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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The

-Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-Title: Christianity Viewed In Relation To The Present State Of Society And Opinion.

-

-Author: François Guizot

-

-Release Date: November 30, 2019 [EBook #60815]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIANITY VIEWED IN RELATION ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Don Kostuch

-

-

-

-

-[Transcriber's note: This production is based on

-https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]

-

-{i}

-

-         Christianity Viewed In Relation To

-

-     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.

-

-                  By M. Guizot.

-

-

-  Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.

-

-

-                    London:

-

-         John Murray, Albemarle Street.

-

-                     1871.

-

-{ii}

-

-             By The Same Author.

-

-       The Essence Of Christianity.

-             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.

-

-  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances

-  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable

-  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."

-    --_Edinburgh Review_.

-

-

-

-      The Present State Of Christianity.

-          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.

-

-  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a

-  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,

-  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further

-  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great

-  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future

-  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great

-  interest."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.

-

-{iii}

-

-{iv}

-

-{v}

-

-                   Preface.

-

-

-In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the

-facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and

-the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I

-retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during

-the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and

-Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated

-amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent

-trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in

-these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,

-Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the

-fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those

-systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the

-office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and

-destiny.

-{vi}

-That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why

-is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has

-had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been

-made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely

-better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of

-humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which

-vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in

-review? because it fills up the void that those systems either

-create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts

-man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]

-

-    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.

-    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]

-

-Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this

-question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas

-and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them

-more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.

-{vii}

-Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity

-can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that

-morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious

-Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the

-very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those

-who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe

-Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each

-other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as

-naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that

-Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,

-that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I

-establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I

-then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and

-determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical

-Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the

-bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.

-{viii}

-I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the

-law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I

-interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show

-that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.

-"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the

-Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the

-present series concludes.

-

-But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the

-historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of

-retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its

-course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor

-wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts

-which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine

-origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and

-destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a

-summary:--

-

-  1. The authority of the sacred books.

-

-  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.

-

-  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.

-

-{ix}

-

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

-

-  5. Romanism and Protestantism.

-

-  6. The different Antichristian crises, their

-     character and their issue.

-

-It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they

-suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised

-itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe

-and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one

-of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my

-Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real

-value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical

-Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of

-Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed

-to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious

-study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many

-quicksands.

-

-{x}

-

-But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I

-been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work

-into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are

-agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding

-their instant solution? What good result can I expect from

-studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my

-country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the

-actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that

-which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many

-troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I

-scrutinize generations--the honour and the destiny of which I

-have so much at heart, for my children form part of them--the

-more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the

-general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself

-in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the

-grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.

-{xi}

-I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,

-France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems

-and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their

-gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not

-having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from

-not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when

-she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary

-forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.

-

-Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some

-question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in

-events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and

-the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than

-the era of modern history--in the sixteenth century the question

-of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth

-century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad

-and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the

-operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in

-France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the

-different objects which each social movement had specially in

-view.

-{xii}

-The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the

-struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on

-high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite

-complications of a labyrinth.

-

-And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of

-essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,

-contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is

-plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I

-propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.

-

-First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of

-the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which

-concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of

-populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly

-these questions were all reducible to one--the aggrandizement or

-the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or

-the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the

-balance of power in Europe.

-{xiii}

-War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled

-this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and

-Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation

-so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and

-ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and

-entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the

-question of nationalities, the question of little states and of

-great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and

-of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their

-midst,--all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a

-routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the

-maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking

-themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial

-organizations and the external relations of States.

-

-{xiv}

-

-Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle

-itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new

-ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual

-theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of

-men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good

-their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any

-respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a

-principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which

-the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name

-of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from

-participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or

-eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.

-Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently

-against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick

-does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of

-which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of

-language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some

-general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased

-to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,

-and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more

-legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his

-successors.

-

-{xv}

-

-I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men

-follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part

-of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain

-share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the

-possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a

-moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of

-this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But

-policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to

-these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and

-right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common

-sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,

-maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,

-and which, up to the present time, have presided over the

-relations of States.

-{xvi}

-The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial

-agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be

-independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect

-for ancient treaties,--all these elements of European order have

-not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory

-of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political

-unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with

-justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western

-Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both

-in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow

-countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal

-of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?

-Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere

-Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations

-of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which

-draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories

-all foreign domination.

-{xvii}

-But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of

-union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and

-the _régime_ of a confederation of States might have been

-established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the

-foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have

-been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the

-interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the

-preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at

-the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that

-any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of

-that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized

-world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally

-compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the

-preservation of peace between the different States.

-

-{xviii}

-

-What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the

-sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,

-the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a

-population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,

-and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute

-themselves into new and independent States? What would become of

-the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also

-were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating

-wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its

-members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations

-or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding

-or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does

-he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in

-the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.

-The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being

-rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to

-the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his

-country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to

-strive to lay the foundation of a new country.

-{xix}

-We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen

-some of the States which form the nation of the United States of

-America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an

-independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in

-their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the

-right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to

-change its government at discretion. The States which remained

-faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the

-principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in

-maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am

-one of those who think that they had both right and reason on

-their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the

-most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character

-as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the

-interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for

-negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to

-me all that he had written and said upon the subject.

-{xx}

-I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he

-expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the

-efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and

-by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He

-would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living

-reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle

-Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much

-sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced

-that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of

-which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the

-danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of

-slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the

-great American State which was their country. Motive detestable

-for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,

-has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a

-Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern

-times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising

-resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an

-unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of

-States.

-

-{xxi}

-

-So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the

-external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the

-future has in store for those which involve domestic order and

-the organization of government. I meet here with the same

-confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between

-ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at

-the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in

-collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments

-in opinions.

-

-The proposition is now universally received that society has the

-right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own

-government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a

-manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.

-{xxii}

-The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to

-attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the

-monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the

-other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the

-great representatives of public power. But neither the

-constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded

-amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of

-events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in

-spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of

-liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on

-its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was

-affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and

-sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional

-monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of

-government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of

-personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the

-essay have greater success? Events will decide.

-{xxiii}

-In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so

-many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the

-disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its

-governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our

-ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,

-have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of

-impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very

-well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed

-and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no

-fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield

-ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our

-very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but

-soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less

-exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our

-most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as

-precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are

-again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in

-the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have

-taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet

-these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found

-any free government.

-

-{xxiv}

-

-I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the

-state of our political institutions to that of the relations

-existent between the different parts of society. I say the

-_different parts_ to avoid saying _different classes_,

-for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking

-that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges

-and exclusions, of that entire _régime_ with its narrow

-compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were

-formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their

-name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental

-qualification they might possess. In effect, this _régime_

-has fallen--fallen completely and definitively; all legal

-barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:

-by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to

-everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.

-{xxv}

-This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate

-it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it

-ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of

-jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they

-have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they

-persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in

-defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration

-was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils

-that the _bourgeoisie_ had to endure, and the risks which it

-had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of

-July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were

-the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle

-classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such

-assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the

-intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been

-already often produced on the stage of the world,--theories which

-have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.

-{xxvi}

-Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial

-distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have

-served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,

-sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon

-things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises

-were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to

-give.

-

-I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good

-observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that

-even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as

-to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial

-settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the

-distribution of the material means of existence, are in

-discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,

-although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume

-the form of Socialism.

-{xxvii}

-I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find

-their field in facts affecting the sphere of material

-subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most

-recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier

-to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the

-ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,

-that errors such as those which presented themselves under the

-names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much

-noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that

-they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof

-of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it

-leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst

-us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst

-of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in

-order to surmount this danger.

-

-Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,

-who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the

-following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between

-the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in

-their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for

-books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly

-workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as

-is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"

-{xxviii}

-After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are

-two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I

-added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you

-great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be

-the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the

-honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I

-congratulated him this time still more.

-

-In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which

-afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their

-disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which

-the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace

-social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of

-distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a

-little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by

-all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations

-from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which

-they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous

-and full of hazard.

-{xxix}

-The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,

-when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true

-to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of

-the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond

-doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously

-excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of

-hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as

-the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it

-devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it

-before them.

-{xxx}

-Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well

-living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with

-efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and

-resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the

-spectacle of the world which surrounds them,--a world now at

-length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,

-the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to

-the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our

-villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people

-from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,

-unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral

-discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which

-religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives

-subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely

-religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and

-Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and

-this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant

-regions of society!

-

-{xxxi}

-

-These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of

-unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,

-of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,

-open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a

-tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity

-counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name

-of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it

-with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical

-deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,

-in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their

-force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the

-incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's

-opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which

-are only simply political and social; many they are who would be

-inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they

-are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all

-these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring

-to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which

-receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ

-which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt

-and exposed to peril.

-

-{xxxii}

-

-I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating

-the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,

-questions of political organization, questions of social

-institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I

-encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great

-complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his

-efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every

-kind--doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and

-oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,

-immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to

-travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to

-feel their way through a labyrinth.

-

-Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and

-impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope

-for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we

-have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign

-power called by some Providence, by others Fate?

-

-{xxxiii}

-

-I am far from thinking so.

-

-Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of

-convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion

-Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day

-detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal

-or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"

-said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to

-disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence

-and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I

-am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military

-sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always

-applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in

-order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,

-to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its

-apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most

-efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the

-number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others

-possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same

-spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,

-single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon

-attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,

-without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.

-{xxxiv}

-We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of

-influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if

-we adopt it.

-

-I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which

-torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the

-rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its

-economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an

-evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of

-French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the

-moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them

-attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its

-removal.

-{xxxv}

-But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,

-a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and

-developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a

-good current which is impelling us forwards;--at the same time

-that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the

-principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to

-control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the

-maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at

-least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions

-of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of

-political economy have defenders no less zealous than the

-presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism

-raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is

-advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress

-also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical

-applications.

-{xxxvi}

-Following respectively their different objects, there are on both

-sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and

-influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several

-causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is

-solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,

-contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our

-history is made up of this great struggle and of its

-vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats

-sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of

-our country.

-

-They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and

-keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human

-sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated

-by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the

-disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought

-back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the

-modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of

-their situation than with the rights of thought, but always

-remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty

-even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only

-defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than

-shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in

-spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent

-indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in

-spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble

-desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.

-

-{xxxvii}

-

-We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius

-of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed

-with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of

-individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,

-and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as

-well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and

-the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who

-are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.

-

-{xxxviii}

-

-What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the

-conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have

-it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil

-current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions

-and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good

-sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and

-to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation

-which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?

-

-Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society

-in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free

-Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we

-should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease

-of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our

-conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our

-understanding.

-

-{xxxix}

-

-I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the

-abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to

-guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to

-individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and

-material. The right of France to these liberties, and their

-opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in

-their clearest light, and established in all their force on their

-highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]

-It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,

-the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,

-that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the

-two great remedies against this ill.

-

-    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, _Sur les libertés

-    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse_, in the séances of

-    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,

-    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]

-

-{xl}

-

-When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are

-perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is

-that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in

-conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of

-so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,

-does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the

-confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,

-provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its

-effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the

-understandings: the different facts, and problems which these

-facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only

-for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow

-accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise

-conceptions of them.

-

-Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions

-define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation

-of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular

-form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so

-salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a

-liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it

-would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle

-opinions still more.

-

-{xli}

-

-Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more

-important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of

-practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the

-thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,

-and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the

-effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs

-riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to

-liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,--when,

-instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be

-virtually solved,--when men are charged as real actors to

-transform into facts their own opinions or those of the

-spectators who are looking on,--then it is that the human mind,

-making its own strength the object of its reflection and

-examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose

-at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy

-itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good

-sense, by justice, and by possibility,--then it is that it learns

-to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.

-Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by

-liberty alone.

-

-{xlii}

-

-Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the

-salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an

-escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving

-questions the most different--I might say the most contrary--in

-their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary

-histories of England, of the United States of America, and of

-France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as

-precedents.

-

-From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against

-the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.

-Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With

-what forces and with what arms did England support these two

-formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political

-liberty.

-{xliii}

-It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued

-in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,

---it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,--it was by

-setting in action all the springs of a free and representative

-government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most

-potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated

-Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,

-during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office

-by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a

-different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,

-sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place

-of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path

-that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,

-sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,

-improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of

-the country, all the strength of its government. Political

-Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause

-and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,

-at another of that of progress.

-

-{xliv}

-

-The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder

-trial. Their government has had to struggle against the

-insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a

-civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular

-independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted

-an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to

-maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the

-national existence of the State against the attempts which were

-made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same

-motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the

-course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,

-and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed

-by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the

-abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the

-right of insurrection.

-{xlv}

-It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the

-institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this

-victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once

-over, the civil _régime_ of American society resumed its

-action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical

-usurpation or military tyranny.

-

-Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so

-well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts

-remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848

-France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been

-preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.

-Neither of the _régimes_ in operation immediately previous

-to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly

-changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks

-to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which

-owed their existence to the previous _régime_, a regular

-government was promptly established, and a new constitutional

-monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.

-{xlvi}

-On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary

-movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect

-for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and

-feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical

-fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the

-victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was

-more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the

-funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,

-celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been

-assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be

-tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the

-archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,

-which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being

-closed for many months.

-{xlvii}

-In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set

-men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more

-profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor

-the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities

-were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of

-the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free

-even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four

-years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments

-which were then in force without leaving their traces; their

-traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary

-influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction

-which put an end to it.

-

-That this influence may still surmount the great trials through

-which governments and people may have both to pass, two things

-are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real

-citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to

-make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by

-their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at

-the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,

-should accept its inconveniences and its perils.

-{xlviii}

-A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it

-does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with

-resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of

-every human situation.

-

-Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room

-to nations for--what do I say? they demand from them--great

-activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude

-their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of

-action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer

-anything but a picture-frame without the picture--a drama

-written, not represented--in which the actors fail to assume

-their parts or to co-operate to produce the _dénouement_.

-

-It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public

-in the life of free government which gives so capital an

-importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.

-{xlix}

-When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a

-sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may

-have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am

-not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily

-hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of

-private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What

-is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled

-moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and

-religious--beliefs which recognize and attest that man is

-naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something

-essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the

-midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by

-such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free

-_régime_ a large share both of its responsibility and of its

-active duties: it is only when so animated that they give

-consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it

-stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe

-in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than

-once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty

-when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a

-tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral

-combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of

-the material forces which assail them.

-{l}

-Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free

-country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who

-profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all

-which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in

-favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete

-misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human

-society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove

-incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in

-tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man

-isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a

-falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the

-supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this

-is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated

-individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his

-silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon

-the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the

-falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of

-respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their

-opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of

-humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in

-such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.

-{li}

-To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to

-refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,

-moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,

-is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very

-impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society

-calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the

-intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and

-practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether

-moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to

-be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the

-people.

-

-{lii}

-

-I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in

-all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,

-it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on

-the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil

-Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable

-with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I

-have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I

-am now publishing.

-

-I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task

-to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day

-to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of

-which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,

-stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only

-here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two

-contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as

-well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups

-profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals

-and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and

-Disbelievers.

-{liii}

-No one of these groups really represents a dominant party

-in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and

-hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,

-vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,

-wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing

-clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of

-truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's

-thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused

-and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of

-thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to

-appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in

-reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a

-vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a

-field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and

-incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to

-bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French

-society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and

-under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here

-described it.

-{liv}

-Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful

-and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find

-everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes

-devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the

-most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in

-search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most

-different directions. Upon this population it is that we must

-act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive

-conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious

-instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are

-by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to

-transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must

-accommodate ourselves to the general character of this

-population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an

-adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence

-must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious

-to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should

-give in return its soul.

-{lv}

-It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is

-not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of

-Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should

-know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the

-society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they

-should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under

-their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under

-their blows.

-

-Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it

-prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such

-success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different

-epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did

-Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their

-times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so

-extraordinary an influence?

-{lvi}

-First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked

-was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also

-because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they

-were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different

-processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with

-the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that

-they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political

-transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it

-on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They

-more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,

-the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;

-still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one

-by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern

-literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having

-re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this

-is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against

-them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France

-felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their

-glory, because it believed in their sympathy.

-

-{lvii}

-

-Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are

-rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of

-their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with

-them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion

-and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church

-of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more

-liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father

-Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice

-of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already

-more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different

-origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same

-cause and to the same work.

-{lviii}

-At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,

-two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I

-have the honour to know, men very different in position and in

-ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a

-great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;

-both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,

-the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent

-in the present state of French society; both having the

-resolution and the ability required in order to present

-Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most

-proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur

-Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor

-at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his

-diocese, (Lent, 1868,) _A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of

-Christianity_. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th

-of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical

-Conference assembled at Nérac, _A Report as to the Actual

-Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches_.

-[Footnote 4]

-

-    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length

-    in the _Gazette de France_, on the 25th and 26th of

-    February, 1868.]

-

-    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the

-    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]

-

-{lix}

-

-I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially

-analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here

-because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each

-reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being

-prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony

-between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the

-present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far

-as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch

-is Christian.

-

-"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was

-contemporary with primitive man--a fact present in all ages, ever

-paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same

-degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind

-man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent

-of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the

-Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and

-upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet

-raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,

-constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His

-creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty

-lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses

-more or less unanimous.

-

-{lx}

-

-"Heathen nations--their history proves it--have preserved

-something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected

-with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of

-Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions

-which they received from their grandsire, and which are the

-common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions

-are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of

-fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East

-and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the

-multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and

-its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily

-distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of

-Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original

-fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality

-of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all

-these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the

-depths of the conscience of the people.

-{lxi}

-Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify

-in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be

-condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but

-for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.

-

-"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful

-work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious

-wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too

-much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and

-Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained

-Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political

-charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,

-breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism

-remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.

-

-{lxii}

-

-"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many

-generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner

-and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred

-and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and

-in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations--this fact, what

-is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that

-it is purely natural--the spontaneous production of our habits,

-the simple result of our instincts--and, so to say, an

-irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is

-divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly

-created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as

-a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common

-sense which tells us this.

-

-"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,

-as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely

-the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its

-own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it

-and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with

-a force which renews itself every day.

-{lxiii}

-It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious

-effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and

-nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to

-its effects a supernatural character. ... Supernatural means were

-necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in

-relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the

-constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of

-the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no

-longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions

-should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,

-infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary

-a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His

-envoys by extraordinary facts--facts of a superhuman power,

-miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of

-the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,

-intervening with supernatural _éclat_ to enable the mission

-to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and

-more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and

-their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their

-religious and predestined course.

-

-{lxiv}

-

-"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the

-highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies

-of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a

-prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with

-signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive

-ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,

-and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His

-character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,

-the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;

-finally, the survival and the development of His work through

-centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the

-direct intervention of God--sole possible means of finding a

-satisfactory explanation of such grand results."

-

-{lxv}

-

-The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas

-recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited--a

-development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to

-assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always

-faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no

-discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of

-ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class

-of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of

-Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of

-man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity

-in particular; considered as a grand fact--a fact universal and

-permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst

-the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the

-scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst

-Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and

-Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,

-by the same title, if not in the same degree;

-{lxvi}

-a fact at once human and divine--human by its accordance with

-man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of

-God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power

-reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of

-events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the

-accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus

-associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle

-of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of

-Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without

-any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage

-rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at

-the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority

-of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not

-justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented

-under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most

-proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,

-on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and

-pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian

-Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so

-many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?

-

-{lxvii}

-

-The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more

-vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop

-of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he

-traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and

-requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and

-describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated

-and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in

-search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to

-be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,

-he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly

-and without compromise.

-

-"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in

-insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds

-in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its

-prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the

-preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.

-{lxviii}

-Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not

-live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,

-they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow

-its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its

-aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are

-of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate

-and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in

-many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In

-France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which

-have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as

-preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every

-symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To

-neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of

-addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who

-neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the

-objections which we attribute to them.

-

-{lxix}

-

-"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is

-easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others--it is that

-of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery

-or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally

-even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons

-more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of

-the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is

-noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our

-generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of

-its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of

-Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant

-now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,

-whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is

-impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a

-fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of

-Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of

-incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is

-definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface

-God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an

-obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.

-

-{lxx}

-

-"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in

-these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt

-or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having

-for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery

-from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are

-combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,

-Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a

-personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of

-the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a

-God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten

-civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,

-and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long

-as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. ... Let nothing

-henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the

-human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God

-than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all

-things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'

-

-{lxxi}

-

-"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their

-weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is

-not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its

-lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and

-its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated

-at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical

-which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it

-is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in

-France, Germany, and Italy.

-

-"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical

-Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to

-destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former

-never will go so far as these.

-{lxxii}

-But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing

-hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it

-we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,

-stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when

-merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious

-life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,

-without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of

-destruction.

-

-"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have

-we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most

-painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,

-with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph

-attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,

-how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the

-Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are

-the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by

-which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in

-discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of

-general interest?

-{lxxiii}

-The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful

-to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul

-from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after

-the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have

-to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to

-souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?

-

-"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we

-are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees

-everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to

-note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting

-the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous

-aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas

-of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social

-application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The

-age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;

-it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the

-union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material

-happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.

-{lxxiv}

-Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,

-men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more

-than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their

-rights as individuals, and of _self-government_, and

-consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here

-assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious _points

-d'appui_ for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread

-for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.

-Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel

-leads to Liberty.

-

-"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought

-we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who

-demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question

-overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his

-weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate

-himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from

-him the cry of the prophet--'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot

-speak, for I am a child!'

-

-{lxxv}

-

-"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,

-much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of

-Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.

-Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the

-origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and

-more scientific than all that in these days men seek to

-substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the

-supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of

-Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of

-Religion itself.

-

-"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to

-establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and

-Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace

-Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not

-more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.

-{lxxvi}

-Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the

-materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian

-Conscience.

-

-"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her

-spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the

-progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make

-herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let

-her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must

-be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to

-everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize

-all his arms.

-

-"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our

-special mission in the special position in which God has placed

-us?"

-

-{lxxvii}

-

-Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of

-his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,

-M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the

-preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and

-evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to

-the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the

-general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of

-general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and

-urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.

-

-"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend

-Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that

-comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that

-comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear

-to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its

-most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with

-anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is

-necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we

-must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect

-fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.

-{lxxviii}

-Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to

-confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the

-contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a

-_point d'appui_ for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us

-strive, we also, to find these _points d'appui_, those

-keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be

-made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country

-that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark

-applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the

-educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as

-it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let

-us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its

-liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and

-demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign

-reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by

-science.

-{lxxix}

-The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human

-activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained

-in the principles of the Gospel."

-

-I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of

-the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two

-documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main

-and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,

-but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at

-leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,

-to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the

-one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.

-The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,

-or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging

-to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by

-each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw

-to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and

-are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.

-

-{lxxx}

-

-I think that they are right both in their hope and their

-endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons

-pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of

-religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain

-and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of

-religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern

-Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,

-France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being

-informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as

-well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement

-between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The

-profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not

-part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater

-development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the

-events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding

-upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,

-to which such subjects are all very strange.

-{lxxxi}

-The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that

-France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with

-religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and

-fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable

-grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,

-at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well

-entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long

-life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part

-in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer

-anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been

-essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made

-no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the

-world, but nothing attaches me to it.

-{lxxxii}

-Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my

-eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and

-the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with

-thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that

-eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:--

-

-  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.

-

-    Guizot.

-    Paris, _April_, 1868.

-

-{lxxxiii}

-

-                Contents.

-

-

-                                         Page

-

-Preface                                    v

-

-I.   -- Christianity and Liberty            1

-

-II.  -- Christianity and Morality          52

-

-III. -- Christianity and Science           93

-

-IV.  -- Christian Ignorance               128

-

-V.   -- Christian Faith                   153

-

-VI.  -- Christian Life                    190

-

-Appendix. -- Observations upon the Work

-             called "Ecce Homo"           213

-

-

-{lxxxiv}

-

-{1}

-

-      Meditations On Christianity

-

-               in its

-

-     Relation To The Actual State

-       Of Society And Opinion.

-

-

-

-           First Meditation.

-

-       Christianity And Liberty.

-

-

-The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days

-for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant

-in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object

-Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both

-simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and

-respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and

-ill-regulated impulse.

-{2}

-Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it

-develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,

-and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions

-have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time

-men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are

-discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they

-vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to

-exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion

-may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered

-upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from

-it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is

-condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it

-is bound to perform.

-

-But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our

-epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less

-important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of

-the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard

-Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest

-enemy.

-{3}

-In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so

-treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a

-multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in

-activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one

-time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian

-sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?

-Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of

-Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather

-true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both

-require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate

-and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century

-remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that

-other question is not solved.

-

-I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these--"What

-shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose

-his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

-[Footnote 5]

-

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

-

-{4}

-

-"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the

-soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and

-body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach

-the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]

-

-    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]

-

-    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]

-

-The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the

-human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to

-save souls, all souls without exception,--souls of the powerful

-and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,

-happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is

-the foundation of the Christian Religion.

-

-The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere

-hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual

-being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,

-who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual

-condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an

-object of present solicitude.

-{5}

-To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a

-product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What

-have they to do with the words of the Gospel--with the immense

-value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them

-as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself

-forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who

-speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated

-tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because

-they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual

-man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What

-constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every

-human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that

-he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially

-in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation

-which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up

-to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use

-which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature

-of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,

-that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime

-a destiny.

-{6}

-Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great

-efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem

-of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel

-recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself

-about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely

-rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and

-responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which

-Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in

-every command that she gives to humanity.

-

-Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,

-and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of

-man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis

-and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most

-daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a

-point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity

-of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.

-

-{7}

-

-Christianity does not confine itself to this;--after having laid

-down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical

-sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of

-resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the

-synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to

-speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John

-answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the

-sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."

-[Footnote 8]

-

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

-

-Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to

-them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach

-in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than

-men." [Footnote 9]

-

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

-

-The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of

-the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his

-faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the

-principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]

-

-    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]

-

-{8}

-

-The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,

-who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for

-dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he

-resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,

-"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to

-continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by

-much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.

-[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle

-of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.

-

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

-

-It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that

-it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the

-principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and

-transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and

-eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms

-the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it

-equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of

-Authority.

-{9}

-I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made

-that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was

-permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar

-the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are

-God's," he established in principle the distinction between the

-religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.

-Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,

-between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful

-worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties

-which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.

-[Footnote 12]

-

-    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,

-    p. 278. London: 1864.]

-

-It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest

-and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization

-commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted

-in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have

-strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded

-with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the

-seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,

-history has confirmed the Gospel.

-

-{10}

-

-Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,

-Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,

-and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been

-able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity

-of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies

-required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at

-another liberty.

-

-Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to

-refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I

-remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that

-Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she

-was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from

-her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she

-alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls

-in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.

-{11}

-If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious

-establishments--Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism--have

-held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the

-world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,

-attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman

-Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism

-did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the

-enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the

-immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.

-Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated

-only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the

-sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of

-Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the

-soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it

-she awakened it.

-

-Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of

-Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have

-occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the

-Christian faith.

-{12}

-No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the

-work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,

-which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the

-purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the

-surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy

-atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part

-and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine

-it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats

-uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the

-excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not

-destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor

-make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work

-of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a

-Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,

-behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those

-stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only

-enables him to see them.

-{13}

-When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal

-errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared

-under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit

-without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or

-ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore

-what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from

-her that which she has not promised.

-

-Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch

-and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to

-Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present

-day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting

-Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount

-them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What

-are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,

-the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an

-obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?

-

-{14}

-

-It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,

-men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre

-colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a

-prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as

-deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of

-amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at

-another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our

-vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not

-of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require

-to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness

-which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which

-cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the

-attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,

-is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent

-evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but

-that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we

-make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.

-{15}

-The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and

-evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic

-sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil

-which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first

-to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it

-appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages

-has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at

-least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if

-we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it

-matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would

-not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor

-should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.

-Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and

-different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we

-have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we

-have ever forgotten.

-

-{16}

-

-And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain

-my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached

-its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance

-more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without

-numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape

-in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the

-selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of

-the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices

-of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political

-liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,

-the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the

-actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its

-tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in

-this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789

-was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant

-travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or

-is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had

-then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all

-mankind. Did she deceive herself?

-{17}

-Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or

-in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we

-progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which

-eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every

-respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;

-for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but

-utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.

-

-I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked

-than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of

-opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never

-hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they

-deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to

-pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have

-originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront

-many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no

-sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.

-{18}

-But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have

-been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon

-the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,

-and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both

-of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the

-world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,

-and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra

-of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive

-motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas

-as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789

-contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,

-truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and

-which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the

-travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to

-France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,

-and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a

-cause of decline.

-{19}

-Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,

-the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past

-centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of

-French society in which it would have bettered its condition by

-halting, or to which it should wish to return.

-

-I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our

-social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment

-of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is

-Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us

-in such a work?

-

-All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,

-whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or

-Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in

-deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for

-physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and

-effeminacy which they generate.

-

-{20}

-

-They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we

-consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even

-those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,

-in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his

-habitual language:--"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten

-o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."

-[Footnote 13]

-

-    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se

-    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une

-    chemise blanche."]

-

-There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be

-vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should

-be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether

-individuals or nations, is that they should not have their

-attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely

-their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they

-have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and

-Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the

-Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort

-or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is

-permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.

-{21}

-Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and

-sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating

-and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of

-more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a

-state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and

-disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can

-supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.

-Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich

-and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;

-she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she

-inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer

-hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be

-powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can

-never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive

-motive to action, even in that principle of interest which

-politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to

-be a panacea.

-{22}

-Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,

-has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other

-sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an

-Epicurean nor an Egotist.

-

-This is the first and the greatest of the services which

-Christianity can and does render in our days to every society

-which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.

-

-There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are

-dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without

-incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the

-other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever

-be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or

-measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it

-is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free

-country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of

-society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments

-and nations, to enable them to support that license which they

-cannot suppress.

-{23}

-Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the

-most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license

-for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity

-maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without

-humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the

-rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in

-fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which

-authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the

-most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority

-suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely

-to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,

-that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves

-with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,

-turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as

-such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and

-Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great

-mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to

-order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom

-licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,

-and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims

-and the arms of Liberty.

-{24}

-History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The

-nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has

-not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,--the

-only nations which, although they have on different occasions and

-by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and

-of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and

-politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of

-the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;

-these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;

-but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once

-come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their

-subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less

-rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.

-

-{25}

-

-It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it

-that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as

-individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it

-generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already

-more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and

-sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,

-as well as strength to recover lost ground.

-

-It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the

-friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary

-admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than

-any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no

-longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the

-encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and

-transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the

-normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and

-with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.

-{26}

-Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,

-has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the

-conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong

-enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously

-the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the

-Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and

-independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when

-Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power

-and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no

-distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a

-similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the

-Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail

-wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and

-indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the

-permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more

-or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which

-fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly

-modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the

-exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these

-days free institutions can be founded.

-

-{27}

-

-That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses

-and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with

-the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,

-that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of

-the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all

-other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which

-are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.

-Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every

-human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error

-press so very closely upon each other in this system, that

-Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is

-entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,

-nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to

-another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes

-to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to

-abrogate as it was to create.

-{28}

-The law paramount is the moral law,--the law laid down by God, to

-which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to

-submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is

-always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights

-of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of

-government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily

-forgets God--easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort

-of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,

-material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is

-incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with

-which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that

-the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only

-principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic

-of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two

-principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour

-and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.

-{29}

-A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning

-with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent

-admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and

-it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by

-Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a

-history, which does not come from man, but which, without

-offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,

-no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same

-time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic

-a society is, the more it is important that this double effect

-shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.

-

-I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The

-Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally

-against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how

-little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine

-to be good and salutary.

-{30}

-How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other

-respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have

-Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of

-the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty

-unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest

-nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state

-of opinions at the present day.

-

-As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst

-Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best

-results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,

-whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as

-the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly

-cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general

-religious community--between the spiritual and the lay members of

-the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by

-authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations

-which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving

-to the laity a share in the government of the Church.

-{31}

-The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time

-the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from

-their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but

-the relations between the two classes ceased to present the

-appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire

-subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and

-influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although

-remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to

-be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social

-institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one

-time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious

-society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of

-independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State

-and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their

-mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the

-two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have

-mutually recovered their independence;

-{32}

-elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all

-ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been

-abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his

-individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.

-But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental

-characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from

-the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves

-constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and

-man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is

-particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction

-between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious

-and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its

-right and become an active influence in religious society itself.

-

-{33}

-

-But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a

-persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much

-calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman

-Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and

-passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed

-with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their

-religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted

-therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to

-their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These

-are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof

-of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the

-holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.

-Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that

-this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will

-towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects

-for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that

-such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present

-constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to

-State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be

-injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to

-individuals.

-{34}

-From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most

-sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as

-Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst

-of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed

-and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in

-order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of

-humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to

-its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in

-all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;

-they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and

-tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;

-they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they

-rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the

-conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the

-guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and

-ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy

-effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate

-result of which has been so glorious.

-

-{35}

-

-The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and

-useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which

-characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its

-Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,

-that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and

-religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and

-all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome

-and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?

-For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the

-aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and

-political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,

-onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced

-situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more

-menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than

-our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power

-in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in

-principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable

-with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to

-condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of

-modern civilization.

-{36}

-In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall

-here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as

-the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction

-that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and

-dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as

-well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without

-abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally

-essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the

-moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions

-also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,

-that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not

-have accepted and accomplished this work of

-conciliation--conciliation real and profound--the friends of

-Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and

-in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,

-those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.

-{37}

-But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance

-than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which

-utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,

-nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of

-events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and

-not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many

-probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the

-case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,

-many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward

-impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the

-conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less

-a certainty.

-

-This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.

-There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of

-different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle

-between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often

-committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly

-profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own

-defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.

-{38}

-The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,

-the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,

-the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the

-great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by

-the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time

-consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal

-regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and

-signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its

-consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the

-question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation

-between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the

-attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a

-decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of

-1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh

-vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.

-{39}

-When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism

-treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from

-the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church

-of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all

-that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,

-and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience

-and resignation. She is right.

-

-One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this

-stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,

-Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of

-fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody

-persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,

-bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,

-once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their

-cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.

-{40}

-The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person

-of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive

-but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor

-the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.

-And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what

-activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,

-Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,

-upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society

-had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of

-Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced

-on its road and towards its object.

-

-But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of

-Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and

-compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without

-doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she

-lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of

-reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is

-more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it

-and oppose it.

-{41}

-This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman

-Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that

-group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which

-continues to play so active a part in struggling for the

-Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:

-these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its

-intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their

-views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux

-Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the

-greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the

-more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the

-disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and

-humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our

-provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have

-not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one

-might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving

-the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the

-people;

-{42}

-they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the

-conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an

-influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its

-sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost

-without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of

-their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal

-tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman

-Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular

-militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of

-enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case

-by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the

-Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make

-their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its

-laws, and of its liberties.

-

-I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I

-observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to

-French institutions,--for I speak only of France,--the essential

-consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the

-relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.

-

-{43}

-

-I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in

-France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past

-are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof

-from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights

-of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil

-society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts

-and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to

-the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from

-civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this

-respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these

-are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for

-religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to

-stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman

-Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of

-modern society, who most dispute about the general question of

-liberty.

-

-{44}

-

-The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this

-question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in

-one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,

-on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from

-religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty

-in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy

-in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other

-solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and

-their mutual independence.

-

-That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State

-to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I

-well understand.

-

-She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of

-strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her

-stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves

-religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a

-fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially

-democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under

-the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the

-influence of the religious authorities.

-{45}

-This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental

-principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is

-impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded

-by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.

-But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance

-of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church

-would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious

-and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large

-measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the

-religious society and of the civil society which the Church and

-the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those

-who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective

-principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on

-in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the

-good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself

-is soon compromised.

-{46}

-The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of

-Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of

-Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because

-there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental

-institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon

-some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant

-guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and

-were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from

-which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed

-on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices

-for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,

-of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in

-Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is

-occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy

-and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church

-with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.

-{47}

-In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,

-when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for

-any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever

-indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be

-serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting

-parties should recognise and accept in each other, without

-equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each

-really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an

-alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of

-the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring

-ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,

-obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret

-warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending

-any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust

-in it.

-{48}

-As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without

-endangering her habits, at least without endangering her

-essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace

-with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual

-civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how

-to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give

-way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a

-source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she

-would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of

-separation and complete independence.

-

-As for the State, the system which separates the two societies

-would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it

-would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of

-many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle

-of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance

-which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such

-principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce

-Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous

-bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from

-every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy

-themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their

-thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and

-its affairs.

-{49}

-Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at

-the present day, a moral influence of great value from an

-alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one

-condition which is not only especially important in our days, but

-of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of

-manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the

-alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference

-in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the

-church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious

-discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving

-their indirect support to the state government, and which can

-purge their support of all impure motives.

-{50}

-The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain

-degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their

-respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part

-of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at

-the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the

-master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor

-priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and

-their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone

-give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,

-if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.

-

-Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the

-facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,

-Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be

-free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.

-Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave

-feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and

-distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles

-essential to civil society and religious society, of any

-compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the

-faults which the two institutions have committed towards each

-other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.

-{51}

-Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have

-become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,

-something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty

-neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their

-legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations

-to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,

-whether allied with or independent of the Church.

-

-{52}

-

-           Second Meditation.

-

-       Christianity And Morality.

-

-

-Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different

-characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously

-minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves

-Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from

-Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea

-of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.

-Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour

-to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the

-abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its

-authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we

-find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the

-other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either

-natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days

-proclaimed and propagated with ardour.

-

-{53}

-

-I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and

-upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.

-In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest

-intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.

-Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced

-that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested

-or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;

-they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth

-alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and

-which some now strive to accredit.

-

-The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the

-scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians

-are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of

-its efficacy.

-{54}

-A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate

-the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to

-it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate

-it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is

-here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent

-Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and

-to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being

-wrecked.

-

-The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who

-flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality

-standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,--and they who

-believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from

-religion,--err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential

-facts of human nature and of human society.

-

-Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete

-observation of these facts. I have already stated in these

-Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality

-from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.

-{55}

-At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,

-and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I

-affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary

-union between morality and religion.

-

-A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the

-theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there

-is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested

-motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and

-treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.

-

-I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they

-forget that it _has_ been, and still _is_, strongly

-contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.

-Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the

-satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate

-aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,

-not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common

-welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could

-perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy

-of human sentiments.

-{56}

-The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the

-recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the

-most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,

-with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to

-other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding

-fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than

-in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive

-themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of

-religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,

-and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive

-themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a

-prey to the disputes of man.

-

-I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders

-of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it

-is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it

-contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential

-elements.

-

-{57}

-

-These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral

-good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;

-the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and

-philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the

-natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human

-morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man

-is a moral being.

-

-I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I

-do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard

-or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any

-one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent

-morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and

-myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the

-true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its

-signification, and accept its results.

-

-{58}

-

-It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not

-satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to

-himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their

-origin and object, their import and bearing.

-

-In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from

-which science sets out; it is only after having well observed

-facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the

-questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which

-the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of

-human morality, such as I have just described it in its three

-constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot

-fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral

-law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the

-ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or

-violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes

-of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or

-elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man

-as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of

-man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three

-constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine

-rightly its source and bearing.

-

-{59}

-

-Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring

-from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that

-he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.

-Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they

-depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,

-or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the

-feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them

-accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.

-

-But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral

-law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes

-its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their

-own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in

-refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may

-attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically

-possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another

-law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever

-they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,

-they bow before it as before something which does not emanate

-from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.

-

-{60}

-

-The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the

-world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the

-characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the

-results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the

-forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations

-or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it

-addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of

-whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to

-crush him, still man would be more noble than that which

-destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the

-advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows

-nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,

-sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily--that he chooses

-to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.

-

-{61}

-

-What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called

-Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command

-man's Liberty to respect it?

-

-Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority

-solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is

-said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his

-right that no human being shall attack his independence or his

-dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and

-therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual

-right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but

-the right which it is recognised that another possesses."

-[Footnote 14]

-

-    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,

-    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]

-

-{62}

-

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

-

-Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,

-does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises

-himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and

-admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which

-arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have

-done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest

-apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence

-and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to

-attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for

-himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental

-principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there

-is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the

-right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to

-it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has

-another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on

-the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the

-paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the

-moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.

-

-{63}

-

-Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of

-the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to

-attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral

-law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and

-imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love

-them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love

-those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to

-you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."

-"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing

-again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the

-children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and

-to the evil." [Footnote 15]

-

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

-

-"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of

-the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If

-we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other

-respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point

-with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.

-

-{64}

-

-It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion

-of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of

-those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is

-the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on

-the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law

-to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet

-melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a

-person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a

-modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light

-as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea

-of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a

-moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not

-a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the

-moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power

-attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the

-relations of men with one another.

-{65}

-Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there

-would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does

-not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to

-govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice

-cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,

-as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed

-to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as

-essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the

-social bond;--the means of peace and of Union amongst

-mankind;--the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and

-defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every

-man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep

-others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him

-to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and

-respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the

-man who has a right has absolutely nothing.

-{66}

-Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of

-physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ

-the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which

-triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify

-the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made

-his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis

-of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of

-right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the

-stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of

-duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of

-defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which

-serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society

-upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away

-the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]

-

-    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir

-    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in

-    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur

-    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,

-    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"

-    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]

-

-{67}

-

-This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in

-considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the

-independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the

-theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral

-elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,

-the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,

-sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the

-independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely

-strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of

-man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their

-duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for

-and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,

-and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to

-honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's

-existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which

-the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense

-which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:

-their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.

-

-{68}

-

-I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the

-principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from

-man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man

-only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and

-mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free

-and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he

-is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his

-own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not

-make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even

-whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot

-withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his

-future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is

-essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its

-subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.

-

-{69}

-

-Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working

-its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without

-further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When

-the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and

-acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his

-act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,

-for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not

-merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they

-find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced

-to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the

-laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal

-punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of

-remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the

-proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is

-that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the

-hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove

-that it may be always reawakened.

-{70}

-Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.

-Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that

-to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which

-feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.

-

-As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an

-idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made

-of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,

-ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of

-merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common

-sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the

-accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.

-It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and

-most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the

-political organisation of society, and in the problems which

-concern the eternal future.

-{71}

-However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or

-delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of

-a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the

-responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its

-complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and

-equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.

-

-Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have

-scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's

-nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have

-considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely

-apart from every other element and every other consideration.

-Those moral facts are briefly as follows:--

-

-  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.

-

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

-

-  Moral Liberty.

-

-  Moral Responsibility.

-

-  Moral merit and demerit.

-

-{72}

-

-These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the

-proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these

-truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are

-they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,

-or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they

-self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which

-form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot

-elude this question.

-

-I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;

-that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not

-one of those laws of fate by which the material world is

-governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free

-world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as

-law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.

-Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man--upon man

-of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without

-enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life

-is passed?

-{73}

-Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law

-emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense

-which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,

-Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order

-reigning in it:--

-

-  "Je ne puis songer

-  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."

-

-  I cannot think

-  This clock exists and never had a maker.

-

-In the moral world we have to do with something far different

-from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine

-constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is

-to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free

-agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to

-accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the

-supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the

-expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both

-contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant

-found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is

-nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human

-Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most

-clearly, most undeniably.

-

-{74}

-

-Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose

-it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river

-without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free

-agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete

-and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and

-loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law

-reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility

-reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human

-invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral

-responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and

-just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is

-contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral

-responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that

-is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and

-impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in

-a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to

-establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.

-

-{75}

-

-Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human

-nature--that is, the distinction between moral good and moral

-evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and

-demerit,--are necessarily and intimately connected with the

-truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God

-moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and

-essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a

-thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of

-man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble

-to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that

-ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is

-reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its

-authority.

-

-Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and

-described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable

-from Religion.

-

-{76}

-

-What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the

-heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are

-distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to

-each other in the unity of the human being?

-

-The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the

-study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms

-Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most

-remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant

-struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle

-what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent

-an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and

-what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected

-in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by

-the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to

-all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the

-moral law, the moral judgment comes.

-{77}

-"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero

-prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up

-unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just

-providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of

-the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was

-the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman

-Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very

-Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after

-having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice

-of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on

-the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on

-account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had

-governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by

-those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is

-incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in

-this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and

-Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,

-sometimes manifests itself there with _éclat_, and sometimes

-remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre

-mysteries.

-{78}

-Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall

-truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now

-occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore

-order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;

-in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still

-mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is

-intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as

-little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in

-that of the individual man.

-

-In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far

-from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they

-progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days

-exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to

-events of the most contradictory character: everything in the

-world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts

-has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.

-{79}

-Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more

-than feeble convictions--dim hopes? On the other side, in the

-midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power

-over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and

-confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the

-material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and

-paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have

-plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the

-fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human

-conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in

-our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;

-intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's

-soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!

-

-{80}

-

-Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and

-indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have

-limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the

-advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I

-have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,

-natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of

-man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the

-threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general

-that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which

-it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his

-unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity

-alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and

-security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is

-not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic

-value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human

-soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect

-harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already

-tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful

-expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the

-moral being.

-

-{81}

-

-The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is

-the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral

-ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been

-contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour

-it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure

-their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,

-Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is

-singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most

-illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,

-understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and

-incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear

-light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to

-their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for

-conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they

-taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they

-founded schools or sects.

-{82}

-The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a

-philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and

-instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around

-him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain

-special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of

-mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of

-discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to

-the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the

-moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his

-disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,

-and then to all men:--"Save your soul, for what would it profit a

-man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and

-preach to all nations."

-

-What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so

-ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so

-universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?

-

-{83}

-

-And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has

-been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward

-movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly

-arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,

-it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of

-Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and

-the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen

-centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and

-evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that

-Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to

-fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same

-task, and promises herself fresh success.

-

-Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me

-at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the

-Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which

-she entertains in the midst of her trials.

-

-{84}

-

-Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,

-cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them

-proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are

-solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,

-regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human

-actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a

-careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them

-to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both

-amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the

-regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how

-serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that

-sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the

-nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same

-time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the

-same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man

-the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his

-soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates

-it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it

-with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared

-for every sacrifice.

-{85}

-Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine

-of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin

-without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the

-sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so

-well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely

-and so austerely?

-

-Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with

-man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its

-rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment

-of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and

-thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he

-opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a

-hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness

-inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy

-the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to

-be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a

-recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the

-equitable benevolence of God.

-{86}

-The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man

-during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store

-for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom

-of God" and "the promises of eternal life."

-

-Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he

-keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,

-his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to

-fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the

-world, without any _dénouement_. He has a prospect, and a

-futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and

-superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain

-this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and

-respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality

-with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole

-view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny

-of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which

-weigh upon the thought and life of man!

-

-{87}

-

-I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the

-peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However

-high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely

-less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is

-purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours

-produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical

-work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of

-its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,

-the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from

-which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to

-induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine

-law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it

-is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its

-sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,

-we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon

-which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it

-undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to

-procure the salvation of man by his reformation.

-

-{88}

-

-When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these

-Meditations--the subject of which is the actual state of the

-Christian Religion--I essayed to characterise therein the

-fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which

-combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my

-companion in life, and my _confrère_ at the Institute, M.

-Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I

-maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,

-he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:--

-

-  "My dear Friend,

-

-  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I

-  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The

-  little difference between our opinions, which you have not

-  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the

-  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which

-  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the

-  nature of religion.

-{89}

-  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still

-  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an

-  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more

-  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself

-  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other

-  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from

-  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets

-  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by

-  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of

-  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,

-  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them

-  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the

-  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in

-  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of

-  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy

-  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must

-  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,

-  grandeur, and peace.

-

-{90}

-

-  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,

-  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our

-  old and sincere friendship."

-

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

-

-  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our

-  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere

-  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,

-  because, independently of our particular and petty

-  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a

-  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that

-  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor

-  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their

-  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their

-  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.

-{91}

-  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,

-  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.

-  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin

-  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of

-  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which

-  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God

-  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to

-  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of

-  his free will.

-

-  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions

-  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."

-

-I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at

-Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other

-afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed

-upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence

-we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole

-question.

-{92}

-It is this--What are the points of resemblance, and what of

-difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity

-and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the

-reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,

-we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their

-nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,

-and the character of their mission.

-

-{93}

-

-           Third Meditation.

-

-        Christianity And Science.

-

-

-It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which

-Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account

-of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely

-inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that

-divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,

-and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man

-without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which

-Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make

-these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are

-possessed. ... They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."

-[Footnote 18]

-

-    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]

-

-    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,

-    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.

-    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]

-

-{94}

-

-The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a

-different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine

-inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work

-directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this

-themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly

-implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter

-and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it

-positively. [Footnote 19]

-

-    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the

-    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"

-    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and

-    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only

-    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to

-    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his

-    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]

-

-This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of

-the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an

-acceptation as in later times.

-{95}

-In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the

-school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration

-of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,

-strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of

-inspiration, and to explain one by the other--"It is not by any

-effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,

-"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so

-divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the

-saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;

-pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the

-divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself

-from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the

-musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us

-the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,

-"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the

-other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of

-individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed

-aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing

-them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute

-the breath which makes it discourse its music."

-

-{96}

-

-Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of

-the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as

-to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence

-proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the

-formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But

-even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,

-great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and

-St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it

-was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they

-distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of

-God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms

-in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking

-of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken

-of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to

-speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.

-{97}

-Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. ... When we meet

-with such diversity of expressions--although not in themselves

-contradictory--used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the

-words of each, only the intent with which the words are

-pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of

-truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the

-very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else

-which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."

-

-It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this

-explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine

-inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the

-fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.

-

-I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of

-darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of

-uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the

-invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;

-that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle

-Age.

-

-{98}

-

-I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch

-of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned

-upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;

-for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been

-fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet

-destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the

-world.

-

-Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and

-events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of

-the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of

-Christian societies, I find that this question had received two

-solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its

-representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the

-Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The

-Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of

-the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;

-surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious

-reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these

-books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and

-canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they

-are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the

-ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]

-

-    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the

-    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10--13. Paris, 1686.]

-

-{99}

-

-The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they

-began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts

-and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and

-complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,

-narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the

-old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's

-dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.

-

-{100}

-

-The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church

-of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the

-sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly

-respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic

-sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the

-complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute

-infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make

-this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters

-of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of

-God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which

-they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we

-repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the

-two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]

-

-    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.

-    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]

-

-"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and

-hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of

-humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their

-action and their force, you err. ... God does everything by

-command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air

-with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to

-will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]

-

-    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.

-    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres

-    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]

-

-{101}

-

-The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the

-nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of

-these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of

-Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the

-Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the

-Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible

-authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,

-found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the

-movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the

-infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the

-present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new

-dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their

-ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,

-have pushed the two doctrines,--the former of ecclesiastical

-authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,--to their

-extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right

-and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.

-{102}

-I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines

-referred to,--they severally infringe, the one the rights of

-religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both

-cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they

-have, in these respects, severally ill understood.

-

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

-23]

-

-    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.

-    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.

-    145-146. London, 1864.]

-

-Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in

-the Scriptures is divinely inspired--the words as well as the

-ideas, all the words used upon all subjects--the material of

-language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this

-assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound

-misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred

-books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in

-grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give

-instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.

-{103}

-It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men

-towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of

-conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.

-It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,

-that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."

-

-I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over

-again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole

-object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.

-The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the

-Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine

-truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in

-intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and

-with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,

-in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the

-midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the

-unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,

-Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and

-of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of

-curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and

-perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.

-{104}

-What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their

-points of connection and their contests,--God watching over and

-acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,

-God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the

-expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each

-acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man

-after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,

-nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating

-man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he

-enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from

-heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious

-and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a

-free agent.

-{105}

-At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous

-action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his

-passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as

-he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the

-good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.

-This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the

-relations of Man with God.

-

-What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful

-connection exists, in this history, between those whom--how shall

-I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not

-appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so

-untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the

-plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,

-invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to

-us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no

-historical narrative or document, does man show himself more

-violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to

-ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst

-the Hebrews.

-{106}

-Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between

-the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and

-the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from

-God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,

-and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly

-violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in

-his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much

-from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not

-change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a

-witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his

-errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily

-before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to

-interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is

-ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and

-labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts

-and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the

-only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.

-

-{107}

-

-In what do those relations consist? By what results does this

-continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this

-incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and

-commands, religious and moral--God proposes these to man; he

-enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands

-nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he

-commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's

-speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his

-prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.

-Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of

-possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human

-sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people

-whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance

-and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,

-in the midst of which they are living.

-{108}

-When they are made the medium for the religious and moral

-precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer

-mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of

-divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it

-to all around them.

-

-I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I

-regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,--the

-simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human

-element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its

-imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his

-religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere

-the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points

-of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his

-barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider

-some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,

-which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.

-

-{109}

-

-I open the book of Genesis and read:--

-

-  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt

-  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here

-  I am.

-

-  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou

-  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him

-  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I

-  will tell thee of.

-

-  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,

-  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and

-  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went

-  unto the place of which God had told him.

-

-  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the

-  place afar off.

-

-  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the

-  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come

-  again to you.

-

-  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it

-  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a

-  knife: and they went both of them together.

-

-  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:

-  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire

-  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?

-

-  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a

-  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.

-{110}

-  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and

-  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and

-  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

-

-  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to

-  slay his son.

-

-  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and

-  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.

-

-  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou

-  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,

-  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

-

-  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind

-  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went

-  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in

-  the stead of his son."

-

-A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his

-mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is

-an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean

-of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the

-Biblical truths to which I am referring.

-

-{111}

-

-"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of

-religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong

-tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest

-feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes

-suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and

-with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to

-propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by

-surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the

-source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct

-that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,

-or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.

-On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these

-two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of

-evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness

-in the life of Abraham. ...

-{112}

-The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the

-son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.

-The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than

-sacrifice,--that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest

-offering that God can receive. ... We have a proverb which tells

-us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]

-

-    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.

-    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,

-    1867.]

-

-Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in

-the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been

-forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and

-the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the

-hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from

-the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law

-and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.

-

-The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full

-concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is

-in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more

-than he points out.

-{113}

-This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which

-he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the

-Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but

-Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such

-sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and

-manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even

-of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he

-pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is

-beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine

-command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac

-is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of

-course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition

-of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he

-believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.

-

-    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;

-    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively

-    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.

-    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]

-

-{114}

-

-It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,

-in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental

-characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,

-although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the

-divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and

-word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my

-conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in

-the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,

-which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement

-of progress.

-

-I say progress,--progress immense, infinitely grander than man's

-imagination could ever have conceived,--and at the same time the

-character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is

-no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the

-continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world

-and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the

-New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to

-recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer

-directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.

-{115}

-It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,

-and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under

-a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,

-intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of

-suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the

-victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,

-God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.

-Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He

-manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by

-natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!

-what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of

-His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself

-upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,

-separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw

-it from the contagion of idolatry;--but now it is for the whole

-world, for all nations, for future as well as for living

-generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the

-barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the

-God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over

-the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His

-servants to extend His empire.

-

-{116}

-

-He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to

-spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate

-from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.

-Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,

-although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human

-errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the

-law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors

-with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature

-of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,

-and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.

-He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and

-brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and

-perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will

-not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very

-texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their

-most essential precepts.

-

-{117}

-

-I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,

-foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for

-stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this _lex talionis_.

-"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy

-neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your

-enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate

-you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute

-you." [Footnote 27]

-

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

-

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

-

-It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a

-wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour

-in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then

-let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,

-and send her out of his house." [Footnote 28]

-

-    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]

-

-{118}

-

-I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and

-asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? ... And

-he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And

-they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to

-put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the

-hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the

-beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this

-cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his

-wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more

-twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,

-let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]

-

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

-

-The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be

-found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall

-both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the

-woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]

-

-    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]

-

-{119}

-

-Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the

-scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;

-and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,

-Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now

-Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but

-what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might

-have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger

-wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they

-continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,

-He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at

-her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they

-which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out

-one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and

-Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When

-Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said

-unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man

-condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,

-Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]

-

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

-

-{120}

-

-The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of

-rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain

-external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration

-and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and

-Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the

-acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a

-lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;

-and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of

-Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and

-ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

-... Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, ... the hour cometh,

-and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in

-spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

-God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in

-spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]

-

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

-

-{121}

-

-Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and

-to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is

-about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man

-had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;

-he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity

-and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious

-and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the

-religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and

-extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself

-with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;

-political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all

-in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either

-social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make

-neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions

-advanced, he sets them aside;

-{122}

-"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the

-things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and

-earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and

-prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]

-

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

-

-Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human

-being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every

-man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every

-human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole

-idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that

-when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary

-consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his

-righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

-[Footnote 34]

-

-    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]

-

-{123}

-

-I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its

-different and special objects,--whether astronomy, geology,

-geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,--is as

-foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred

-Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man

-left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,

-assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious

-exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,

-then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts

-declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to

-facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no

-disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine

-torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the

-language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak

-according to the measure of their knowledge or of their

-ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order

-to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that

-men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.

-{124}

-In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,

-and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,

-aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to

-employ a similar language,--a language comprehended and received

-by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their

-inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters

-purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the

-mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of

-science, but according to their appearances, and so men

-comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear

-them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of

-ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.

-What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the

-person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his

-missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which

-turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that

-it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its

-circumference?

-{125}

-What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the

-language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific

-imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that

-language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or

-moral law of humanity?

-

-No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater

-admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and

-it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of

-man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no

-sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,

-to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of

-publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely

-human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is

-essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in

-need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of

-God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the

-religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his

-life, and to decide his lot in eternity.

-{126}

-It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of

-all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated

-philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the

-most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,

-thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from

-being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. ...

-After death the reason,--just ideas survive; all the rest

-perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even

-from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in

-God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them

-only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble

-souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made

-up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish

-almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple

-accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul

-of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely

-troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the

-consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really

-are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of

-soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]

-

-    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation

-    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]

-

-{127}

-

-I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought

-showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the

-favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour

-at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not

-believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is

-declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good

-their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.

-

-{128}

-

-           Fourth Meditation.

-

-          Christian Ignorance.

-

-

-When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have

-either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the

-intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that

-it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,

-to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any

-kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind

-limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there

-a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the

-objects are different to which it is applied? These are

-questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words

-"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to

-offer what appears to me to be the right solution.

-

-{129}

-

-I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or

-systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to

-make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,

-Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these

-sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,

-Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.

-I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these

-systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to

-undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all

-philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special

-questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between

-Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus

-only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to

-the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,

-their bearing and their limitation.

-

-{130}

-

-I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the

-first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,

-Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the

-distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,

-Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology

-is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great

-philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which

-Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more

-eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak

-more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of

-Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible

-to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or

-non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for

-which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]

-

-    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.

-    By M. Littré, p. 519.]

-

-That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,

-Ontology, and Theology are not--cannot be--sciences.

-{131}

-As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,

-and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of

-Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of

-Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three

-schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them

-the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term

-"Christian Ignorance."

-

-It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and

-with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this

-question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which

-they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as

-Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of

-the four sciences--Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and

-Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there

-to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there

-discovered.

-

-When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is

-indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more

-so, than Spiritualism itself.

-{132}

-It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all

-Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal

-in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other

-questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and

-Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between

-Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between

-Rationalistic science and Christian science.

-

-Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of

-Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it

-admits that these different sciences owe their birth and

-development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men

-and of things, and have for their object the solution of the

-questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once

-admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology

-alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of

-Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which

-the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to

-say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for

-human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source

-other than human reason.

-{133}

-Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and

-other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts

-supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it

-recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are

-bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand

-that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human

-mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the

-history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth

-of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have

-testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as

-well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact

-proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,

-the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical

-Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which

-Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data

-and the legitimate bases of science.

-

-{134}

-

-I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and

-to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to

-the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human

-experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no

-intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great

-question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with

-respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall

-return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has

-not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it

-demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas--facts,

-rather--absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic

-opponents of the supernatural.

-

-    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.

-    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,

-    1864.]

-

-Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal

-causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and

-distinctive characteristic of man.

-{135}

-It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself

-above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things

-determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it

-in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any

-general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such

-facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a

-machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to

-drive man back to the condition of that nature which is

-substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish

-at one blow human morality and human liberty.

-

-The blow strikes still higher--it would abolish God. God, who

-created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his

-creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the

-daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that

-human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies

-to the source from which it emanates.

-{136}

-By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the

-condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble

-of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;

-that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of

-Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical

-reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,

-nothing more than Atheism.

-

-The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this

-consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being

-disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the

-most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from

-entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be

-finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not

-assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical

-consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident

-in the moral and social condition of humanity.

-

-{137}

-

-There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of

-the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that

-the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and

-permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential

-laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings

-whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject

-absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of

-necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in

-harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly

-perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If

-the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will

-venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even

-there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that

-the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small

-Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every

-place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in

-the midst of space and of time?

-

-{138}

-

-Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it

-admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe--an unknown

-incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and

-admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.

-de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime

-flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing

-in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows

-how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the

-fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches

-us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the

-discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in

-the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest

-and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in

-the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to

-these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality

-of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely

-minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the

-reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects

-than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it

-discovers.

-{139}

-What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the

-worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no

-more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that

-all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those

-inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same

-conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our

-science becomes very modest when set side by side with our

-ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,

-however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may

-be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is

-either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing

-this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,

-Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which

-outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.

-

-{140}

-

-Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity

-has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the

-reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one

-side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life

-of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life

-of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,

-a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the

-other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and

-with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of

-the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible

-laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places

-itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the

-spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the

-extent.

-

-{141}

-

-It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another

-adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by

-asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts

-and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,

-let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I

-address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by

-the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before

-speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,

-I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is

-here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion

-in the great struggle in which it is engaged.

-

-The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an

-uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.

-Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these

-documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the

-facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the

-less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a

-poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion

-of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of

-the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius

-were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral

-precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes

-and subjects.

-{142}

-I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human

-imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books

-which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time

-incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential

-characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its

-latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the

-Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing

-centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil

-society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another

-and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a

-religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have

-been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of

-God upon the destinies of Mankind.

-

-{143}

-

-In proportion to the vigour with which these events have

-developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed

-to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its

-peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.

-

-What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the

-means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays

-to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he

-believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his

-thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to

-attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the

-Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,

-he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,

-cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does

-Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,

-to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very

-presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of

-God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow

-the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him

-imperfectly,--where he attempts to carry the torch of human

-science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?

-

-{144}

-

-I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two

-examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.

-

-The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and

-Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly

-repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive

-documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that

-"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the

-Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all

-theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the

-divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian

-religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never

-have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation

-was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author."

-

-    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of

-    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]

-

-{145}

-

-But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this

-sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought

-to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the

-human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such

-union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's

-personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,

-which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the

-divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the

-councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and

-agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.

-

-Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of

-divine History.

-

-The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as

-unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the

-Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of

-Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy

-Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.

-{146}

-The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its

-place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very

-beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves

-to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to

-determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the

-religions truth; in other words, to transform history into

-science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the

-authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,

-rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of

-the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,

-and Holy Ghost.

-

-I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the

-doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either

-originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their

-essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to

-human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less

-legitimate, of Religion.

-

-{147}

-

-When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of

-Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do

-not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The

-scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,

-always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of

-the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves

-to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and

-thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause

-of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral

-influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and

-authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have

-been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than

-efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their

-mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The

-Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this

-was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;

-forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they

-have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by

-explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an

-intermixture of man's work.

-{148}

-Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same

-time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can

-recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man

-to make of them a science.

-

-Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his

-explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:

-"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,

-or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add

-to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity

-and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this

-is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."

-[Footnote 39]

-

-    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.

-    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]

-

-Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian

-ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to

-take refuge.

-

-{149}

-

-It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are

-unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a

-serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and

-what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to

-believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of

-man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in

-religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only

-their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own

-work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most

-logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this

-respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly

-be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian

-ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to

-moderation and charity than Theological science.

-

-But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and

-efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human

-science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the

-same error and the same peril.

-{150}

-The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God

-to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and

-inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and

-mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon

-certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations

-of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the

-hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and

-the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter

-themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the

-solution of such questions is hidden.

-

-I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious

-impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets

-of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling

-curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?

-Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself

-under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be

-possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and

-powerless?

-{151}

-There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and

-under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost

-recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding

-from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to

-them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who

-of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of

-a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,

-conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,

-in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of

-human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event

-brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to

-which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine

-Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt

-the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve

-problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to

-rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine

-author.

-{152}

-But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No

-doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by

-his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to

-our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and

-his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their

-effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general

-problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions

-touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of

-Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into

-ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at

-limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific

-vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to

-overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon

-man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,

-"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his

-charity, and his liberty.

-

-{153}

-

-           Fifth Meditation.

-

-           Christian Faith.

-

-

-Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé

-Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the

-Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue

-Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is

-called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it

-expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.

-Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in

-its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to

-my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages

-which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the

-imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to

-regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a

-starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I

-now give to the press.

-

-{154}

-

-By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in

-facts or dogmas of a special nature--in facts or dogmas of

-religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in

-speaking of _the faith_ the term is used alone and

-absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its

-fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from

-which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the

-following are met with:--"I have full _faith_ in your words;

-this man has _faith_ in himself--in his strength--in his

-fortune, &c." This employment of the word _faith_ in secular

-matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it

-is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never

-been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had

-also other significations attached to it.

-

-{155}

-

-It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular

-opinion, 1st, that the word _faith_ designates a certain

-internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a

-certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of

-the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,

-nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied

-to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its

-special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the

-variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are

-taking place every day?

-

-Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a

-religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy

-of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing

-in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction

-of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called

-_Faith_; a name which neither masters and disciples will

-repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.

-{156}

-Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the

-truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the

-conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been

-generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;

-that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name

-of _Faith_, is its energy, is the empire which that energy

-gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith

-of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth

-century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of

-Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.

-

-The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it

-was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by

-an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of

-persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened

-reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral

-affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to

-feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave

-the name of _Faith_ to the result of their action, just as

-they had done so to the result of the process essentially

-intellectual of which I was before speaking.

-{157}

-Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by

-reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is

-the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.

-

-Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always

-sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has

-been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to

-practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach

-ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a

-meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind

-was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to

-certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it

-had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission

-of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to

-govern man's life and to regulate his thought.

-

-{158}

-

-Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated

-in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the

-intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation

-of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that

-it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by

-any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention

-and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became

-thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive

-character.

-

-The word _faith_ has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,

-a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human

-intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the

-sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often

-even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's

-long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to

-command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural

-means,--by divine grace.

-

-{159}

-

-What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may

-emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What

-is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider

-it independently of its origin and of its object?

-

-Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it

-innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,

-but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and

-establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being

-aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or

-volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and

-the influence of that external world in the midst of which his

-life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of

-laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary

-study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all

-his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering

-it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there

-taking place--to render an account thereof to himself, and thus

-to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge

-which he did not before possess, although the facts which form

-its object nevertheless existed as facts external--and which he

-might see by his eyes,--or as facts which were taking place

-within him.

-

-{160}

-

-Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of

-_faith_?

-

-It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to

-that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:

-such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man

-in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he

-dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,

-unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it

-the characteristics of _faith?_

-

-Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time

-others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost

-unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and

-spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without

-which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct

-without having given it any intimate and personal assent.

-{161}

-It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,

-admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to

-say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him

-to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful

-principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the

-profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which

-reigns over him. _Faith_, on the contrary, has this power;

-faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which

-faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account

-to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will

-do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind

-it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of

-human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of

-gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth

-which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,

-of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much

-more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does

-much more than direct him, it enlightens him.

-{162}

-How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and

-instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without

-our being able to affirm that they have _faith_ in them.

-Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,

-nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without

-seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,

-however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,

-should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction

-between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their

-nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their

-legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by

-comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying

-it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a

-sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and

-establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;

-this is no longer simple natural belief, it is _faith_.

-

-{163}

-

-Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two

-kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them

-the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous

-belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and

-science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is

-individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,

-dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison

-with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,

-faith is the full security of man in the possession of his

-belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path

-which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and

-a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent

-harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man

-whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition

-present no longer any problems for solution as to the things

-which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full

-possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and

-in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.

-{164}

-As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,

-it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external

-conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from

-other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its

-object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined

-and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature

-itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may

-be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the

-intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in

-the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory

-of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so

-forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of

-every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally

-oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of

-the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the

-exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long

-obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the

-three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,

-and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously

-satisfied.

-{165}

-Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a

-situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of

-its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need

-be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his

-faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral

-nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.

-

-The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith

-would seem _à priori_ to be intellectual beauty, and

-practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the

-mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent

-or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but

-the name of _faith_ would not be suitably applied to it.

-{166}

-Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an

-idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also

-attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the

-pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple

-belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may

-become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure

-to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to

-awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin

-and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall

-be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and

-the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the

-other, and to unite them.

-

-It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost

-exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief

-possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote

-40] which provoke the development of faith.

-

-    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]

-

-{167}

-

-Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful

-applications; political theories may strike the mind by the

-elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of

-their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more

-surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor

-have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in

-the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression

-at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their

-practical importance, a certain measure of science and of

-sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as

-the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does

-not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on

-the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in

-itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;

-having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and

-undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however

-rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once

-sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an

-habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him

-access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual

-life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;

-it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over

-him the empire of the most powerful interest.

-{168}

-Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition

-to a state of _faith_ should be so rapid and so general? But

-it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to

-transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary

-energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free

-and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to

-impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith

-which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which

-addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the

-loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,

-can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral

-nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to

-the mission prescribed to him by his thought.

-{169}

-But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of

-the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience

-proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the

-different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more

-its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by

-his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections

-or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the

-abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring

-from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once

-there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to

-diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law

-of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,

-it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its

-designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost

-always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this

-mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any

-other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and

-of society falling under oppression.

-

-{170}

-

-For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in

-belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his

-will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,

-has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith

-fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty

-does not exist, faith first usurps,--then becomes

-bewildered--finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to

-the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its

-efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it

-abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we

-have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the

-tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.

-In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces

-consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]

-

-    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et

-    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of

-    1861).]

-

-{171}

-

-If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I

-rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it

-Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as

-characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon

-which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold

-merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which

-has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other

-side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in

-sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in

-sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.

-

-What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the

-principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man

-incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each

-man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and

-more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the

-present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;

-in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.

-

-{172}

-

-The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less

-evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical

-importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor

-de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of

-Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit

-of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and

-adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the

-sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally

-certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or

-Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere

-believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and

-imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of

-fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and

-strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.

-As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has

-presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever

-seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to

-make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has

-nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of

-the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very

-efficacious influence to the principle of authority.

-

-{173}

-

-Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and

-assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,

-let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is

-engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What

-is the principle of this contest, and what its character?

-

-Here we are met by that all-important question, the question

-which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which

-all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the

-Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm

-that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of

-these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,

-and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:

-whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such

-contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as

-they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.

-

-{174}

-

-In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that

-which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is

-profound; but I do not think that the question between the two

-has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition

-has been rightly defined.

-

-To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,

-first, to the philosophers.

-

-We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to

-what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:

-"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with

-respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,

-than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then

-either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the

-old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the

-standard of reason."

-{175}

-Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him

-in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,--"My

-first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,

-unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to

-avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to

-follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but

-what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as

-to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]

-

-    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,

-    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]

-

-More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace

-to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the

-history of its progressive development, did far more than

-obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his

-labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its

-proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of

-a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and

-then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,

-all his knowledge,--in fact, the entire man himself.

-

-{176}

-

-Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have

-their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.

-Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to

-know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by

-the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a

-_tabula rasa_, and to fill up the void which he has so made,

-he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so

-clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to

-doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses

-not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without

-reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a

-statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this

-statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the

-man--the entire man--with all the developments of his nature and

-of his thought.

-

-{177}

-

-I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting

-point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very

-commencement of philosophy,--in short, a mere hypothesis.

-Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and

-of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress

-of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and

-scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the

-material world; but from their very commencement both these

-philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight

-road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a

-mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete

-appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss

-either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two

-hypotheses, the _tabula rasa_ of Descartes, and the statue

-of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they

-are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to

-inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle

-which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,

-and Christian faith.

-

-{178}

-

-The true point of departure of this history and the first of the

-facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and

-the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the

-other, the "_moi_" and the "_non moi_," the subject and

-the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I

-repudiate absolutely the different systems,--Pantheism, whether

-materialistic or idealistic,--Scepticism, whether idealistic or

-absolute,--which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the

-reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge

-of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the

-relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe

-together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a

-pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these

-different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have

-to deal with something very different from the question to which

-I am applying myself at this moment.

-{179}

-Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form

-of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it

-admits the reality and the distinction of the "_moi_" and of

-the "_non moi_" of the subject and the object, of the

-spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the

-universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for

-Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and

-under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's

-life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all

-simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the

-spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being

-from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself

-and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the

-diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives

-from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has

-a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and

-also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows

-not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive

-and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,

-yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.

-{180}

-Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,

-by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and

-which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that

-external world. He observes and notes both what takes place

-without him and within him. The results of this observation he

-terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations

-merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him

-of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands

-in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is

-highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,

-but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of

-science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein

-involved.

-

-{181}

-

-Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,

-I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,

-or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;

-first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which

-mankind professes, although under very different forms and in

-very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of

-philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in

-order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,

-and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side

-is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other

-is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of

-disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is

-called religious philosophy.

-

-Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no

-other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these

-systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,

-and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the

-religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of

-religion?

-

-{182}

-

-To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,

-Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.

-

-In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the

-instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of

-human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and

-proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active

-presence of God in the life of man and in the history of

-humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and

-active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of

-Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active

-presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the

-mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and

-of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,

-are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological

-and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which

-it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.

-

-{183}

-

-Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and

-disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which

-all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always

-confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,

-greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is

-looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is

-immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,

-diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is

-situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence

-reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision

-more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He

-observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts

-which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion

-amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in

-appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their

-character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the

-question antecedent to and which governs all the others.

-

-{184}

-

-The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not

-a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and

-a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith

-as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at

-the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,

-as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they

-themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only

-the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the

-life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these

-psychological and historic facts which reason and science are

-bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians

-justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence

-alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and

-permanent laws assigned to all other existences?

-

-{185}

-

-As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are

-concerned, this is the real question at issue.

-

-Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which

-we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.

-

-Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and

-those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to

-demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of

-God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all

-their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these

-days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.

-Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made

-earnest--I would willingly say pious--efforts to elucidate the

-proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid

-that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the

-religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive

-themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain

-to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of

-the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.

-{186}

-In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which

-Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and

-unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of

-each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic

-Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to

-prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of

-the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the

-place of the real action of God.

-

-In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"

-another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and

-with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different

-systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to

-polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear

-enunciation of his own thought.

-{187}

-"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend

-against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law

-of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would

-not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a

-commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and

-product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,

-to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in

-opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a

-supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be

-perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he

-is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of

-spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in

-ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,

-he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind

-supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an

-unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,

-inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that

-emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he

-would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a

-divine Reason.

-

-{188}

-

-Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living

-God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves ... A God

-that loved not would not be worthy of being adored ... We do not

-adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in

-consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however

-potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure

-it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being

-who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its

-highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a

-contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if

-the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.

-

-This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious

-conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."

-[Footnote 43]

-

-    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.

-    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]

-

-{189}

-

-It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions

-still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from

-philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.

-

-Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the

-philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle

-of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon

-the soul of man.

-

-Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,

-continually present, and active in the government of the

-Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the

-human race.

-

-Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short

-there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts

-which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these

-facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that

-Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.

-

-{190}

-

-           Sixth Meditation.

-

-            Christian Life.

-

-

-Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit

-to a test--the great test--the practical application. The idea

-has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.

-

-Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,

-upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their

-ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are

-right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is

-in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its

-object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man

-pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever

-the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it

-believes that it has attained to the truth.

-

-{191}

-

-This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only

-ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under

-its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those

-who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the

-principle that we should be indifferent whether we are

-essentially in the right, and that practically there is no

-difference between truth and error.

-

-But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than

-the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human

-mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,

-that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves

-itself?

-

-To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a

-denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every

-doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a

-test,--the practical application.

-{192}

-The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;

-these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically

-true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which

-it is bound to give.

-

-There is a radical difference between the material world and the

-intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in

-the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought

-and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is

-ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has

-no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot

-influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite

-of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if

-Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,

-and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's

-principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to

-the general system of the world. _There_ man's error is

-absolutely without effect or influence.

-

-{193}

-

-In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is

-not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act--

-to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to

-the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant

-of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside

-here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and

-independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here

-without real and serious consequences; they have the power of

-sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual

-and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to

-the disputes of men.

-

-Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,

-separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from

-its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific

-investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and

-admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of

-society or the results of their own labours.

-{194}

-Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave

-inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world

-are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;

-man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the

-profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,

-procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative

-description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no

-general disturbance results in that material world upon which

-naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will

-not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their

-ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,

-on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its

-teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and

-make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape

-the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in

-its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world

-to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,

-incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not

-here the object of science, it is still its necessary and

-appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the

-truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.

-

-{195}

-

-Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen

-centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue

-ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace

-here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and

-surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of

-Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single

-small part of this history, the most modest part, the least

-pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what

-Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian

-Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different

-situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day

-accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the

-furtherance of his ultimate destiny.

-

-{196}

-

-Three words, "_Rights of Man_" inscribed upon the banners of

-the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man

-as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his

-humanity. Three other words, _Liberty, Equality,

-Fraternity_, have served as a commentary upon the three

-former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French

-Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources

-of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the

-ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.

-

-Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is

-Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have

-of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by

-Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does

-Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and

-condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity

-alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral

-force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the

-good also to perish.

-

-{197}

-

-It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride

-that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,

-the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his

-rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential

-objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the

-rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the

-individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,

-where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human

-creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a

-single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,

-Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not

-only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The

-right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of

-the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,

-constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant

-precept of the Christian religion.

-{198}

-It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian

-Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put

-into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as

-the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the

-chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that

-Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was

-amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as

-brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although

-sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a

-stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less

-potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it

-maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over

-distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil

-society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are

-most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the

-iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices

-have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the

-Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the

-earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church

-itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and

-acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.

-{199}

-Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never

-afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any

-human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of

-earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to

-be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all

-the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only

-in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear

-themselves greeted as _brethren_.

-

-The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence

-in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand

-to the political authorities, or in which the different classes

-stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the

-constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,

-called family.

-{200}

-There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the

-despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of

-wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If

-we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as

-religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of

-antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman

-family,--we shall not need to examine long before we discern

-clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just

-appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and

-liberty.

-

-I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and

-puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular

-maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and

-fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of

-false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the

-history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not

-merely in the records of a few years, but through three

-centuries.

-{201}

-Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying

-claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the

-same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show

-of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim

-to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner

-of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did

-they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon

-authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,

-and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.

-Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of

-Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to

-the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of

-this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its

-cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its

-liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either

-in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,

-and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which

-the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.

-{202}

-They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor

-humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and

-disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage

-to its right at the same time that they maintained their own

-right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished

-at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not

-as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]

-

-    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]

-

-Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,

-and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen

-me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go

-and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."

-[Footnote 45]

-

-    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]

-

-And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and

-struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the

-doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every

-soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but

-of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ... Wherefore ye

-must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for

-conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]

-

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

-

-{203}

-

-Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself

-addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which

-are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote

-47]

-

-    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]

-

-The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of

-power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of

-religious life from civil life,--all these were not, for the

-primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their

-situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles

-of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the

-name of justice and of truth.

-

-{204}

-

-Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,

-greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the

-history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to

-the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once

-became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by

-earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the

-arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil

-inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and

-combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity

-had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,

-nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary

-doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted

-and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape

-and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they

-never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they

-survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the

-broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,

-Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled

-against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite

-of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of

-violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,

-the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.

-{205}

-Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious

-and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of

-human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and

-these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,

-traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable

-them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and

-corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.

-Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which

-agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely

-healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant

-subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of

-sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated

-herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she

-has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against

-which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which

-she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over

-the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of

-promise. This she owes to her origin--she was born in the manger

-of Jesus.

-

-{206}

-

-There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened

-men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has

-rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality

-of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of

-Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,

-the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality

-is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be

-separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but

-its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not

-disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and

-empire of morality, I have established in this volume of

-Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,

-and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart

-from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,

-and powerless--a branch without root and without fruit.

-{207}

-I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is

-Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as

-the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,

-but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have

-taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still

-higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did

-not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of

-doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a

-truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and

-superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as

-such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,

-and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and

-vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and

-learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the

-fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.

-{208}

-At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw

-in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a

-sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by

-Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his

-appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;

-but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who

-detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council

-and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and

-the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to

-have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,

-a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in

-reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the

-apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of

-Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching

-these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself

-to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,

-joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,

-were scattered and brought to nought.

-{209}

-After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the

-taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;

-and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I

-say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if

-this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But

-if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found

-even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]

-

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

-

-The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity

-at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already

-made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the

-living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son

-of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]

-

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

-

-{210}

-

-The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A

-short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as

-their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide

-the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in

-repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof

-was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries

-of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of

-Christianity,--the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,

-the Inspiration of the Scriptures,--became the grand dogmas of

-Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its

-turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed

-from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to

-undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly

-interests and human errors and passions had a great part;

-Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes

-converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so

-constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was

-theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of

-practical application in every form and every shape.

-{211}

-The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all

-these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows

-of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and

-is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the

-same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,

-with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and

-the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.

-The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its

-Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The

-authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of

-the next and last series of my "Meditations."

-

-{212}

-

-{213}

-

-               Appendix.

-

-

-Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at

-London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance

-a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:

-all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or

-simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or

-attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,

-perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,

-has just made it the subject of three articles, which are

-remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They

-appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his

-country. [Footnote 50]

-

-    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by

-    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen

-    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of

-    January, February, and March, 1868.]

-

-  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'

-  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be

-  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified

-  authorship--that has appeared within the same interval, has

-  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism

-  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled

-  'Ecce Homo.'"

-

-{214}

-

-The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his

-intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental

-ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current

-conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a

-definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons

-not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They

-may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the

-beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time

-when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as

-St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with

-those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to

-trace his biography from point to point, and accept those

-conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles

-have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,

-critically weighed, appear to warrant.

-

-"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the

-satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good

-many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that

-there was no historical character whose motives, objects and

-feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which

-proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.

-

-"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions

-whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern

-Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;

-which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time

-to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an

-answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the

-Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to

-attain that object?'"

-

-{215}

-

-On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief

-words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not

-to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,

-I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in

-the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very

-outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study

-the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering

-him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer

-all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire

-to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating

-him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when

-living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the

-ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,

-in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a

-person unknown to us--a fossil man, so to say, of which the

-features might be traceable in some contemporary document,

-showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to

-supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he

-performed;--this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,

-one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true

-comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus

-mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer

-limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent

-thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and

-its nature verified in its positive and vast development.

-

-{216}

-

-This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of

-history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like

-anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and

-comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their

-different elements and in all the development of their life. They

-form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we

-are deciphering.

-

-I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce

-Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it

-within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also

-understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed

-and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these

-days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?--a

-man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine

-nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he

-really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such

-things as miracles? What are we to understand by the

-supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and

-accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style

-Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably

-suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and

-violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce

-Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to

-study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it

-because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no

-positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a

-certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of

-some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of

-him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact

-not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to

-the sole and proper force of mankind?

-

-{217}

-

-Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous

-author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:

-what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book

-"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed

-to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has

-proposed to explain Christianity.

-

-I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of

-the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a

-strange one,--it is condemnatory and destructive of the

-fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and

-honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the

-facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human

-nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural

-operations of humanity.

-

-The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether

-twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of

-Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing

-with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,

-the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the

-authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,

-the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the

-systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its

-fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and

-sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn

-the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.

-Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and

-striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,

-however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,

-and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.

-

-{218}

-

-All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the

-vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the

-perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the

-solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not

-enter.

-

-I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an

-account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's

-opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my

-aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show

-plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There

-precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with

-the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of

-Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of

-Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he

-departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he

-appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought

-seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly

-contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts

-or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is

-more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he

-believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity

-find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they

-encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or

-the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.

-

-{219}

-

-There are several passages of this remarkable work which are

-particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I

-feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of

-the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,

-entitled _Christ's Credentials_, and chapter ninth,

-[Footnote 51] entitled _Reflections on the Nature of Christ's

-Society;_ in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled

-_Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems_,

-and chapter the eleventh, _The Christian Republic_ [Footnote

-52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,

-fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and

-satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the

-author's inconsistency with respect to religion.

-

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

-

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

-

-Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply

-remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and

-particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and

-call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a

-singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a

-subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with

-philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of

-human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and

-religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and

-painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a

-grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,

-however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no

-idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable

-work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to

-which I have already referred, and indeed it appears

-incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the

-human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as

-of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his

-book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another

-volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the

-Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."

-{220}

-He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking

-inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ

-much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however

-superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary

-humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and

-is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not

-have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.

-

-

-                 The End.

-

-

-

-

-

-

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

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

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-Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot

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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60815 ***
+
+[Transcriber's note: This production is based on
+https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]
+
+{i}
+
+         Christianity Viewed In Relation To
+
+     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
+
+                  By M. Guizot.
+
+
+  Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.
+
+
+                    London:
+
+         John Murray, Albemarle Street.
+
+                     1871.
+
+{ii}
+
+             By The Same Author.
+
+       The Essence Of Christianity.
+             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.
+
+  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances
+  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable
+  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."
+    --_Edinburgh Review_.
+
+
+
+      The Present State Of Christianity.
+          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.
+
+  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a
+  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,
+  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further
+  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great
+  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future
+  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great
+  interest."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.
+
+{iii}
+
+{iv}
+
+{v}
+
+                   Preface.
+
+
+In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the
+facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and
+the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I
+retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during
+the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and
+Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated
+amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent
+trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in
+these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,
+Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the
+fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those
+systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the
+office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and
+destiny.
+{vi}
+That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why
+is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has
+had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been
+made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely
+better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of
+humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which
+vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in
+review? because it fills up the void that those systems either
+create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts
+man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]
+
+    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.
+    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]
+
+Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this
+question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas
+and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them
+more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.
+{vii}
+Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity
+can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that
+morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious
+Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the
+very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those
+who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe
+Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each
+other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as
+naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that
+Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,
+that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I
+establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I
+then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and
+determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical
+Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the
+bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.
+{viii}
+I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the
+law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I
+interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show
+that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.
+"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the
+Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the
+present series concludes.
+
+But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the
+historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of
+retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its
+course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor
+wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts
+which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine
+origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and
+destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a
+summary:--
+
+  1. The authority of the sacred books.
+
+  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.
+
+  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.
+
+{ix}
+
+  4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.
+
+  5. Romanism and Protestantism.
+
+  6. The different Antichristian crises, their
+     character and their issue.
+
+It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they
+suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised
+itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe
+and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one
+of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my
+Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real
+value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical
+Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of
+Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed
+to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious
+study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many
+quicksands.
+
+{x}
+
+But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I
+been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work
+into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are
+agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding
+their instant solution? What good result can I expect from
+studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my
+country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the
+actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that
+which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many
+troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I
+scrutinize generations--the honour and the destiny of which I
+have so much at heart, for my children form part of them--the
+more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the
+general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself
+in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the
+grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.
+{xi}
+I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,
+France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems
+and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their
+gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not
+having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from
+not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when
+she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary
+forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.
+
+Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some
+question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in
+events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and
+the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than
+the era of modern history--in the sixteenth century the question
+of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth
+century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad
+and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the
+operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in
+France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the
+different objects which each social movement had specially in
+view.
+{xii}
+The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the
+struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on
+high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite
+complications of a labyrinth.
+
+And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of
+essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,
+contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is
+plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I
+propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.
+
+First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of
+the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which
+concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of
+populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly
+these questions were all reducible to one--the aggrandizement or
+the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or
+the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the
+balance of power in Europe.
+{xiii}
+War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled
+this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and
+Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation
+so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and
+ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and
+entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the
+question of nationalities, the question of little states and of
+great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and
+of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their
+midst,--all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a
+routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the
+maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking
+themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial
+organizations and the external relations of States.
+
+{xiv}
+
+Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle
+itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new
+ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual
+theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of
+men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good
+their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any
+respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a
+principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which
+the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name
+of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from
+participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or
+eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.
+Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently
+against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick
+does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of
+which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of
+language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some
+general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased
+to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,
+and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more
+legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his
+successors.
+
+{xv}
+
+I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men
+follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part
+of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain
+share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the
+possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a
+moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of
+this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But
+policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to
+these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and
+right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common
+sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,
+maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,
+and which, up to the present time, have presided over the
+relations of States.
+{xvi}
+The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial
+agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be
+independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect
+for ancient treaties,--all these elements of European order have
+not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory
+of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political
+unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with
+justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western
+Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both
+in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow
+countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal
+of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?
+Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere
+Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations
+of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which
+draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories
+all foreign domination.
+{xvii}
+But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of
+union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and
+the _régime_ of a confederation of States might have been
+established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the
+foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have
+been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the
+interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the
+preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at
+the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that
+any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of
+that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized
+world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally
+compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the
+preservation of peace between the different States.
+
+{xviii}
+
+What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the
+sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,
+the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a
+population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,
+and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute
+themselves into new and independent States? What would become of
+the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also
+were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating
+wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its
+members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations
+or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding
+or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does
+he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in
+the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.
+The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being
+rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to
+the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his
+country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to
+strive to lay the foundation of a new country.
+{xix}
+We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen
+some of the States which form the nation of the United States of
+America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an
+independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in
+their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the
+right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to
+change its government at discretion. The States which remained
+faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the
+principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in
+maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am
+one of those who think that they had both right and reason on
+their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the
+most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character
+as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the
+interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for
+negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to
+me all that he had written and said upon the subject.
+{xx}
+I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he
+expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the
+efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and
+by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He
+would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living
+reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle
+Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much
+sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced
+that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of
+which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the
+danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of
+slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the
+great American State which was their country. Motive detestable
+for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,
+has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a
+Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern
+times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising
+resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an
+unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of
+States.
+
+{xxi}
+
+So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the
+external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the
+future has in store for those which involve domestic order and
+the organization of government. I meet here with the same
+confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between
+ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at
+the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in
+collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments
+in opinions.
+
+The proposition is now universally received that society has the
+right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own
+government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a
+manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.
+{xxii}
+The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to
+attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the
+monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the
+other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the
+great representatives of public power. But neither the
+constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded
+amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of
+events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in
+spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of
+liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on
+its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was
+affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and
+sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional
+monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of
+government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of
+personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the
+essay have greater success? Events will decide.
+{xxiii}
+In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so
+many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the
+disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its
+governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our
+ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,
+have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of
+impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very
+well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed
+and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no
+fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield
+ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our
+very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but
+soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less
+exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our
+most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as
+precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are
+again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in
+the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have
+taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet
+these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found
+any free government.
+
+{xxiv}
+
+I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the
+state of our political institutions to that of the relations
+existent between the different parts of society. I say the
+_different parts_ to avoid saying _different classes_,
+for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking
+that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges
+and exclusions, of that entire _régime_ with its narrow
+compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were
+formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their
+name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental
+qualification they might possess. In effect, this _régime_
+has fallen--fallen completely and definitively; all legal
+barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:
+by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to
+everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.
+{xxv}
+This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate
+it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it
+ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of
+jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they
+have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they
+persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in
+defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration
+was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils
+that the _bourgeoisie_ had to endure, and the risks which it
+had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of
+July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were
+the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle
+classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such
+assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the
+intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been
+already often produced on the stage of the world,--theories which
+have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.
+{xxvi}
+Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial
+distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have
+served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,
+sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon
+things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises
+were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to
+give.
+
+I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good
+observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that
+even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as
+to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial
+settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the
+distribution of the material means of existence, are in
+discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,
+although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume
+the form of Socialism.
+{xxvii}
+I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find
+their field in facts affecting the sphere of material
+subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most
+recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier
+to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the
+ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,
+that errors such as those which presented themselves under the
+names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much
+noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that
+they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof
+of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it
+leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst
+us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst
+of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in
+order to surmount this danger.
+
+Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,
+who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the
+following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between
+the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in
+their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for
+books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly
+workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as
+is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"
+{xxviii}
+After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are
+two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I
+added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you
+great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be
+the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the
+honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I
+congratulated him this time still more.
+
+In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which
+afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their
+disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which
+the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace
+social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of
+distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a
+little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by
+all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations
+from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which
+they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous
+and full of hazard.
+{xxix}
+The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,
+when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true
+to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of
+the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond
+doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously
+excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of
+hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as
+the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it
+devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it
+before them.
+{xxx}
+Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well
+living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with
+efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and
+resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the
+spectacle of the world which surrounds them,--a world now at
+length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,
+the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to
+the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our
+villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people
+from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,
+unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral
+discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which
+religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives
+subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely
+religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and
+Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and
+this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant
+regions of society!
+
+{xxxi}
+
+These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of
+unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,
+of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,
+open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a
+tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity
+counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name
+of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it
+with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical
+deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,
+in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their
+force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the
+incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's
+opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which
+are only simply political and social; many they are who would be
+inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they
+are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all
+these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring
+to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which
+receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ
+which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt
+and exposed to peril.
+
+{xxxii}
+
+I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating
+the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,
+questions of political organization, questions of social
+institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I
+encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great
+complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his
+efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every
+kind--doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and
+oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,
+immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to
+travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to
+feel their way through a labyrinth.
+
+Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and
+impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope
+for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we
+have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign
+power called by some Providence, by others Fate?
+
+{xxxiii}
+
+I am far from thinking so.
+
+Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of
+convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion
+Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day
+detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal
+or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"
+said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to
+disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence
+and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I
+am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military
+sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always
+applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in
+order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,
+to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its
+apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most
+efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the
+number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others
+possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same
+spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,
+single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon
+attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,
+without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.
+{xxxiv}
+We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of
+influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if
+we adopt it.
+
+I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which
+torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the
+rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its
+economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an
+evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of
+French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the
+moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them
+attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its
+removal.
+{xxxv}
+But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,
+a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and
+developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a
+good current which is impelling us forwards;--at the same time
+that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the
+principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to
+control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the
+maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at
+least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions
+of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of
+political economy have defenders no less zealous than the
+presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism
+raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is
+advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress
+also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical
+applications.
+{xxxvi}
+Following respectively their different objects, there are on both
+sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and
+influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several
+causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is
+solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,
+contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our
+history is made up of this great struggle and of its
+vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats
+sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of
+our country.
+
+They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and
+keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human
+sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated
+by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the
+disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought
+back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the
+modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of
+their situation than with the rights of thought, but always
+remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty
+even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only
+defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than
+shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in
+spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent
+indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in
+spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble
+desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.
+
+{xxxvii}
+
+We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius
+of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed
+with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of
+individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,
+and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as
+well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and
+the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who
+are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.
+
+{xxxviii}
+
+What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the
+conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have
+it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil
+current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions
+and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good
+sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and
+to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation
+which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?
+
+Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society
+in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free
+Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we
+should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease
+of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our
+conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our
+understanding.
+
+{xxxix}
+
+I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the
+abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to
+guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to
+individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and
+material. The right of France to these liberties, and their
+opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in
+their clearest light, and established in all their force on their
+highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]
+It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,
+the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,
+that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the
+two great remedies against this ill.
+
+    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, _Sur les libertés
+    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse_, in the séances of
+    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,
+    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]
+
+{xl}
+
+When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are
+perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is
+that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in
+conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of
+so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,
+does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the
+confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,
+provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its
+effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the
+understandings: the different facts, and problems which these
+facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only
+for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow
+accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise
+conceptions of them.
+
+Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions
+define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation
+of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular
+form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so
+salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a
+liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it
+would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle
+opinions still more.
+
+{xli}
+
+Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more
+important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of
+practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the
+thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,
+and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the
+effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs
+riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to
+liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,--when,
+instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be
+virtually solved,--when men are charged as real actors to
+transform into facts their own opinions or those of the
+spectators who are looking on,--then it is that the human mind,
+making its own strength the object of its reflection and
+examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose
+at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy
+itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good
+sense, by justice, and by possibility,--then it is that it learns
+to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.
+Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by
+liberty alone.
+
+{xlii}
+
+Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the
+salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an
+escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving
+questions the most different--I might say the most contrary--in
+their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary
+histories of England, of the United States of America, and of
+France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as
+precedents.
+
+From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against
+the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.
+Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With
+what forces and with what arms did England support these two
+formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political
+liberty.
+{xliii}
+It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued
+in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,
+--it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,--it was by
+setting in action all the springs of a free and representative
+government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most
+potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated
+Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,
+during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office
+by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a
+different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,
+sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place
+of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path
+that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,
+sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,
+improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of
+the country, all the strength of its government. Political
+Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause
+and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,
+at another of that of progress.
+
+{xliv}
+
+The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder
+trial. Their government has had to struggle against the
+insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a
+civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular
+independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted
+an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to
+maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the
+national existence of the State against the attempts which were
+made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same
+motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the
+course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,
+and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed
+by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the
+abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the
+right of insurrection.
+{xlv}
+It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the
+institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this
+victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once
+over, the civil _régime_ of American society resumed its
+action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical
+usurpation or military tyranny.
+
+Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so
+well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts
+remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848
+France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been
+preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.
+Neither of the _régimes_ in operation immediately previous
+to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly
+changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks
+to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which
+owed their existence to the previous _régime_, a regular
+government was promptly established, and a new constitutional
+monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.
+{xlvi}
+On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary
+movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect
+for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and
+feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical
+fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the
+victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was
+more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the
+funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,
+celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been
+assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be
+tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the
+archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,
+which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being
+closed for many months.
+{xlvii}
+In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set
+men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more
+profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor
+the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities
+were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of
+the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free
+even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four
+years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments
+which were then in force without leaving their traces; their
+traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary
+influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction
+which put an end to it.
+
+That this influence may still surmount the great trials through
+which governments and people may have both to pass, two things
+are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real
+citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to
+make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by
+their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at
+the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,
+should accept its inconveniences and its perils.
+{xlviii}
+A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it
+does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with
+resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of
+every human situation.
+
+Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room
+to nations for--what do I say? they demand from them--great
+activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude
+their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of
+action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer
+anything but a picture-frame without the picture--a drama
+written, not represented--in which the actors fail to assume
+their parts or to co-operate to produce the _dénouement_.
+
+It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public
+in the life of free government which gives so capital an
+importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.
+{xlix}
+When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a
+sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may
+have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am
+not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily
+hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of
+private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What
+is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled
+moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and
+religious--beliefs which recognize and attest that man is
+naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something
+essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the
+midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by
+such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free
+_régime_ a large share both of its responsibility and of its
+active duties: it is only when so animated that they give
+consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it
+stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe
+in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than
+once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty
+when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a
+tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral
+combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of
+the material forces which assail them.
+{l}
+Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free
+country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who
+profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all
+which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in
+favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete
+misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human
+society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove
+incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in
+tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man
+isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a
+falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the
+supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this
+is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated
+individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his
+silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon
+the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the
+falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of
+respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their
+opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of
+humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in
+such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.
+{li}
+To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to
+refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,
+moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,
+is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very
+impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society
+calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the
+intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and
+practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether
+moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to
+be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the
+people.
+
+{lii}
+
+I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in
+all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,
+it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on
+the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil
+Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable
+with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I
+have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I
+am now publishing.
+
+I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task
+to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day
+to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of
+which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,
+stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only
+here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two
+contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as
+well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups
+profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals
+and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and
+Disbelievers.
+{liii}
+No one of these groups really represents a dominant party
+in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and
+hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,
+vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,
+wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing
+clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of
+truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's
+thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused
+and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of
+thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to
+appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in
+reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a
+vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a
+field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and
+incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to
+bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French
+society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and
+under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here
+described it.
+{liv}
+Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful
+and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find
+everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes
+devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the
+most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in
+search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most
+different directions. Upon this population it is that we must
+act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive
+conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious
+instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are
+by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to
+transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must
+accommodate ourselves to the general character of this
+population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an
+adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence
+must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious
+to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should
+give in return its soul.
+{lv}
+It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is
+not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of
+Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should
+know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the
+society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they
+should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under
+their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under
+their blows.
+
+Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it
+prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such
+success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different
+epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did
+Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their
+times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so
+extraordinary an influence?
+{lvi}
+First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked
+was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also
+because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they
+were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different
+processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with
+the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that
+they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political
+transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it
+on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They
+more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,
+the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;
+still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one
+by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern
+literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having
+re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this
+is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against
+them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France
+felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their
+glory, because it believed in their sympathy.
+
+{lvii}
+
+Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are
+rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of
+their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with
+them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion
+and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church
+of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more
+liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father
+Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice
+of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already
+more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different
+origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same
+cause and to the same work.
+{lviii}
+At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,
+two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I
+have the honour to know, men very different in position and in
+ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a
+great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;
+both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,
+the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent
+in the present state of French society; both having the
+resolution and the ability required in order to present
+Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most
+proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur
+Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor
+at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his
+diocese, (Lent, 1868,) _A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of
+Christianity_. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th
+of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical
+Conference assembled at Nérac, _A Report as to the Actual
+Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches_.
+[Footnote 4]
+
+    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length
+    in the _Gazette de France_, on the 25th and 26th of
+    February, 1868.]
+
+    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the
+    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]
+
+{lix}
+
+I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially
+analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here
+because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each
+reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being
+prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony
+between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the
+present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far
+as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch
+is Christian.
+
+"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was
+contemporary with primitive man--a fact present in all ages, ever
+paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same
+degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind
+man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent
+of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the
+Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and
+upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet
+raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,
+constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His
+creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty
+lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses
+more or less unanimous.
+
+{lx}
+
+"Heathen nations--their history proves it--have preserved
+something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected
+with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of
+Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions
+which they received from their grandsire, and which are the
+common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions
+are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of
+fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East
+and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the
+multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and
+its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily
+distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of
+Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original
+fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality
+of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all
+these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the
+depths of the conscience of the people.
+{lxi}
+Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify
+in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be
+condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but
+for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.
+
+"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful
+work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious
+wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too
+much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and
+Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained
+Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political
+charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,
+breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism
+remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.
+
+{lxii}
+
+"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many
+generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner
+and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred
+and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and
+in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations--this fact, what
+is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that
+it is purely natural--the spontaneous production of our habits,
+the simple result of our instincts--and, so to say, an
+irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is
+divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly
+created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as
+a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common
+sense which tells us this.
+
+"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,
+as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely
+the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its
+own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it
+and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with
+a force which renews itself every day.
+{lxiii}
+It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious
+effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and
+nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to
+its effects a supernatural character. ... Supernatural means were
+necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in
+relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the
+constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of
+the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no
+longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions
+should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,
+infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary
+a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His
+envoys by extraordinary facts--facts of a superhuman power,
+miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of
+the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,
+intervening with supernatural _éclat_ to enable the mission
+to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and
+more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and
+their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their
+religious and predestined course.
+
+{lxiv}
+
+"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the
+highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies
+of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a
+prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with
+signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive
+ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,
+and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His
+character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,
+the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;
+finally, the survival and the development of His work through
+centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the
+direct intervention of God--sole possible means of finding a
+satisfactory explanation of such grand results."
+
+{lxv}
+
+The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas
+recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited--a
+development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to
+assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always
+faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no
+discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of
+ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class
+of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of
+Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of
+man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity
+in particular; considered as a grand fact--a fact universal and
+permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst
+the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the
+scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst
+Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and
+Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,
+by the same title, if not in the same degree;
+{lxvi}
+a fact at once human and divine--human by its accordance with
+man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of
+God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power
+reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of
+events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the
+accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus
+associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle
+of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of
+Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without
+any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage
+rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at
+the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority
+of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not
+justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented
+under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most
+proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,
+on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and
+pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian
+Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so
+many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?
+
+{lxvii}
+
+The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more
+vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop
+of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he
+traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and
+requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and
+describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated
+and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in
+search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to
+be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,
+he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly
+and without compromise.
+
+"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in
+insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds
+in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its
+prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the
+preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.
+{lxviii}
+Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not
+live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,
+they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow
+its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its
+aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are
+of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate
+and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in
+many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In
+France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which
+have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as
+preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every
+symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To
+neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of
+addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who
+neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the
+objections which we attribute to them.
+
+{lxix}
+
+"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is
+easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others--it is that
+of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery
+or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally
+even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons
+more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of
+the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is
+noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our
+generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of
+its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of
+Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant
+now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,
+whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is
+impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a
+fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of
+Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of
+incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is
+definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface
+God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an
+obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.
+
+{lxx}
+
+"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in
+these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt
+or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having
+for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery
+from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are
+combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,
+Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a
+personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of
+the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a
+God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten
+civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,
+and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long
+as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. ... Let nothing
+henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the
+human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God
+than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all
+things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'
+
+{lxxi}
+
+"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their
+weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is
+not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its
+lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and
+its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated
+at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical
+which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it
+is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in
+France, Germany, and Italy.
+
+"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical
+Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to
+destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former
+never will go so far as these.
+{lxxii}
+But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing
+hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it
+we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,
+stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when
+merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious
+life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,
+without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of
+destruction.
+
+"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have
+we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most
+painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,
+with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph
+attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,
+how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the
+Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are
+the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by
+which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in
+discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of
+general interest?
+{lxxiii}
+The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful
+to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul
+from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after
+the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have
+to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to
+souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?
+
+"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we
+are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees
+everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to
+note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting
+the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous
+aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas
+of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social
+application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The
+age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;
+it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the
+union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material
+happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.
+{lxxiv}
+Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,
+men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more
+than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their
+rights as individuals, and of _self-government_, and
+consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here
+assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious _points
+d'appui_ for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread
+for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.
+Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel
+leads to Liberty.
+
+"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought
+we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who
+demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question
+overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his
+weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate
+himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from
+him the cry of the prophet--'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot
+speak, for I am a child!'
+
+{lxxv}
+
+"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,
+much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of
+Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.
+Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the
+origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and
+more scientific than all that in these days men seek to
+substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the
+supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of
+Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of
+Religion itself.
+
+"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to
+establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and
+Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace
+Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not
+more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.
+{lxxvi}
+Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the
+materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian
+Conscience.
+
+"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her
+spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the
+progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make
+herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let
+her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must
+be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to
+everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize
+all his arms.
+
+"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our
+special mission in the special position in which God has placed
+us?"
+
+{lxxvii}
+
+Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of
+his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,
+M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the
+preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and
+evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to
+the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the
+general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of
+general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and
+urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.
+
+"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend
+Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that
+comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that
+comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear
+to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its
+most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with
+anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is
+necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we
+must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect
+fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.
+{lxxviii}
+Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to
+confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the
+contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a
+_point d'appui_ for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us
+strive, we also, to find these _points d'appui_, those
+keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be
+made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country
+that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark
+applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the
+educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as
+it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let
+us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its
+liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and
+demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign
+reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by
+science.
+{lxxix}
+The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human
+activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained
+in the principles of the Gospel."
+
+I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of
+the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two
+documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main
+and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,
+but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at
+leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,
+to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the
+one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.
+The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,
+or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging
+to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by
+each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw
+to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and
+are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.
+
+{lxxx}
+
+I think that they are right both in their hope and their
+endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons
+pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of
+religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain
+and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of
+religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern
+Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,
+France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being
+informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as
+well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement
+between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The
+profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not
+part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater
+development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the
+events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding
+upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,
+to which such subjects are all very strange.
+{lxxxi}
+The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that
+France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with
+religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and
+fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable
+grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,
+at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well
+entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long
+life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part
+in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer
+anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been
+essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made
+no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the
+world, but nothing attaches me to it.
+{lxxxii}
+Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my
+eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and
+the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with
+thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that
+eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:--
+
+  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.
+
+    Guizot.
+    Paris, _April_, 1868.
+
+{lxxxiii}
+
+                Contents.
+
+
+                                         Page
+
+Preface                                    v
+
+I.   -- Christianity and Liberty            1
+
+II.  -- Christianity and Morality          52
+
+III. -- Christianity and Science           93
+
+IV.  -- Christian Ignorance               128
+
+V.   -- Christian Faith                   153
+
+VI.  -- Christian Life                    190
+
+Appendix. -- Observations upon the Work
+             called "Ecce Homo"           213
+
+
+{lxxxiv}
+
+{1}
+
+      Meditations On Christianity
+
+               in its
+
+     Relation To The Actual State
+       Of Society And Opinion.
+
+
+
+           First Meditation.
+
+       Christianity And Liberty.
+
+
+The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days
+for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant
+in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object
+Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both
+simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and
+respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and
+ill-regulated impulse.
+{2}
+Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it
+develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,
+and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions
+have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time
+men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are
+discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they
+vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to
+exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion
+may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered
+upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from
+it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is
+condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it
+is bound to perform.
+
+But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our
+epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less
+important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of
+the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard
+Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest
+enemy.
+{3}
+In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so
+treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a
+multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in
+activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one
+time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian
+sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?
+Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of
+Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather
+true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both
+require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate
+and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century
+remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that
+other question is not solved.
+
+I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these--"What
+shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
+his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
+[Footnote 5]
+
+    [Footnote 5: Mark viii. 36, 37.]
+
+{4}
+
+"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the
+soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and
+body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach
+the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]
+
+    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]
+
+    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]
+
+The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the
+human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to
+save souls, all souls without exception,--souls of the powerful
+and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
+happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is
+the foundation of the Christian Religion.
+
+The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere
+hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual
+being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,
+who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual
+condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an
+object of present solicitude.
+{5}
+To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a
+product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What
+have they to do with the words of the Gospel--with the immense
+value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them
+as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself
+forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who
+speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated
+tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because
+they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual
+man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What
+constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every
+human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that
+he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially
+in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation
+which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up
+to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use
+which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature
+of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,
+that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime
+a destiny.
+{6}
+Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great
+efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem
+of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel
+recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself
+about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely
+rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and
+responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which
+Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in
+every command that she gives to humanity.
+
+Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,
+and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of
+man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis
+and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most
+daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a
+point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity
+of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.
+
+{7}
+
+Christianity does not confine itself to this;--after having laid
+down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical
+sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of
+resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the
+synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to
+speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John
+answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the
+sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+[Footnote 8]
+
+    [Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]
+
+Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to
+them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach
+in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than
+men." [Footnote 9]
+
+    [Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]
+
+The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of
+the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his
+faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the
+principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]
+
+    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]
+
+{8}
+
+The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,
+who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for
+dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he
+resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,
+"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to
+continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by
+much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.
+[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle
+of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.
+
+    [Footnote 11: Acts xiv. 19, 22.]
+
+It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that
+it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the
+principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and
+transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and
+eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms
+the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it
+equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of
+Authority.
+{9}
+I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made
+that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was
+permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar
+the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are
+God's," he established in principle the distinction between the
+religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.
+Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,
+between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful
+worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties
+which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.
+[Footnote 12]
+
+    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,
+    p. 278. London: 1864.]
+
+It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest
+and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization
+commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted
+in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have
+strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded
+with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the
+seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,
+history has confirmed the Gospel.
+
+{10}
+
+Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,
+Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,
+and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been
+able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity
+of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies
+required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at
+another liberty.
+
+Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to
+refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I
+remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that
+Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she
+was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from
+her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she
+alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls
+in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.
+{11}
+If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious
+establishments--Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism--have
+held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the
+world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,
+attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman
+Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism
+did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the
+enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the
+immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.
+Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated
+only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the
+sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of
+Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the
+soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it
+she awakened it.
+
+Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of
+Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have
+occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the
+Christian faith.
+{12}
+No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the
+work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,
+which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the
+purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the
+surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy
+atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part
+and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine
+it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats
+uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the
+excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not
+destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor
+make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work
+of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a
+Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,
+behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those
+stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only
+enables him to see them.
+{13}
+When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal
+errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared
+under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit
+without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or
+ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore
+what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from
+her that which she has not promised.
+
+Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch
+and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to
+Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present
+day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting
+Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount
+them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What
+are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,
+the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an
+obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?
+
+{14}
+
+It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,
+men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre
+colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a
+prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as
+deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of
+amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at
+another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our
+vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not
+of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require
+to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness
+which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which
+cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the
+attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,
+is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent
+evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but
+that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we
+make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.
+{15}
+The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and
+evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic
+sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil
+which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first
+to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it
+appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages
+has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at
+least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if
+we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it
+matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would
+not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor
+should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.
+Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and
+different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we
+have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we
+have ever forgotten.
+
+{16}
+
+And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain
+my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached
+its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance
+more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without
+numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape
+in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the
+selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of
+the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices
+of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political
+liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,
+the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the
+actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its
+tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in
+this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789
+was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant
+travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or
+is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had
+then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all
+mankind. Did she deceive herself?
+{17}
+Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or
+in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we
+progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which
+eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every
+respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;
+for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but
+utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.
+
+I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked
+than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of
+opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never
+hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they
+deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to
+pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have
+originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront
+many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no
+sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.
+{18}
+But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have
+been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon
+the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,
+and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both
+of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the
+world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,
+and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra
+of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive
+motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas
+as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789
+contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,
+truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and
+which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the
+travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to
+France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,
+and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a
+cause of decline.
+{19}
+Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,
+the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past
+centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of
+French society in which it would have bettered its condition by
+halting, or to which it should wish to return.
+
+I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our
+social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment
+of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is
+Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us
+in such a work?
+
+All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,
+whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or
+Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in
+deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for
+physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and
+effeminacy which they generate.
+
+{20}
+
+They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we
+consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even
+those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,
+in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his
+habitual language:--"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten
+o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."
+[Footnote 13]
+
+    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se
+    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une
+    chemise blanche."]
+
+There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be
+vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should
+be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether
+individuals or nations, is that they should not have their
+attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely
+their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they
+have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and
+Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the
+Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort
+or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is
+permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.
+{21}
+Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and
+sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating
+and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of
+more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a
+state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and
+disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can
+supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.
+Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich
+and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;
+she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she
+inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer
+hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be
+powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can
+never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive
+motive to action, even in that principle of interest which
+politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to
+be a panacea.
+{22}
+Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,
+has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other
+sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an
+Epicurean nor an Egotist.
+
+This is the first and the greatest of the services which
+Christianity can and does render in our days to every society
+which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.
+
+There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are
+dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without
+incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the
+other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever
+be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or
+measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it
+is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free
+country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of
+society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments
+and nations, to enable them to support that license which they
+cannot suppress.
+{23}
+Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the
+most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license
+for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity
+maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without
+humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the
+rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in
+fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which
+authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the
+most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority
+suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely
+to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,
+that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves
+with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,
+turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as
+such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and
+Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great
+mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to
+order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom
+licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,
+and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims
+and the arms of Liberty.
+{24}
+History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The
+nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has
+not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,--the
+only nations which, although they have on different occasions and
+by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and
+of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and
+politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of
+the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;
+these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;
+but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once
+come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their
+subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less
+rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.
+
+{25}
+
+It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it
+that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as
+individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it
+generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already
+more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and
+sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,
+as well as strength to recover lost ground.
+
+It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the
+friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary
+admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than
+any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no
+longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the
+encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and
+transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the
+normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and
+with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.
+{26}
+Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,
+has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the
+conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong
+enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously
+the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the
+Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and
+independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when
+Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power
+and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no
+distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a
+similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the
+Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail
+wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and
+indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the
+permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more
+or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which
+fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly
+modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the
+exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these
+days free institutions can be founded.
+
+{27}
+
+That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses
+and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with
+the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,
+that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of
+the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all
+other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which
+are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.
+Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every
+human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error
+press so very closely upon each other in this system, that
+Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is
+entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,
+nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to
+another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes
+to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to
+abrogate as it was to create.
+{28}
+The law paramount is the moral law,--the law laid down by God, to
+which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to
+submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is
+always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights
+of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of
+government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily
+forgets God--easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort
+of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,
+material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is
+incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with
+which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that
+the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only
+principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic
+of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two
+principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour
+and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.
+{29}
+A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning
+with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent
+admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and
+it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by
+Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a
+history, which does not come from man, but which, without
+offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,
+no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same
+time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic
+a society is, the more it is important that this double effect
+shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.
+
+I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The
+Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally
+against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how
+little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine
+to be good and salutary.
+{30}
+How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other
+respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have
+Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of
+the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty
+unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest
+nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state
+of opinions at the present day.
+
+As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst
+Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best
+results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,
+whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as
+the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly
+cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general
+religious community--between the spiritual and the lay members of
+the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by
+authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations
+which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving
+to the laity a share in the government of the Church.
+{31}
+The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time
+the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from
+their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but
+the relations between the two classes ceased to present the
+appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire
+subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and
+influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although
+remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to
+be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social
+institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one
+time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious
+society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of
+independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State
+and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their
+mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the
+two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have
+mutually recovered their independence;
+{32}
+elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all
+ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been
+abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his
+individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.
+But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental
+characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from
+the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves
+constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and
+man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is
+particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction
+between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious
+and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its
+right and become an active influence in religious society itself.
+
+{33}
+
+But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a
+persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much
+calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman
+Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and
+passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed
+with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their
+religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted
+therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to
+their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These
+are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof
+of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the
+holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.
+Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that
+this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will
+towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects
+for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that
+such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present
+constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to
+State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be
+injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to
+individuals.
+{34}
+From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most
+sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as
+Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst
+of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed
+and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in
+order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of
+humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to
+its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in
+all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;
+they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and
+tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;
+they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they
+rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the
+conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the
+guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and
+ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy
+effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate
+result of which has been so glorious.
+
+{35}
+
+The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and
+useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which
+characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its
+Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,
+that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and
+religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and
+all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome
+and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?
+For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the
+aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and
+political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,
+onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced
+situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more
+menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than
+our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power
+in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in
+principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable
+with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to
+condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of
+modern civilization.
+{36}
+In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall
+here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as
+the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction
+that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and
+dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as
+well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without
+abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally
+essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the
+moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions
+also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,
+that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not
+have accepted and accomplished this work of
+conciliation--conciliation real and profound--the friends of
+Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and
+in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,
+those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.
+{37}
+But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance
+than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which
+utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,
+nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of
+events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and
+not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many
+probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the
+case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,
+many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward
+impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the
+conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less
+a certainty.
+
+This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.
+There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of
+different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle
+between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often
+committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly
+profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own
+defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.
+{38}
+The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,
+the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,
+the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the
+great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by
+the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time
+consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal
+regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and
+signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its
+consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the
+question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation
+between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the
+attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a
+decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of
+1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh
+vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.
+{39}
+When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism
+treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from
+the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church
+of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all
+that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,
+and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience
+and resignation. She is right.
+
+One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this
+stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,
+Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of
+fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody
+persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,
+bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,
+once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their
+cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.
+{40}
+The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person
+of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive
+but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor
+the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.
+And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what
+activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,
+Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,
+upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society
+had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of
+Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced
+on its road and towards its object.
+
+But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of
+Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and
+compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without
+doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she
+lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of
+reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is
+more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it
+and oppose it.
+{41}
+This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman
+Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that
+group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which
+continues to play so active a part in struggling for the
+Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:
+these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its
+intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their
+views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux
+Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the
+greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the
+more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the
+disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and
+humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our
+provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have
+not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one
+might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving
+the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the
+people;
+{42}
+they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the
+conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an
+influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its
+sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost
+without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of
+their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal
+tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman
+Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular
+militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of
+enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case
+by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the
+Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make
+their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its
+laws, and of its liberties.
+
+I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I
+observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to
+French institutions,--for I speak only of France,--the essential
+consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the
+relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.
+
+{43}
+
+I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in
+France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past
+are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof
+from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights
+of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil
+society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts
+and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to
+the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from
+civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this
+respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these
+are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for
+religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to
+stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman
+Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of
+modern society, who most dispute about the general question of
+liberty.
+
+{44}
+
+The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this
+question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in
+one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,
+on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from
+religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty
+in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy
+in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other
+solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and
+their mutual independence.
+
+That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State
+to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I
+well understand.
+
+She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of
+strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her
+stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves
+religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a
+fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially
+democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under
+the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the
+influence of the religious authorities.
+{45}
+This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental
+principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is
+impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded
+by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.
+But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance
+of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church
+would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious
+and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large
+measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the
+religious society and of the civil society which the Church and
+the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those
+who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective
+principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on
+in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the
+good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself
+is soon compromised.
+{46}
+The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of
+Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of
+Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because
+there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental
+institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon
+some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant
+guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and
+were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from
+which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed
+on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices
+for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,
+of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in
+Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is
+occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy
+and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church
+with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.
+{47}
+In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,
+when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for
+any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever
+indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be
+serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting
+parties should recognise and accept in each other, without
+equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each
+really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an
+alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of
+the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring
+ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,
+obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret
+warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending
+any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust
+in it.
+{48}
+As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without
+endangering her habits, at least without endangering her
+essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace
+with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual
+civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how
+to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give
+way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a
+source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she
+would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of
+separation and complete independence.
+
+As for the State, the system which separates the two societies
+would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it
+would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of
+many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle
+of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance
+which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such
+principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce
+Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous
+bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from
+every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy
+themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their
+thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and
+its affairs.
+{49}
+Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at
+the present day, a moral influence of great value from an
+alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one
+condition which is not only especially important in our days, but
+of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of
+manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the
+alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference
+in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the
+church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious
+discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving
+their indirect support to the state government, and which can
+purge their support of all impure motives.
+{50}
+The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain
+degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their
+respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part
+of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at
+the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the
+master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor
+priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and
+their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone
+give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,
+if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.
+
+Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the
+facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,
+Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be
+free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.
+Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave
+feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and
+distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles
+essential to civil society and religious society, of any
+compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the
+faults which the two institutions have committed towards each
+other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.
+{51}
+Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have
+become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,
+something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty
+neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their
+legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations
+to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,
+whether allied with or independent of the Church.
+
+{52}
+
+           Second Meditation.
+
+       Christianity And Morality.
+
+
+Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different
+characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously
+minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves
+Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from
+Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea
+of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.
+Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour
+to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the
+abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its
+authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we
+find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the
+other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either
+natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days
+proclaimed and propagated with ardour.
+
+{53}
+
+I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and
+upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.
+In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest
+intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.
+Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced
+that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested
+or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;
+they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth
+alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and
+which some now strive to accredit.
+
+The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the
+scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians
+are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of
+its efficacy.
+{54}
+A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate
+the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to
+it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate
+it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is
+here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent
+Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and
+to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being
+wrecked.
+
+The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who
+flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality
+standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,--and they who
+believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from
+religion,--err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential
+facts of human nature and of human society.
+
+Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete
+observation of these facts. I have already stated in these
+Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality
+from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.
+{55}
+At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,
+and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I
+affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary
+union between morality and religion.
+
+A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the
+theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there
+is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested
+motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and
+treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.
+
+I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they
+forget that it _has_ been, and still _is_, strongly
+contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.
+Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the
+satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate
+aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,
+not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common
+welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could
+perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy
+of human sentiments.
+{56}
+The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the
+recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the
+most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,
+with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to
+other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding
+fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than
+in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive
+themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of
+religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,
+and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive
+themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a
+prey to the disputes of man.
+
+I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders
+of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it
+is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it
+contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential
+elements.
+
+{57}
+
+These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral
+good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;
+the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and
+philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the
+natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human
+morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man
+is a moral being.
+
+I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I
+do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard
+or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any
+one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent
+morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and
+myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the
+true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its
+signification, and accept its results.
+
+{58}
+
+It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not
+satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to
+himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their
+origin and object, their import and bearing.
+
+In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from
+which science sets out; it is only after having well observed
+facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the
+questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which
+the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of
+human morality, such as I have just described it in its three
+constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot
+fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral
+law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the
+ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or
+violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes
+of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or
+elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man
+as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of
+man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three
+constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine
+rightly its source and bearing.
+
+{59}
+
+Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring
+from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that
+he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.
+Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they
+depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,
+or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the
+feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them
+accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.
+
+But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral
+law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes
+its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their
+own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in
+refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may
+attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically
+possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another
+law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever
+they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,
+they bow before it as before something which does not emanate
+from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.
+
+{60}
+
+The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the
+world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the
+characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the
+results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the
+forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations
+or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it
+addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of
+whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to
+crush him, still man would be more noble than that which
+destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the
+advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows
+nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,
+sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily--that he chooses
+to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.
+
+{61}
+
+What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called
+Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command
+man's Liberty to respect it?
+
+Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority
+solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is
+said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his
+right that no human being shall attack his independence or his
+dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and
+therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual
+right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but
+the right which it is recognised that another possesses."
+[Footnote 14]
+
+    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,
+    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]
+
+{62}
+
+There is here a profound mistake, and a strange forgetfulness.
+
+Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,
+does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises
+himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and
+admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which
+arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have
+done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest
+apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence
+and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to
+attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for
+himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental
+principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there
+is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the
+right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to
+it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has
+another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on
+the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the
+paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the
+moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.
+
+{63}
+
+Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of
+the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to
+attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral
+law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and
+imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love
+them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love
+those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to
+you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."
+"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing
+again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
+children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and
+to the evil." [Footnote 15]
+
+    [Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]
+
+"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of
+the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If
+we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other
+respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point
+with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.
+
+{64}
+
+It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion
+of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of
+those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is
+the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on
+the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law
+to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet
+melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a
+person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a
+modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light
+as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea
+of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a
+moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not
+a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the
+moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power
+attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the
+relations of men with one another.
+{65}
+Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there
+would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does
+not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to
+govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice
+cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,
+as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed
+to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as
+essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the
+social bond;--the means of peace and of Union amongst
+mankind;--the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and
+defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every
+man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep
+others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him
+to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and
+respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the
+man who has a right has absolutely nothing.
+{66}
+Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of
+physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ
+the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which
+triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify
+the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made
+his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis
+of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of
+right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the
+stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of
+duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of
+defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which
+serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society
+upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away
+the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]
+
+    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir
+    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in
+    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur
+    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,
+    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"
+    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]
+
+{67}
+
+This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in
+considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the
+independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the
+theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral
+elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,
+the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,
+sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the
+independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely
+strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of
+man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their
+duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for
+and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,
+and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to
+honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's
+existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which
+the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense
+which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:
+their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.
+
+{68}
+
+I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the
+principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from
+man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man
+only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and
+mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free
+and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he
+is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his
+own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not
+make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even
+whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot
+withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his
+future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is
+essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its
+subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.
+
+{69}
+
+Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working
+its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without
+further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When
+the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and
+acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his
+act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,
+for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not
+merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they
+find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced
+to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the
+laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal
+punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of
+remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the
+proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is
+that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the
+hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove
+that it may be always reawakened.
+{70}
+Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.
+Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that
+to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which
+feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.
+
+As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an
+idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made
+of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,
+ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of
+merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common
+sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the
+accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.
+It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and
+most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the
+political organisation of society, and in the problems which
+concern the eternal future.
+{71}
+However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or
+delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of
+a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the
+responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its
+complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and
+equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.
+
+Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have
+scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's
+nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have
+considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely
+apart from every other element and every other consideration.
+Those moral facts are briefly as follows:--
+
+  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.
+
+  The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.
+
+  Moral Liberty.
+
+  Moral Responsibility.
+
+  Moral merit and demerit.
+
+{72}
+
+These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the
+proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these
+truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are
+they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,
+or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they
+self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which
+form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot
+elude this question.
+
+I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;
+that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not
+one of those laws of fate by which the material world is
+governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free
+world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as
+law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.
+Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man--upon man
+of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without
+enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life
+is passed?
+{73}
+Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law
+emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense
+which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,
+Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order
+reigning in it:--
+
+  "Je ne puis songer
+  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."
+
+  I cannot think
+  This clock exists and never had a maker.
+
+In the moral world we have to do with something far different
+from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine
+constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is
+to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free
+agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to
+accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the
+supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the
+expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both
+contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant
+found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is
+nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human
+Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most
+clearly, most undeniably.
+
+{74}
+
+Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose
+it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river
+without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free
+agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete
+and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and
+loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law
+reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility
+reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human
+invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral
+responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and
+just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is
+contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral
+responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that
+is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and
+impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in
+a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to
+establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.
+
+{75}
+
+Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human
+nature--that is, the distinction between moral good and moral
+evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and
+demerit,--are necessarily and intimately connected with the
+truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God
+moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and
+essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a
+thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of
+man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble
+to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that
+ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is
+reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its
+authority.
+
+Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and
+described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable
+from Religion.
+
+{76}
+
+What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the
+heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are
+distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to
+each other in the unity of the human being?
+
+The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the
+study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms
+Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most
+remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant
+struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle
+what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent
+an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and
+what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected
+in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by
+the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to
+all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the
+moral law, the moral judgment comes.
+{77}
+"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero
+prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up
+unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just
+providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of
+the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was
+the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman
+Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very
+Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after
+having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice
+of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on
+the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on
+account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had
+governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by
+those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is
+incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in
+this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and
+Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,
+sometimes manifests itself there with _éclat_, and sometimes
+remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre
+mysteries.
+{78}
+Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall
+truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now
+occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore
+order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;
+in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still
+mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is
+intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as
+little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in
+that of the individual man.
+
+In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far
+from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they
+progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days
+exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to
+events of the most contradictory character: everything in the
+world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts
+has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.
+{79}
+Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more
+than feeble convictions--dim hopes? On the other side, in the
+midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power
+over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and
+confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the
+material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and
+paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have
+plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human
+conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in
+our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;
+intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's
+soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
+
+{80}
+
+Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and
+indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have
+limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the
+advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I
+have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,
+natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of
+man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the
+threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general
+that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which
+it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his
+unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity
+alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and
+security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is
+not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic
+value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human
+soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect
+harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already
+tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful
+expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the
+moral being.
+
+{81}
+
+The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is
+the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral
+ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been
+contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour
+it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure
+their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,
+Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is
+singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most
+illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,
+understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and
+incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear
+light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to
+their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for
+conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they
+taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they
+founded schools or sects.
+{82}
+The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a
+philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and
+instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around
+him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain
+special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of
+mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of
+discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to
+the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the
+moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his
+disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,
+and then to all men:--"Save your soul, for what would it profit a
+man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and
+preach to all nations."
+
+What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so
+ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so
+universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?
+
+{83}
+
+And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has
+been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward
+movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly
+arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,
+it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of
+Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and
+the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen
+centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and
+evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that
+Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to
+fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same
+task, and promises herself fresh success.
+
+Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me
+at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the
+Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which
+she entertains in the midst of her trials.
+
+{84}
+
+Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,
+cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them
+proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are
+solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,
+regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human
+actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a
+careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them
+to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both
+amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the
+regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how
+serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that
+sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the
+nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same
+time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the
+same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man
+the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his
+soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates
+it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it
+with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared
+for every sacrifice.
+{85}
+Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine
+of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin
+without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the
+sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so
+well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely
+and so austerely?
+
+Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with
+man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its
+rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment
+of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and
+thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he
+opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a
+hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness
+inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy
+the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to
+be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a
+recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the
+equitable benevolence of God.
+{86}
+The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man
+during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store
+for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom
+of God" and "the promises of eternal life."
+
+Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he
+keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,
+his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to
+fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the
+world, without any _dénouement_. He has a prospect, and a
+futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and
+superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain
+this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and
+respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality
+with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole
+view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny
+of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which
+weigh upon the thought and life of man!
+
+{87}
+
+I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the
+peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However
+high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely
+less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is
+purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours
+produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical
+work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of
+its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,
+the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from
+which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to
+induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine
+law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it
+is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its
+sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,
+we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon
+which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it
+undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to
+procure the salvation of man by his reformation.
+
+{88}
+
+When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these
+Meditations--the subject of which is the actual state of the
+Christian Religion--I essayed to characterise therein the
+fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which
+combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my
+companion in life, and my _confrère_ at the Institute, M.
+Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I
+maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,
+he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:--
+
+  "My dear Friend,
+
+  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I
+  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The
+  little difference between our opinions, which you have not
+  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the
+  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which
+  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the
+  nature of religion.
+{89}
+  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still
+  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an
+  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more
+  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself
+  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other
+  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from
+  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets
+  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by
+  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of
+  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,
+  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them
+  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the
+  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in
+  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of
+  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy
+  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must
+  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,
+  grandeur, and peace.
+
+{90}
+
+  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,
+  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our
+  old and sincere friendship."
+
+I replied to him on the 13th of June:--
+
+  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our
+  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere
+  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,
+  because, independently of our particular and petty
+  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a
+  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that
+  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor
+  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their
+  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their
+  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.
+{91}
+  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,
+  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.
+  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin
+  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of
+  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which
+  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God
+  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to
+  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of
+  his free will.
+
+  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions
+  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."
+
+I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at
+Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other
+afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed
+upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence
+we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole
+question.
+{92}
+It is this--What are the points of resemblance, and what of
+difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity
+and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the
+reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,
+we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their
+nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,
+and the character of their mission.
+
+{93}
+
+           Third Meditation.
+
+        Christianity And Science.
+
+
+It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which
+Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account
+of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely
+inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that
+divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,
+and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man
+without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which
+Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make
+these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are
+possessed. ... They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."
+[Footnote 18]
+
+    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]
+
+    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,
+    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.
+    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]
+
+{94}
+
+The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a
+different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine
+inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work
+directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this
+themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly
+implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter
+and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it
+positively. [Footnote 19]
+
+    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the
+    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"
+    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and
+    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only
+    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to
+    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his
+    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]
+
+This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of
+the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an
+acceptation as in later times.
+{95}
+In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the
+school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration
+of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,
+strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of
+inspiration, and to explain one by the other--"It is not by any
+effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,
+"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so
+divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the
+saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;
+pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the
+divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself
+from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the
+musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us
+the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,
+"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the
+other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of
+individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed
+aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing
+them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute
+the breath which makes it discourse its music."
+
+{96}
+
+Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of
+the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as
+to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence
+proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the
+formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But
+even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,
+great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and
+St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it
+was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they
+distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of
+God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms
+in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking
+of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken
+of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to
+speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.
+{97}
+Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. ... When we meet
+with such diversity of expressions--although not in themselves
+contradictory--used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the
+words of each, only the intent with which the words are
+pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of
+truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the
+very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else
+which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."
+
+It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this
+explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine
+inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the
+fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.
+
+I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of
+darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of
+uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the
+invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;
+that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle
+Age.
+
+{98}
+
+I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch
+of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned
+upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;
+for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been
+fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet
+destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the
+world.
+
+Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and
+events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of
+the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of
+Christian societies, I find that this question had received two
+solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its
+representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the
+Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The
+Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of
+the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;
+surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious
+reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these
+books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and
+canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they
+are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the
+ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]
+
+    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the
+    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10--13. Paris, 1686.]
+
+{99}
+
+The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they
+began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts
+and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and
+complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,
+narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the
+old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's
+dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.
+
+{100}
+
+The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church
+of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the
+sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly
+respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic
+sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the
+complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute
+infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make
+this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters
+of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of
+God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which
+they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we
+repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the
+two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]
+
+    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.
+    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]
+
+"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and
+hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of
+humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their
+action and their force, you err. ... God does everything by
+command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air
+with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to
+will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]
+
+    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.
+    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres
+    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]
+
+{101}
+
+The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the
+nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of
+these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of
+Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the
+Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the
+Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible
+authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,
+found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the
+movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the
+infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the
+present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new
+dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their
+ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,
+have pushed the two doctrines,--the former of ecclesiastical
+authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,--to their
+extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right
+and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.
+{102}
+I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines
+referred to,--they severally infringe, the one the rights of
+religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both
+cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they
+have, in these respects, severally ill understood.
+
+I have already expressed my views upon this subject. [Footnote
+23]
+
+    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.
+    145-146. London, 1864.]
+
+Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in
+the Scriptures is divinely inspired--the words as well as the
+ideas, all the words used upon all subjects--the material of
+language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this
+assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound
+misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred
+books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in
+grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give
+instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.
+{103}
+It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men
+towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of
+conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.
+It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,
+that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."
+
+I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over
+again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole
+object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.
+The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the
+Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine
+truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in
+intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and
+with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,
+in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the
+midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the
+unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,
+Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and
+of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of
+curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and
+perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.
+{104}
+What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their
+points of connection and their contests,--God watching over and
+acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,
+God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the
+expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each
+acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man
+after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,
+nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating
+man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he
+enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from
+heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious
+and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a
+free agent.
+{105}
+At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous
+action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his
+passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as
+he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the
+good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.
+This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the
+relations of Man with God.
+
+What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful
+connection exists, in this history, between those whom--how shall
+I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not
+appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so
+untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the
+plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,
+invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to
+us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no
+historical narrative or document, does man show himself more
+violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to
+ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst
+the Hebrews.
+{106}
+Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between
+the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and
+the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from
+God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,
+and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly
+violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in
+his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much
+from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not
+change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a
+witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his
+errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily
+before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to
+interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is
+ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and
+labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts
+and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the
+only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.
+
+{107}
+
+In what do those relations consist? By what results does this
+continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this
+incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and
+commands, religious and moral--God proposes these to man; he
+enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands
+nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he
+commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's
+speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his
+prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.
+Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of
+possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human
+sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people
+whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance
+and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,
+in the midst of which they are living.
+{108}
+When they are made the medium for the religious and moral
+precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer
+mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of
+divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it
+to all around them.
+
+I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I
+regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,--the
+simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human
+element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its
+imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his
+religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere
+the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points
+of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his
+barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider
+some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,
+which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.
+
+{109}
+
+I open the book of Genesis and read:--
+
+  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
+  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here
+  I am.
+
+  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
+  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
+  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
+  will tell thee of.
+
+  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,
+  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and
+  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went
+  unto the place of which God had told him.
+
+  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the
+  place afar off.
+
+  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the
+  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come
+  again to you.
+
+  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it
+  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a
+  knife: and they went both of them together.
+
+  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
+  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire
+  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?
+
+  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a
+  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.
+{110}
+  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and
+  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and
+  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
+
+  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
+  slay his son.
+
+  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and
+  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.
+
+  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
+  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,
+  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
+
+  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind
+  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went
+  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in
+  the stead of his son."
+
+A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his
+mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is
+an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean
+of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the
+Biblical truths to which I am referring.
+
+{111}
+
+"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of
+religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong
+tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest
+feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes
+suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and
+with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to
+propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by
+surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the
+source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct
+that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,
+or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.
+On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these
+two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of
+evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness
+in the life of Abraham. ...
+{112}
+The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the
+son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.
+The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than
+sacrifice,--that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest
+offering that God can receive. ... We have a proverb which tells
+us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]
+
+    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.
+    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,
+    1867.]
+
+Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in
+the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been
+forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and
+the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the
+hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from
+the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law
+and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.
+
+The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full
+concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is
+in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more
+than he points out.
+{113}
+This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which
+he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the
+Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but
+Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such
+sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and
+manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even
+of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he
+pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is
+beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine
+command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac
+is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of
+course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition
+of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he
+believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.
+
+    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;
+    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively
+    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.
+    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]
+
+{114}
+
+It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,
+in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental
+characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,
+although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the
+divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and
+word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my
+conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in
+the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,
+which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement
+of progress.
+
+I say progress,--progress immense, infinitely grander than man's
+imagination could ever have conceived,--and at the same time the
+character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is
+no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the
+continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world
+and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the
+New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to
+recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer
+directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.
+{115}
+It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,
+and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under
+a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,
+intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of
+suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the
+victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,
+God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.
+Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He
+manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by
+natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!
+what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of
+His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself
+upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,
+separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw
+it from the contagion of idolatry;--but now it is for the whole
+world, for all nations, for future as well as for living
+generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the
+barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the
+God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over
+the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His
+servants to extend His empire.
+
+{116}
+
+He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to
+spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate
+from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.
+Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,
+although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human
+errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the
+law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors
+with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature
+of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,
+and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.
+He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and
+brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and
+perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will
+not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very
+texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their
+most essential precepts.
+
+{117}
+
+I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
+foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for
+stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this _lex talionis_.
+"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
+neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
+enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
+you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute
+you." [Footnote 27]
+
+    [Footnote 26: Exodus xxi. 24, 25.]
+
+    [Footnote 27: Matthew v. 43, 44.]
+
+It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a
+wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour
+in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then
+let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,
+and send her out of his house." [Footnote 28]
+
+    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]
+
+{118}
+
+I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and
+asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? ... And
+he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And
+they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to
+put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the
+hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the
+beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this
+cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his
+wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more
+twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,
+let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]
+
+    [Footnote 29: Mark x. 2-9;  Matthew xix. 3-9.]
+
+The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be
+found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall
+both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the
+woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]
+
+    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]
+
+{119}
+
+Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the
+scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;
+and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,
+Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now
+Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but
+what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might
+have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger
+wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they
+continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,
+He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at
+her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they
+which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
+one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
+Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When
+Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said
+unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man
+condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
+Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]
+
+    [Footnote 31: John viii. 3-11.]
+
+{120}
+
+The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of
+rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain
+external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration
+and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and
+Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the
+acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a
+lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;
+and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of
+Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and
+ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
+... Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, ... the hour cometh,
+and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in
+spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
+God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in
+spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]
+
+    [Footnote 32: John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.]
+
+{121}
+
+Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and
+to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is
+about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man
+had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;
+he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity
+and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious
+and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the
+religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and
+extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself
+with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;
+political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all
+in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either
+social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make
+neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions
+advanced, he sets them aside;
+{122}
+"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the
+things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and
+earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and
+prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]
+
+    [Footnote 33: Matthew xxii. 21; xi. 25.]
+
+Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human
+being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every
+man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every
+human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole
+idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that
+when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary
+consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
+righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
+[Footnote 34]
+
+    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]
+
+{123}
+
+I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its
+different and special objects,--whether astronomy, geology,
+geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,--is as
+foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred
+Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man
+left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,
+assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious
+exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,
+then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts
+declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to
+facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no
+disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine
+torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the
+language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak
+according to the measure of their knowledge or of their
+ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order
+to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that
+men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.
+{124}
+In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,
+and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,
+aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to
+employ a similar language,--a language comprehended and received
+by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their
+inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters
+purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the
+mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of
+science, but according to their appearances, and so men
+comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear
+them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of
+ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.
+What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the
+person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his
+missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which
+turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that
+it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its
+circumference?
+{125}
+What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the
+language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific
+imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that
+language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or
+moral law of humanity?
+
+No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater
+admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and
+it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of
+man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no
+sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,
+to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of
+publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely
+human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is
+essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in
+need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of
+God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the
+religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his
+life, and to decide his lot in eternity.
+{126}
+It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of
+all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated
+philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the
+most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,
+thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from
+being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. ...
+After death the reason,--just ideas survive; all the rest
+perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even
+from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in
+God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them
+only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble
+souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made
+up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish
+almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple
+accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul
+of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely
+troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the
+consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really
+are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of
+soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]
+
+    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation
+    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]
+
+{127}
+
+I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought
+showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the
+favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour
+at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not
+believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is
+declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good
+their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.
+
+{128}
+
+           Fourth Meditation.
+
+          Christian Ignorance.
+
+
+When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have
+either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the
+intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that
+it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,
+to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any
+kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind
+limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there
+a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the
+objects are different to which it is applied? These are
+questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words
+"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to
+offer what appears to me to be the right solution.
+
+{129}
+
+I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or
+systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to
+make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these
+sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,
+Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.
+I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these
+systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to
+undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all
+philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special
+questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between
+Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus
+only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to
+the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,
+their bearing and their limitation.
+
+{130}
+
+I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the
+first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,
+Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the
+distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,
+Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology
+is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great
+philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which
+Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more
+eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak
+more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of
+Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible
+to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or
+non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for
+which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]
+
+    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.
+    By M. Littré, p. 519.]
+
+That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,
+Ontology, and Theology are not--cannot be--sciences.
+{131}
+As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,
+and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of
+Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three
+schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them
+the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term
+"Christian Ignorance."
+
+It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and
+with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this
+question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which
+they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as
+Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of
+the four sciences--Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and
+Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there
+to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there
+discovered.
+
+When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is
+indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more
+so, than Spiritualism itself.
+{132}
+It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all
+Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal
+in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other
+questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and
+Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between
+Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between
+Rationalistic science and Christian science.
+
+Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of
+Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it
+admits that these different sciences owe their birth and
+development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men
+and of things, and have for their object the solution of the
+questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once
+admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology
+alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of
+Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which
+the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to
+say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for
+human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source
+other than human reason.
+{133}
+Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and
+other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts
+supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it
+recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are
+bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand
+that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human
+mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the
+history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth
+of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have
+testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as
+well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact
+proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,
+the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical
+Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which
+Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data
+and the legitimate bases of science.
+
+{134}
+
+I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and
+to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to
+the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human
+experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no
+intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great
+question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with
+respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall
+return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has
+not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it
+demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas--facts,
+rather--absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic
+opponents of the supernatural.
+
+    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,
+    1864.]
+
+Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal
+causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and
+distinctive characteristic of man.
+{135}
+It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself
+above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things
+determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it
+in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any
+general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such
+facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a
+machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to
+drive man back to the condition of that nature which is
+substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish
+at one blow human morality and human liberty.
+
+The blow strikes still higher--it would abolish God. God, who
+created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his
+creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the
+daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that
+human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies
+to the source from which it emanates.
+{136}
+By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the
+condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble
+of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;
+that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of
+Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical
+reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,
+nothing more than Atheism.
+
+The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this
+consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being
+disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the
+most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from
+entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be
+finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not
+assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical
+consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident
+in the moral and social condition of humanity.
+
+{137}
+
+There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of
+the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that
+the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and
+permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential
+laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings
+whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject
+absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of
+necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in
+harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly
+perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If
+the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will
+venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even
+there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that
+the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small
+Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every
+place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in
+the midst of space and of time?
+
+{138}
+
+Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it
+admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe--an unknown
+incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and
+admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.
+de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime
+flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing
+in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows
+how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the
+fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches
+us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the
+discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in
+the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest
+and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in
+the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to
+these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality
+of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely
+minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the
+reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects
+than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it
+discovers.
+{139}
+What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the
+worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no
+more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that
+all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those
+inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same
+conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our
+science becomes very modest when set side by side with our
+ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,
+however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may
+be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is
+either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing
+this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,
+Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which
+outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.
+
+{140}
+
+Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity
+has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the
+reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one
+side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life
+of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life
+of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,
+a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the
+other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and
+with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of
+the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible
+laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places
+itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the
+spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the
+extent.
+
+{141}
+
+It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another
+adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by
+asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts
+and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,
+let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I
+address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by
+the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before
+speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,
+I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is
+here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion
+in the great struggle in which it is engaged.
+
+The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an
+uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.
+Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these
+documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the
+facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the
+less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a
+poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion
+of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of
+the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius
+were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral
+precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes
+and subjects.
+{142}
+I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human
+imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books
+which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time
+incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential
+characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its
+latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the
+Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing
+centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil
+society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another
+and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a
+religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have
+been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of
+God upon the destinies of Mankind.
+
+{143}
+
+In proportion to the vigour with which these events have
+developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed
+to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its
+peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.
+
+What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the
+means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays
+to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he
+believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his
+thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to
+attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the
+Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,
+he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,
+cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does
+Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,
+to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very
+presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of
+God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow
+the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him
+imperfectly,--where he attempts to carry the torch of human
+science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?
+
+{144}
+
+I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two
+examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.
+
+The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and
+Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly
+repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive
+documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that
+"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the
+Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all
+theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the
+divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian
+religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never
+have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation
+was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author."
+
+    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of
+    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]
+
+{145}
+
+But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this
+sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought
+to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the
+human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such
+union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's
+personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,
+which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the
+divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the
+councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and
+agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.
+
+Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of
+divine History.
+
+The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as
+unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the
+Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of
+Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.
+{146}
+The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its
+place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very
+beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves
+to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to
+determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the
+religions truth; in other words, to transform history into
+science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the
+authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,
+rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of
+the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,
+and Holy Ghost.
+
+I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the
+doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either
+originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their
+essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to
+human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less
+legitimate, of Religion.
+
+{147}
+
+When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of
+Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do
+not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The
+scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,
+always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of
+the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves
+to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and
+thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause
+of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral
+influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and
+authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have
+been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than
+efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their
+mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The
+Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this
+was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;
+forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they
+have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by
+explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an
+intermixture of man's work.
+{148}
+Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same
+time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can
+recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man
+to make of them a science.
+
+Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his
+explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:
+"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,
+or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add
+to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity
+and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this
+is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."
+[Footnote 39]
+
+    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.
+    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]
+
+Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian
+ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to
+take refuge.
+
+{149}
+
+It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are
+unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a
+serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and
+what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to
+believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of
+man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in
+religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only
+their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own
+work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most
+logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this
+respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly
+be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian
+ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to
+moderation and charity than Theological science.
+
+But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and
+efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human
+science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the
+same error and the same peril.
+{150}
+The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God
+to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and
+inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and
+mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon
+certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations
+of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the
+hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and
+the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter
+themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the
+solution of such questions is hidden.
+
+I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious
+impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets
+of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling
+curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?
+Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself
+under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be
+possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and
+powerless?
+{151}
+There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and
+under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost
+recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding
+from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to
+them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who
+of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of
+a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,
+conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,
+in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of
+human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event
+brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to
+which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine
+Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt
+the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve
+problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to
+rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine
+author.
+{152}
+But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No
+doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by
+his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to
+our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and
+his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their
+effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general
+problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions
+touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of
+Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into
+ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at
+limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific
+vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to
+overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon
+man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,
+"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his
+charity, and his liberty.
+
+{153}
+
+           Fifth Meditation.
+
+           Christian Faith.
+
+
+Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé
+Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the
+Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue
+Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is
+called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it
+expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.
+Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in
+its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to
+my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages
+which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the
+imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to
+regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a
+starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I
+now give to the press.
+
+{154}
+
+By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in
+facts or dogmas of a special nature--in facts or dogmas of
+religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in
+speaking of _the faith_ the term is used alone and
+absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its
+fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from
+which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the
+following are met with:--"I have full _faith_ in your words;
+this man has _faith_ in himself--in his strength--in his
+fortune, &c." This employment of the word _faith_ in secular
+matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it
+is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never
+been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had
+also other significations attached to it.
+
+{155}
+
+It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular
+opinion, 1st, that the word _faith_ designates a certain
+internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a
+certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of
+the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,
+nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied
+to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its
+special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the
+variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are
+taking place every day?
+
+Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a
+religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy
+of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing
+in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction
+of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called
+_Faith_; a name which neither masters and disciples will
+repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.
+{156}
+Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the
+truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the
+conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been
+generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;
+that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name
+of _Faith_, is its energy, is the empire which that energy
+gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith
+of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth
+century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of
+Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.
+
+The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it
+was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by
+an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of
+persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened
+reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral
+affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to
+feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave
+the name of _Faith_ to the result of their action, just as
+they had done so to the result of the process essentially
+intellectual of which I was before speaking.
+{157}
+Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by
+reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is
+the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.
+
+Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always
+sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has
+been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to
+practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach
+ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a
+meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind
+was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to
+certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it
+had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission
+of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to
+govern man's life and to regulate his thought.
+
+{158}
+
+Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated
+in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the
+intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation
+of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that
+it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by
+any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention
+and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became
+thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive
+character.
+
+The word _faith_ has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,
+a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human
+intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the
+sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often
+even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's
+long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to
+command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural
+means,--by divine grace.
+
+{159}
+
+What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may
+emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What
+is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider
+it independently of its origin and of its object?
+
+Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it
+innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,
+but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and
+establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being
+aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or
+volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and
+the influence of that external world in the midst of which his
+life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of
+laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary
+study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all
+his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering
+it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there
+taking place--to render an account thereof to himself, and thus
+to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge
+which he did not before possess, although the facts which form
+its object nevertheless existed as facts external--and which he
+might see by his eyes,--or as facts which were taking place
+within him.
+
+{160}
+
+Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of
+_faith_?
+
+It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to
+that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:
+such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man
+in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he
+dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,
+unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it
+the characteristics of _faith?_
+
+Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time
+others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost
+unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and
+spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without
+which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct
+without having given it any intimate and personal assent.
+{161}
+It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,
+admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to
+say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him
+to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful
+principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the
+profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which
+reigns over him. _Faith_, on the contrary, has this power;
+faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which
+faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account
+to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will
+do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind
+it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of
+human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of
+gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth
+which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,
+of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much
+more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does
+much more than direct him, it enlightens him.
+{162}
+How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and
+instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without
+our being able to affirm that they have _faith_ in them.
+Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,
+nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without
+seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,
+however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,
+should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction
+between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their
+nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their
+legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by
+comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying
+it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a
+sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and
+establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;
+this is no longer simple natural belief, it is _faith_.
+
+{163}
+
+Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two
+kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them
+the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous
+belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and
+science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is
+individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,
+dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison
+with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,
+faith is the full security of man in the possession of his
+belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path
+which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and
+a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent
+harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man
+whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition
+present no longer any problems for solution as to the things
+which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full
+possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and
+in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.
+{164}
+As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,
+it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external
+conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from
+other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its
+object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined
+and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature
+itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may
+be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the
+intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in
+the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory
+of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so
+forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of
+every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally
+oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of
+the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the
+exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long
+obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the
+three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,
+and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously
+satisfied.
+{165}
+Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a
+situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of
+its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need
+be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his
+faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral
+nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.
+
+The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith
+would seem _à priori_ to be intellectual beauty, and
+practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the
+mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent
+or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but
+the name of _faith_ would not be suitably applied to it.
+{166}
+Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an
+idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also
+attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the
+pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple
+belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may
+become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure
+to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to
+awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin
+and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall
+be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and
+the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the
+other, and to unite them.
+
+It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost
+exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief
+possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote
+40] which provoke the development of faith.
+
+    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]
+
+{167}
+
+Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful
+applications; political theories may strike the mind by the
+elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of
+their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more
+surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor
+have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in
+the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression
+at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their
+practical importance, a certain measure of science and of
+sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as
+the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does
+not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on
+the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in
+itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;
+having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and
+undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however
+rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once
+sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an
+habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him
+access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual
+life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;
+it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over
+him the empire of the most powerful interest.
+{168}
+Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition
+to a state of _faith_ should be so rapid and so general? But
+it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to
+transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary
+energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free
+and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to
+impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith
+which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which
+addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the
+loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,
+can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral
+nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to
+the mission prescribed to him by his thought.
+{169}
+But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of
+the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience
+proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the
+different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more
+its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by
+his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections
+or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the
+abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring
+from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once
+there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to
+diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law
+of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,
+it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its
+designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost
+always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this
+mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any
+other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and
+of society falling under oppression.
+
+{170}
+
+For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in
+belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his
+will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,
+has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith
+fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty
+does not exist, faith first usurps,--then becomes
+bewildered--finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to
+the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its
+efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it
+abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we
+have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the
+tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.
+In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces
+consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]
+
+    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et
+    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of
+    1861).]
+
+{171}
+
+If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I
+rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it
+Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as
+characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon
+which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold
+merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which
+has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other
+side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in
+sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in
+sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.
+
+What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the
+principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man
+incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each
+man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and
+more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the
+present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;
+in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.
+
+{172}
+
+The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less
+evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical
+importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor
+de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of
+Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit
+of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and
+adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the
+sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally
+certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or
+Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere
+believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and
+imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of
+fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and
+strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.
+As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has
+presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever
+seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to
+make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has
+nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of
+the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very
+efficacious influence to the principle of authority.
+
+{173}
+
+Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and
+assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,
+let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is
+engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What
+is the principle of this contest, and what its character?
+
+Here we are met by that all-important question, the question
+which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which
+all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the
+Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm
+that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of
+these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,
+and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:
+whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such
+contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as
+they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.
+
+{174}
+
+In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that
+which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is
+profound; but I do not think that the question between the two
+has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition
+has been rightly defined.
+
+To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,
+first, to the philosophers.
+
+We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to
+what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:
+"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with
+respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,
+than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then
+either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the
+old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the
+standard of reason."
+{175}
+Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him
+in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,--"My
+first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,
+unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to
+avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to
+follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but
+what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as
+to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]
+
+    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,
+    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]
+
+More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace
+to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the
+history of its progressive development, did far more than
+obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his
+labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its
+proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of
+a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and
+then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,
+all his knowledge,--in fact, the entire man himself.
+
+{176}
+
+Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have
+their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.
+Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to
+know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by
+the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a
+_tabula rasa_, and to fill up the void which he has so made,
+he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so
+clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to
+doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses
+not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without
+reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a
+statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this
+statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the
+man--the entire man--with all the developments of his nature and
+of his thought.
+
+{177}
+
+I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting
+point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very
+commencement of philosophy,--in short, a mere hypothesis.
+Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and
+of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress
+of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and
+scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the
+material world; but from their very commencement both these
+philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight
+road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a
+mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete
+appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss
+either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two
+hypotheses, the _tabula rasa_ of Descartes, and the statue
+of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they
+are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to
+inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle
+which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,
+and Christian faith.
+
+{178}
+
+The true point of departure of this history and the first of the
+facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and
+the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the
+other, the "_moi_" and the "_non moi_," the subject and
+the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I
+repudiate absolutely the different systems,--Pantheism, whether
+materialistic or idealistic,--Scepticism, whether idealistic or
+absolute,--which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the
+reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge
+of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the
+relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe
+together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a
+pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these
+different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have
+to deal with something very different from the question to which
+I am applying myself at this moment.
+{179}
+Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form
+of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it
+admits the reality and the distinction of the "_moi_" and of
+the "_non moi_" of the subject and the object, of the
+spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the
+universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for
+Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and
+under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's
+life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all
+simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the
+spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being
+from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself
+and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the
+diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives
+from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has
+a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and
+also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows
+not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive
+and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,
+yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.
+{180}
+Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,
+by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and
+which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that
+external world. He observes and notes both what takes place
+without him and within him. The results of this observation he
+terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations
+merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him
+of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands
+in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is
+highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,
+but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of
+science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein
+involved.
+
+{181}
+
+Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,
+I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,
+or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;
+first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which
+mankind professes, although under very different forms and in
+very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of
+philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in
+order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,
+and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side
+is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other
+is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of
+disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is
+called religious philosophy.
+
+Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no
+other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these
+systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,
+and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the
+religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of
+religion?
+
+{182}
+
+To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,
+Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.
+
+In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the
+instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of
+human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and
+proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active
+presence of God in the life of man and in the history of
+humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and
+active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of
+Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active
+presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the
+mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and
+of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,
+are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological
+and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which
+it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.
+
+{183}
+
+Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and
+disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which
+all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always
+confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,
+greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is
+looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is
+immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,
+diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is
+situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence
+reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision
+more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He
+observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts
+which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion
+amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in
+appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their
+character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the
+question antecedent to and which governs all the others.
+
+{184}
+
+The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not
+a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and
+a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith
+as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at
+the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,
+as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they
+themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only
+the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the
+life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these
+psychological and historic facts which reason and science are
+bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians
+justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence
+alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and
+permanent laws assigned to all other existences?
+
+{185}
+
+As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are
+concerned, this is the real question at issue.
+
+Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which
+we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.
+
+Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and
+those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to
+demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of
+God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all
+their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these
+days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.
+Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made
+earnest--I would willingly say pious--efforts to elucidate the
+proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid
+that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the
+religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive
+themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain
+to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of
+the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.
+{186}
+In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which
+Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and
+unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of
+each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic
+Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to
+prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of
+the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the
+place of the real action of God.
+
+In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"
+another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and
+with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different
+systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to
+polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear
+enunciation of his own thought.
+{187}
+"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend
+against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law
+of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would
+not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a
+commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and
+product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,
+to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in
+opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a
+supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be
+perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he
+is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of
+spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in
+ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,
+he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind
+supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an
+unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,
+inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that
+emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he
+would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a
+divine Reason.
+
+{188}
+
+Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living
+God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves ... A God
+that loved not would not be worthy of being adored ... We do not
+adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in
+consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however
+potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure
+it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being
+who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its
+highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a
+contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if
+the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.
+
+This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious
+conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."
+[Footnote 43]
+
+    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.
+    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]
+
+{189}
+
+It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions
+still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from
+philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.
+
+Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the
+philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle
+of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon
+the soul of man.
+
+Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,
+continually present, and active in the government of the
+Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the
+human race.
+
+Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short
+there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts
+which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these
+facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that
+Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.
+
+{190}
+
+           Sixth Meditation.
+
+            Christian Life.
+
+
+Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit
+to a test--the great test--the practical application. The idea
+has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.
+
+Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,
+upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their
+ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are
+right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is
+in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its
+object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man
+pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever
+the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it
+believes that it has attained to the truth.
+
+{191}
+
+This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only
+ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under
+its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those
+who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the
+principle that we should be indifferent whether we are
+essentially in the right, and that practically there is no
+difference between truth and error.
+
+But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than
+the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human
+mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,
+that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves
+itself?
+
+To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a
+denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every
+doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a
+test,--the practical application.
+{192}
+The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;
+these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically
+true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which
+it is bound to give.
+
+There is a radical difference between the material world and the
+intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in
+the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought
+and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is
+ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has
+no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot
+influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite
+of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if
+Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,
+and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's
+principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to
+the general system of the world. _There_ man's error is
+absolutely without effect or influence.
+
+{193}
+
+In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is
+not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act--
+to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to
+the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant
+of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside
+here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and
+independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here
+without real and serious consequences; they have the power of
+sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual
+and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to
+the disputes of men.
+
+Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,
+separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from
+its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific
+investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and
+admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of
+society or the results of their own labours.
+{194}
+Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave
+inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world
+are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;
+man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the
+profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,
+procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative
+description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no
+general disturbance results in that material world upon which
+naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will
+not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their
+ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,
+on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its
+teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and
+make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape
+the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in
+its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world
+to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,
+incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not
+here the object of science, it is still its necessary and
+appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the
+truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.
+
+{195}
+
+Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen
+centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue
+ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace
+here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and
+surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of
+Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single
+small part of this history, the most modest part, the least
+pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what
+Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian
+Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different
+situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day
+accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the
+furtherance of his ultimate destiny.
+
+{196}
+
+Three words, "_Rights of Man_" inscribed upon the banners of
+the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man
+as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his
+humanity. Three other words, _Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity_, have served as a commentary upon the three
+former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French
+Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources
+of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the
+ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.
+
+Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is
+Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have
+of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by
+Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does
+Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and
+condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity
+alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral
+force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the
+good also to perish.
+
+{197}
+
+It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride
+that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,
+the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his
+rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential
+objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the
+rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the
+individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,
+where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human
+creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a
+single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,
+Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not
+only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The
+right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of
+the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,
+constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant
+precept of the Christian religion.
+{198}
+It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian
+Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put
+into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as
+the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the
+chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that
+Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was
+amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as
+brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although
+sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a
+stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less
+potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it
+maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over
+distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil
+society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are
+most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the
+iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices
+have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the
+Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the
+earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church
+itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and
+acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.
+{199}
+Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never
+afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any
+human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of
+earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to
+be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all
+the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only
+in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear
+themselves greeted as _brethren_.
+
+The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence
+in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand
+to the political authorities, or in which the different classes
+stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the
+constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,
+called family.
+{200}
+There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the
+despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of
+wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If
+we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as
+religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of
+antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman
+family,--we shall not need to examine long before we discern
+clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just
+appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and
+liberty.
+
+I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and
+puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular
+maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and
+fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of
+false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the
+history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not
+merely in the records of a few years, but through three
+centuries.
+{201}
+Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying
+claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the
+same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show
+of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim
+to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner
+of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did
+they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon
+authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,
+and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.
+Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of
+Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to
+the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of
+this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its
+cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its
+liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either
+in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,
+and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which
+the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.
+{202}
+They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor
+humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and
+disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage
+to its right at the same time that they maintained their own
+right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished
+at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not
+as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]
+
+    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]
+
+Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,
+and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen
+me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
+and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."
+[Footnote 45]
+
+    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]
+
+And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and
+struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the
+doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every
+soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but
+of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ... Wherefore ye
+must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for
+conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]
+
+    [Footnote 46: Romans xiii. 1, 5. ]
+
+{203}
+
+Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself
+addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which
+are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote
+47]
+
+    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]
+
+The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of
+power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of
+religious life from civil life,--all these were not, for the
+primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their
+situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles
+of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the
+name of justice and of truth.
+
+{204}
+
+Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,
+greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the
+history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to
+the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once
+became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by
+earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the
+arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil
+inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and
+combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity
+had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,
+nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary
+doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted
+and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape
+and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they
+never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they
+survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the
+broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,
+Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled
+against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite
+of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of
+violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,
+the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.
+{205}
+Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious
+and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of
+human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and
+these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,
+traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable
+them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and
+corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.
+Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which
+agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely
+healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant
+subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of
+sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated
+herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she
+has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against
+which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which
+she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over
+the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of
+promise. This she owes to her origin--she was born in the manger
+of Jesus.
+
+{206}
+
+There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened
+men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has
+rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality
+of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of
+Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,
+the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality
+is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be
+separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but
+its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not
+disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and
+empire of morality, I have established in this volume of
+Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,
+and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart
+from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,
+and powerless--a branch without root and without fruit.
+{207}
+I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is
+Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as
+the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,
+but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have
+taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still
+higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did
+not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of
+doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a
+truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and
+superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as
+such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,
+and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and
+vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and
+learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the
+fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.
+{208}
+At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw
+in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a
+sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by
+Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his
+appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;
+but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who
+detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council
+and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and
+the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to
+have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,
+a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in
+reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the
+apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of
+Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching
+these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself
+to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,
+joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,
+were scattered and brought to nought.
+{209}
+After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the
+taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;
+and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I
+say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if
+this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But
+if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found
+even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]
+
+    [Footnote 48: Acts v. 21, 33--39.]
+
+The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity
+at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already
+made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the
+living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
+of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]
+
+    [Footnote 49: Matthew xxvi. 63, 64.]
+
+{210}
+
+The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A
+short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as
+their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide
+the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in
+repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof
+was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries
+of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of
+Christianity,--the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,
+the Inspiration of the Scriptures,--became the grand dogmas of
+Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its
+turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed
+from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to
+undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly
+interests and human errors and passions had a great part;
+Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes
+converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so
+constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was
+theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of
+practical application in every form and every shape.
+{211}
+The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all
+these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows
+of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and
+is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the
+same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,
+with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and
+the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.
+The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its
+Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The
+authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of
+the next and last series of my "Meditations."
+
+{212}
+
+{213}
+
+               Appendix.
+
+
+Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at
+London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance
+a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:
+all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or
+simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or
+attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,
+perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,
+has just made it the subject of three articles, which are
+remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They
+appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his
+country. [Footnote 50]
+
+    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by
+    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen
+    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of
+    January, February, and March, 1868.]
+
+  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'
+  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be
+  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified
+  authorship--that has appeared within the same interval, has
+  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism
+  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled
+  'Ecce Homo.'"
+
+{214}
+
+The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his
+intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental
+ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current
+conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a
+definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons
+not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They
+may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the
+beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time
+when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as
+St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with
+those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to
+trace his biography from point to point, and accept those
+conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles
+have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,
+critically weighed, appear to warrant.
+
+"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+there was no historical character whose motives, objects and
+feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+
+"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern
+Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;
+which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an
+answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the
+Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to
+attain that object?'"
+
+{215}
+
+On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief
+words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not
+to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,
+I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in
+the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very
+outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study
+the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering
+him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer
+all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire
+to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating
+him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when
+living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the
+ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,
+in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a
+person unknown to us--a fossil man, so to say, of which the
+features might be traceable in some contemporary document,
+showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to
+supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he
+performed;--this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,
+one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true
+comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus
+mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer
+limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent
+thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and
+its nature verified in its positive and vast development.
+
+{216}
+
+This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of
+history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like
+anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and
+comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their
+different elements and in all the development of their life. They
+form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we
+are deciphering.
+
+I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce
+Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it
+within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also
+understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed
+and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these
+days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?--a
+man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine
+nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he
+really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such
+things as miracles? What are we to understand by the
+supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and
+accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style
+Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably
+suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and
+violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce
+Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to
+study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it
+because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no
+positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a
+certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of
+some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of
+him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact
+not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to
+the sole and proper force of mankind?
+
+{217}
+
+Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous
+author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:
+what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book
+"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed
+to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has
+proposed to explain Christianity.
+
+I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of
+the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a
+strange one,--it is condemnatory and destructive of the
+fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and
+honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the
+facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human
+nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural
+operations of humanity.
+
+The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether
+twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of
+Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing
+with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,
+the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the
+authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,
+the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the
+systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its
+fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and
+sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn
+the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.
+Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and
+striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,
+however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,
+and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.
+
+{218}
+
+All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the
+vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the
+perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the
+solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not
+enter.
+
+I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an
+account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's
+opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my
+aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show
+plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There
+precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with
+the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of
+Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of
+Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he
+departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he
+appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought
+seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly
+contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts
+or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is
+more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he
+believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity
+find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they
+encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or
+the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.
+
+{219}
+
+There are several passages of this remarkable work which are
+particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I
+feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of
+the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,
+entitled _Christ's Credentials_, and chapter ninth,
+[Footnote 51] entitled _Reflections on the Nature of Christ's
+Society;_ in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled
+_Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems_,
+and chapter the eleventh, _The Christian Republic_ [Footnote
+52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,
+fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and
+satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the
+author's inconsistency with respect to religion.
+
+    [Footnote 51: Ecce Homo, ed. 1866, pp. 41-51, 81--102.]
+
+    [Footnote 52: _Ibid_, pp. 108--119, 120--126.]
+
+Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply
+remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and
+particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and
+call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a
+singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a
+subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with
+philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of
+human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and
+religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and
+painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a
+grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,
+however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no
+idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable
+work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to
+which I have already referred, and indeed it appears
+incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the
+human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as
+of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his
+book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another
+volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the
+Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."
+{220}
+He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking
+inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ
+much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however
+superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary
+humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and
+is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not
+have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.
+
+
+                 The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Bradbury, Evans, And Co., Printers, Whitefriars.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The
+Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60815 ***
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The

-Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot

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-Title: Christianity Viewed In Relation To The Present State Of Society And Opinion.

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-[Transcriber's note: This production is based on

-https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_i">{i}</a></span>

-

-         <h1>Christianity Viewed In Relation To

-<br><br>

-     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.</h1>

-<br>

-                  <h2>By M. Guizot.

-</h2>

-

-  <h3>Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.

-<br><br><br>

-

-                    London:

-<br><br>

-         John Murray, Albemarle Street.

-<br><br>

-                     1871.</h3>

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ii">{ii}</a></span>

-

-             <h2>By The Same Author.</h2>

-

-       <h3>The Essence Of Christianity.<br>

-             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.</h3>

-<p>

-  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances

-  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable

-  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."<br>

-    &mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>.

-</p>

-<br>

-

-      <h3>The Present State Of Christianity.<br>

-          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.</h3>

-<p>

-  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a

-  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,

-  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further

-  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great

-  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future

-  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great

-  interest."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iii">{iii}</a></span>

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iv">{iv}</a></span>

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_v">{v}</a></span>

-<br>

-                   <h2>Preface.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the

-facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and

-the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I

-retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during

-the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and

-Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated

-amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent

-trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in

-these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,

-Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the

-fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those

-systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the

-office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and

-destiny.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vi">{vi}</a></span>

-That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why

-is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has

-had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been

-made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely

-better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of

-humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which

-vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in

-review? because it fills up the void that those systems either

-create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts

-man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.

-    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this

-question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas

-and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them

-more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vii">{vii}</a></span>

-Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity

-can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that

-morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious

-Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the

-very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those

-who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe

-Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each

-other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as

-naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that

-Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,

-that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I

-establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I

-then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and

-determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical

-Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the

-bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_viii">{viii}</a></span>

-I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the

-law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I

-interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show

-that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.

-"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the

-Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the

-present series concludes.

-</p>

-<p>

-But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the

-historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of

-retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its

-course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor

-wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts

-which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine

-origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and

-destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a

-summary:&mdash;

-</p>

-<p class="cite">

-  1. The authority of the sacred books.

-<br><br>

-  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.

-<br><br>

-  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ix">{ix}</a></span>

-<br>

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

-<br><br>

-  5. Romanism and Protestantism.

-<br><br>

-  6. The different Antichristian crises, their

-     character and their issue.

-</p>

-<p>

-It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they

-suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised

-itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe

-and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one

-of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my

-Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real

-value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical

-Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of

-Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed

-to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious

-study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many

-quicksands.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_x">{x}</a></span>

-<p>

-But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I

-been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work

-into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are

-agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding

-their instant solution? What good result can I expect from

-studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my

-country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the

-actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that

-which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many

-troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I

-scrutinize generations&mdash;the honour and the destiny of which I

-have so much at heart, for my children form part of them&mdash;the

-more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the

-general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself

-in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the

-grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xi">{xi}</a></span>

-I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,

-France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems

-and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their

-gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not

-having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from

-not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when

-she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary

-forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.

-</p>

-<p>

-Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some

-question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in

-events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and

-the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than

-the era of modern history&mdash;in the sixteenth century the question

-of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth

-century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad

-and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the

-operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in

-France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the

-different objects which each social movement had specially in

-view.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xii">{xii}</a></span>

-The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the

-struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on

-high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite

-complications of a labyrinth.

-</p>

-<p>

-And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of

-essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,

-contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is

-plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I

-propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.

-</p>

-<p>

-First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of

-the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which

-concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of

-populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly

-these questions were all reducible to one&mdash;the aggrandizement or

-the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or

-the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the

-balance of power in Europe.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span>

-War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled

-this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and

-Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation

-so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and

-ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and

-entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the

-question of nationalities, the question of little states and of

-great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and

-of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their

-midst,&mdash;all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a

-routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the

-maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking

-themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial

-organizations and the external relations of States.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span>

-<p>

-Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle

-itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new

-ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual

-theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of

-men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good

-their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any

-respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a

-principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which

-the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name

-of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from

-participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or

-eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.

-Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently

-against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick

-does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of

-which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of

-language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some

-general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased

-to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,

-and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more

-legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his

-successors.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xv">{xv}</a></span>

-<p>

-I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men

-follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part

-of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain

-share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the

-possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a

-moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of

-this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But

-policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to

-these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and

-right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common

-sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,

-maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,

-and which, up to the present time, have presided over the

-relations of States.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span>

-The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial

-agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be

-independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect

-for ancient treaties,&mdash;all these elements of European order have

-not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory

-of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political

-unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with

-justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western

-Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both

-in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow

-countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal

-of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?

-Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere

-Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations

-of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which

-draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories

-all foreign domination.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span>

-But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of

-union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and

-the <i>régime</i> of a confederation of States might have been

-established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the

-foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have

-been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the

-interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the

-preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at

-the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that

-any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of

-that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized

-world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally

-compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the

-preservation of peace between the different States.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span>

-<p>

-What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the

-sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,

-the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a

-population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,

-and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute

-themselves into new and independent States? What would become of

-the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also

-were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating

-wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its

-members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations

-or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding

-or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does

-he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in

-the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.

-The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being

-rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to

-the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his

-country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to

-strive to lay the foundation of a new country.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xix">{xix}</a></span>

-We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen

-some of the States which form the nation of the United States of

-America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an

-independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in

-their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the

-right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to

-change its government at discretion. The States which remained

-faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the

-principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in

-maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am

-one of those who think that they had both right and reason on

-their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the

-most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character

-as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the

-interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for

-negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to

-me all that he had written and said upon the subject.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xx">{xx}</a></span>

-I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he

-expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the

-efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and

-by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He

-would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living

-reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle

-Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much

-sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced

-that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of

-which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the

-danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of

-slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the

-great American State which was their country. Motive detestable

-for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,

-has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a

-Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern

-times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising

-resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an

-unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of

-States.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span>

-<p>

-So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the

-external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the

-future has in store for those which involve domestic order and

-the organization of government. I meet here with the same

-confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between

-ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at

-the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in

-collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments

-in opinions.

-</p>

-<p>

-The proposition is now universally received that society has the

-right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own

-government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a

-manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span>

-The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to

-attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the

-monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the

-other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the

-great representatives of public power. But neither the

-constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded

-amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of

-events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in

-spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of

-liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on

-its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was

-affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and

-sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional

-monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of

-government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of

-personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the

-essay have greater success? Events will decide.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxiii">{xxiii}</a></span>

-In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so

-many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the

-disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its

-governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our

-ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,

-have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of

-impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very

-well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed

-and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no

-fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield

-ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our

-very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but

-soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less

-exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our

-most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as

-precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are

-again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in

-the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have

-taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet

-these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found

-any free government.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxiv">{xxiv}</a></span>

-<p>

-I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the

-state of our political institutions to that of the relations

-existent between the different parts of society. I say the

-<i>different parts</i> to avoid saying <i>different classes</i>,

-for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking

-that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges

-and exclusions, of that entire <i>régime</i> with its narrow

-compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were

-formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their

-name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental

-qualification they might possess. In effect, this <i>régime</i>

-has fallen&mdash;fallen completely and definitively; all legal

-barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:

-by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to

-everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxv">{xxv}</a></span>

-This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate

-it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it

-ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of

-jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they

-have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they

-persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in

-defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration

-was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils

-that the <i>bourgeoisie</i> had to endure, and the risks which it

-had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of

-July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were

-the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle

-classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such

-assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the

-intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been

-already often produced on the stage of the world,&mdash;theories which

-have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxvi">{xxvi}</a></span>

-Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial

-distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have

-served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,

-sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon

-things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises

-were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to

-give.

-</p>

-<p>

-I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good

-observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that

-even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as

-to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial

-settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the

-distribution of the material means of existence, are in

-discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,

-although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume

-the form of Socialism.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxvii">{xxvii}</a></span>

-I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find

-their field in facts affecting the sphere of material

-subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most

-recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier

-to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the

-ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,

-that errors such as those which presented themselves under the

-names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much

-noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that

-they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof

-of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it

-leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst

-us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst

-of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in

-order to surmount this danger.

-</p>

-<p>

-Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,

-who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the

-following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between

-the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in

-their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for

-books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly

-workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as

-is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxviii">{xxviii}</a></span>

-After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are

-two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I

-added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you

-great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be

-the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the

-honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I

-congratulated him this time still more.

-</p>

-<p>

-In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which

-afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their

-disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which

-the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace

-social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of

-distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a

-little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by

-all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations

-from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which

-they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous

-and full of hazard.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxix">{xxix}</a></span>

-The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,

-when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true

-to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of

-the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond

-doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously

-excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of

-hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as

-the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it

-devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it

-before them.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxx">{xxx}</a></span>

-Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well

-living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with

-efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and

-resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the

-spectacle of the world which surrounds them,&mdash;a world now at

-length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,

-the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to

-the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our

-villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people

-from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,

-unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral

-discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which

-religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives

-subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely

-religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and

-Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and

-this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant

-regions of society!

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxi">{xxxi}</a></span>

-<p>

-These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of

-unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,

-of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,

-open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a

-tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity

-counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name

-of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it

-with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical

-deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,

-in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their

-force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the

-incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's

-opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which

-are only simply political and social; many they are who would be

-inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they

-are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all

-these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring

-to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which

-receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ

-which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt

-and exposed to peril.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxii">{xxxii}</a></span>

-<p>

-I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating

-the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,

-questions of political organization, questions of social

-institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I

-encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great

-complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his

-efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every

-kind&mdash;doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and

-oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,

-immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to

-travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to

-feel their way through a labyrinth.

-</p>

-<p>

-Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and

-impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope

-for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we

-have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign

-power called by some Providence, by others Fate?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxiii">{xxxiii}</a></span>

-<p>

-I am far from thinking so.

-</p>

-<p>

-Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of

-convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion

-Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day

-detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal

-or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"

-said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to

-disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence

-and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I

-am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military

-sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always

-applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in

-order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,

-to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its

-apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most

-efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the

-number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others

-possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same

-spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,

-single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon

-attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,

-without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxiv">{xxxiv}</a></span>

-We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of

-influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if

-we adopt it.

-</p>

-<p>

-I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which

-torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the

-rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its

-economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an

-evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of

-French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the

-moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them

-attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its

-removal.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxv">{xxxv}</a></span>

-But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,

-a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and

-developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a

-good current which is impelling us forwards;&mdash;at the same time

-that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the

-principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to

-control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the

-maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at

-least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions

-of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of

-political economy have defenders no less zealous than the

-presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism

-raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is

-advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress

-also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical

-applications.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxvi">{xxxvi}</a></span>

-Following respectively their different objects, there are on both

-sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and

-influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several

-causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is

-solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,

-contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our

-history is made up of this great struggle and of its

-vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats

-sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of

-our country.

-</p>

-<p>

-They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and

-keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human

-sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated

-by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the

-disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought

-back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the

-modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of

-their situation than with the rights of thought, but always

-remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty

-even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only

-defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than

-shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in

-spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent

-indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in

-spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble

-desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxvii">{xxxvii}</a></span>

-<p>

-We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius

-of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed

-with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of

-individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,

-and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as

-well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and

-the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who

-are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxviii">{xxxviii}</a></span>

-<p>

-What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the

-conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have

-it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil

-current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions

-and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good

-sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and

-to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation

-which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?

-</p>

-<p>

-Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society

-in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free

-Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we

-should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease

-of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our

-conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our

-understanding.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxix">{xxxix}</a></span>

-<p>

-I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the

-abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to

-guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to

-individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and

-material. The right of France to these liberties, and their

-opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in

-their clearest light, and established in all their force on their

-highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]

-It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,

-the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,

-that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the

-two great remedies against this ill.

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, <i>Sur les libertés

-    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse</i>, in the séances of

-    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,

-    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xl">{xl}</a></span>

-<p>

-When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are

-perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is

-that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in

-conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of

-so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,

-does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the

-confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,

-provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its

-effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the

-understandings: the different facts, and problems which these

-facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only

-for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow

-accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise

-conceptions of them.

-</p>

-<p>

-Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions

-define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation

-of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular

-form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so

-salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a

-liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it

-would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle

-opinions still more.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xli">{xli}</a></span>

-<p>

-Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more

-important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of

-practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the

-thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,

-and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the

-effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs

-riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to

-liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,&mdash;when,

-instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be

-virtually solved,&mdash;when men are charged as real actors to

-transform into facts their own opinions or those of the

-spectators who are looking on,&mdash;then it is that the human mind,

-making its own strength the object of its reflection and

-examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose

-at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy

-itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good

-sense, by justice, and by possibility,&mdash;then it is that it learns

-to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.

-Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by

-liberty alone.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlii">{xlii}</a></span>

-<p>

-Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the

-salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an

-escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving

-questions the most different&mdash;I might say the most contrary&mdash;in

-their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary

-histories of England, of the United States of America, and of

-France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as

-precedents.

-</p>

-<p>

-From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against

-the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.

-Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With

-what forces and with what arms did England support these two

-formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political

-liberty.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xliii">{xliii}</a></span>

-It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued

-in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,

-&mdash;it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,&mdash;it was by

-setting in action all the springs of a free and representative

-government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most

-potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated

-Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,

-during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office

-by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a

-different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,

-sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place

-of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path

-that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,

-sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,

-improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of

-the country, all the strength of its government. Political

-Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause

-and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,

-at another of that of progress.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xliv">{xliv}</a></span>

-<p>

-The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder

-trial. Their government has had to struggle against the

-insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a

-civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular

-independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted

-an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to

-maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the

-national existence of the State against the attempts which were

-made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same

-motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the

-course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,

-and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed

-by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the

-abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the

-right of insurrection.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlv">{xlv}</a></span>

-It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the

-institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this

-victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once

-over, the civil <i>régime</i> of American society resumed its

-action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical

-usurpation or military tyranny.

-</p>

-<p>

-Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so

-well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts

-remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848

-France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been

-preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.

-Neither of the <i>régimes</i> in operation immediately previous

-to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly

-changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks

-to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which

-owed their existence to the previous <i>régime</i>, a regular

-government was promptly established, and a new constitutional

-monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlvi">{xlvi}</a></span>

-On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary

-movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect

-for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and

-feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical

-fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the

-victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was

-more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the

-funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,

-celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been

-assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be

-tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the

-archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,

-which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being

-closed for many months.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlvii">{xlvii}</a></span>

-In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set

-men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more

-profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor

-the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities

-were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of

-the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free

-even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four

-years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments

-which were then in force without leaving their traces; their

-traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary

-influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction

-which put an end to it.

-</p>

-<p>

-That this influence may still surmount the great trials through

-which governments and people may have both to pass, two things

-are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real

-citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to

-make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by

-their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at

-the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,

-should accept its inconveniences and its perils.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlviii">{xlviii}</a></span>

-A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it

-does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with

-resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of

-every human situation.

-</p>

-<p>

-Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room

-to nations for&mdash;what do I say? they demand from them&mdash;great

-activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude

-their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of

-action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer

-anything but a picture-frame without the picture&mdash;a drama

-written, not represented&mdash;in which the actors fail to assume

-their parts or to co-operate to produce the <i>dénouement</i>.

-</p>

-<p>

-It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public

-in the life of free government which gives so capital an

-importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlix">{xlix}</a></span>

-When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a

-sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may

-have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am

-not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily

-hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of

-private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What

-is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled

-moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and

-religious&mdash;beliefs which recognize and attest that man is

-naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something

-essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the

-midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by

-such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free

-<i>régime</i> a large share both of its responsibility and of its

-active duties: it is only when so animated that they give

-consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it

-stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe

-in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than

-once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty

-when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a

-tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral

-combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of

-the material forces which assail them.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_l">{l}</a></span>

-Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free

-country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who

-profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all

-which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in

-favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete

-misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human

-society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove

-incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in

-tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man

-isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a

-falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the

-supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this

-is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated

-individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his

-silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon

-the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the

-falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of

-respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their

-opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of

-humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in

-such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_li">{li}</a></span>

-To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to

-refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,

-moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,

-is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very

-impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society

-calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the

-intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and

-practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether

-moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to

-be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the

-people.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lii">{lii}</a></span>

-<p>

-I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in

-all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,

-it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on

-the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil

-Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable

-with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I

-have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I

-am now publishing.

-</p>

-<p>

-I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task

-to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day

-to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of

-which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,

-stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only

-here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two

-contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as

-well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups

-profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals

-and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and

-Disbelievers.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_liii">{liii}</a></span>

-No one of these groups really represents a dominant party

-in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and

-hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,

-vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,

-wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing

-clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of

-truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's

-thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused

-and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of

-thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to

-appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in

-reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a

-vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a

-field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and

-incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to

-bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French

-society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and

-under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here

-described it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_liv">{liv}</a></span>

-Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful

-and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find

-everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes

-devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the

-most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in

-search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most

-different directions. Upon this population it is that we must

-act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive

-conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious

-instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are

-by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to

-transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must

-accommodate ourselves to the general character of this

-population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an

-adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence

-must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious

-to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should

-give in return its soul.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lv">{lv}</a></span>

-It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is

-not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of

-Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should

-know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the

-society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they

-should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under

-their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under

-their blows.

-</p>

-<p>

-Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it

-prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such

-success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different

-epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did

-Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their

-times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so

-extraordinary an influence?

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lvi">{lvi}</a></span>

-First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked

-was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also

-because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they

-were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different

-processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with

-the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that

-they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political

-transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it

-on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They

-more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,

-the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;

-still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one

-by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern

-literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having

-re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this

-is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against

-them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France

-felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their

-glory, because it believed in their sympathy.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lvii">{lvii}</a></span>

-<p>

-Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are

-rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of

-their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with

-them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion

-and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church

-of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more

-liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father

-Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice

-of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already

-more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different

-origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same

-cause and to the same work.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lviii">{lviii}</a></span>

-At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,

-two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I

-have the honour to know, men very different in position and in

-ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a

-great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;

-both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,

-the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent

-in the present state of French society; both having the

-resolution and the ability required in order to present

-Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most

-proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur

-Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor

-at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his

-diocese, (Lent, 1868,) <i>A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of

-Christianity</i>. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th

-of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical

-Conference assembled at Nérac, <i>A Report as to the Actual

-Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches</i>.

-[Footnote 4]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length

-    in the <i>Gazette de France</i>, on the 25th and 26th of

-    February, 1868.]

-<br><br>

-    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the

-    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lix">{lix}</a></span>

-<p>

-I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially

-analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here

-because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each

-reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being

-prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony

-between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the

-present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far

-as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch

-is Christian.

-</p>

-<p>

-"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was

-contemporary with primitive man&mdash;a fact present in all ages, ever

-paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same

-degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind

-man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent

-of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the

-Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and

-upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet

-raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,

-constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His

-creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty

-lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses

-more or less unanimous.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lx">{lx}</a></span>

-<p>

-"Heathen nations&mdash;their history proves it&mdash;have preserved

-something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected

-with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of

-Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions

-which they received from their grandsire, and which are the

-common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions

-are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of

-fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East

-and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the

-multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and

-its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily

-distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of

-Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original

-fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality

-of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all

-these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the

-depths of the conscience of the people.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxi">{lxi}</a></span>

-Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify

-in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be

-condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but

-for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.

-</p>

-<p>

-"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful

-work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious

-wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too

-much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and

-Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained

-Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political

-charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,

-breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism

-remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxii">{lxii}</a></span>

-<p>

-"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many

-generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner

-and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred

-and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and

-in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations&mdash;this fact, what

-is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that

-it is purely natural&mdash;the spontaneous production of our habits,

-the simple result of our instincts&mdash;and, so to say, an

-irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is

-divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly

-created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as

-a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common

-sense which tells us this.

-</p>

-<p>

-"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,

-as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely

-the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its

-own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it

-and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with

-a force which renews itself every day.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxiii">{lxiii}</a></span>

-It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious

-effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and

-nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to

-its effects a supernatural character. &hellip; Supernatural means were

-necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in

-relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the

-constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of

-the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no

-longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions

-should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,

-infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary

-a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His

-envoys by extraordinary facts&mdash;facts of a superhuman power,

-miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of

-the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,

-intervening with supernatural <i>éclat</i> to enable the mission

-to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and

-more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and

-their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their

-religious and predestined course.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxiv">{lxiv}</a></span>

-<p>

-"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the

-highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies

-of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a

-prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with

-signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive

-ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,

-and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His

-character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,

-the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;

-finally, the survival and the development of His work through

-centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the

-direct intervention of God&mdash;sole possible means of finding a

-satisfactory explanation of such grand results."

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxv">{lxv}</a></span>

-<p>

-The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas

-recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited&mdash;a

-development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to

-assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always

-faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no

-discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of

-ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class

-of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of

-Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of

-man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity

-in particular; considered as a grand fact&mdash;a fact universal and

-permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst

-the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the

-scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst

-Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and

-Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,

-by the same title, if not in the same degree;

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxvi">{lxvi}</a></span>

-a fact at once human and divine&mdash;human by its accordance with

-man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of

-God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power

-reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of

-events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the

-accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus

-associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle

-of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of

-Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without

-any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage

-rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at

-the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority

-of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not

-justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented

-under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most

-proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,

-on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and

-pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian

-Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so

-many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxvii">{lxvii}</a></span>

-<p>

-The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more

-vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop

-of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he

-traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and

-requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and

-describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated

-and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in

-search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to

-be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,

-he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly

-and without compromise.

-</p>

-<p>

-"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in

-insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds

-in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its

-prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the

-preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxviii">{lxviii}</a></span>

-Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not

-live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,

-they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow

-its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its

-aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are

-of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate

-and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in

-many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In

-France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which

-have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as

-preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every

-symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To

-neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of

-addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who

-neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the

-objections which we attribute to them.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxix">{lxix}</a></span>

-<p>

-"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is

-easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others&mdash;it is that

-of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery

-or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally

-even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons

-more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of

-the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is

-noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our

-generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of

-its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of

-Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant

-now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,

-whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is

-impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a

-fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of

-Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of

-incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is

-definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface

-God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an

-obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxx">{lxx}</a></span>

-<p>

-"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in

-these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt

-or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having

-for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery

-from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are

-combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,

-Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a

-personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of

-the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a

-God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten

-civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,

-and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long

-as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. &hellip; Let nothing

-henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the

-human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God

-than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all

-things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxi">{lxxi}</a></span>

-<p>

-"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their

-weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is

-not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its

-lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and

-its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated

-at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical

-which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it

-is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in

-France, Germany, and Italy.

-</p>

-<p>

-"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical

-Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to

-destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former

-never will go so far as these.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxii">{lxxii}</a></span>

-But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing

-hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it

-we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,

-stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when

-merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious

-life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,

-without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of

-destruction.

-</p>

-<p>

-"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have

-we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most

-painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,

-with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph

-attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,

-how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the

-Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are

-the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by

-which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in

-discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of

-general interest?

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxiii">{lxxiii}</a></span>

-The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful

-to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul

-from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after

-the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have

-to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to

-souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?

-</p>

-<p>

-"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we

-are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees

-everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to

-note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting

-the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous

-aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas

-of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social

-application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The

-age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;

-it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the

-union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material

-happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxiv">{lxxiv}</a></span>

-Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,

-men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more

-than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their

-rights as individuals, and of <i>self-government</i>, and

-consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here

-assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious <i>points

-d'appui</i> for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread

-for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.

-Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel

-leads to Liberty.

-</p>

-<p>

-"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought

-we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who

-demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question

-overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his

-weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate

-himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from

-him the cry of the prophet&mdash;'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot

-speak, for I am a child!'

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxv">{lxxv}</a></span>

-<p>

-"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,

-much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of

-Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.

-Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the

-origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and

-more scientific than all that in these days men seek to

-substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the

-supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of

-Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of

-Religion itself.

-</p>

-<p>

-"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to

-establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and

-Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace

-Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not

-more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxvi">{lxxvi}</a></span>

-Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the

-materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian

-Conscience.

-</p>

-<p>

-"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her

-spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the

-progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make

-herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let

-her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must

-be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to

-everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize

-all his arms.

-</p>

-<p>

-"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our

-special mission in the special position in which God has placed

-us?"

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxvii">{lxxvii}</a></span>

-<p>

-Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of

-his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,

-M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the

-preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and

-evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to

-the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the

-general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of

-general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and

-urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.

-</p>

-<p>

-"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend

-Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that

-comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that

-comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear

-to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its

-most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with

-anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is

-necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we

-must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect

-fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxviii">{lxxviii}</a></span>

-Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to

-confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the

-contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a

-<i>point d'appui</i> for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us

-strive, we also, to find these <i>points d'appui</i>, those

-keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be

-made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country

-that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark

-applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the

-educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as

-it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let

-us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its

-liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and

-demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign

-reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by

-science.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxix">{lxxix}</a></span>

-The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human

-activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained

-in the principles of the Gospel."

-</p>

-<p>

-I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of

-the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two

-documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main

-and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,

-but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at

-leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,

-to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the

-one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.

-The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,

-or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging

-to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by

-each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw

-to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and

-are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxx">{lxxx}</a></span>

-<p>

-I think that they are right both in their hope and their

-endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons

-pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of

-religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain

-and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of

-religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern

-Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,

-France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being

-informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as

-well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement

-between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The

-profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not

-part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater

-development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the

-events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding

-upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,

-to which such subjects are all very strange.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxi">{lxxxi}</a></span>

-The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that

-France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with

-religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and

-fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable

-grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,

-at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well

-entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long

-life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part

-in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer

-anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been

-essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made

-no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the

-world, but nothing attaches me to it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxii">{lxxxii}</a></span>

-Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my

-eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and

-the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with

-thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that

-eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:&mdash;

-<p class="cite">

-  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.

-<br><br>

-    Guizot.<br>

-    Paris, <i>April</i>, 1868.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxiii">{lxxxiii}</a></span>

-<br><br>

-                <h2>Contents.</h2>

-<table>

-<tr>

-	<td></td>

-	<td></td>

-	<td>Page</td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>Preface</td>

-	<td></td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>I.</td>

-	<td>Christianity and Liberty</td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>II.</td>

-	<td>Christianity and Morality</td>

-	<td> <a href="#Page_52">52</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>III.</td>

-	<td>Christianity and Science</td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>IV.</td>

-	<td>Christian Ignorance</td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>V.</td>

-	<td>Christian Faith</td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>VI.</td>

-	<td>Christian Life</td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-	<td>Appendix</td>

-	<td>Observations upon the Work

-             called "Ecce Homo"</td>

-	<td><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td>

-</tr>

-</table>

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxiv">{lxxxiv}</a></span>

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1">{1}</a></span>

-<br>

-      <h1>Meditations On Christianity

-<br><br>

-               in its

-<br><br>

-     Relation To The Actual State<br>

-       Of Society And Opinion.</h1>

-<br>

-

-

-           <h2>First Meditation.

-<br><br>

-       Christianity And Liberty.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days

-for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant

-in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object

-Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both

-simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and

-respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and

-ill-regulated impulse.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2">{2}</a></span>

-Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it

-develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,

-and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions

-have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time

-men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are

-discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they

-vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to

-exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion

-may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered

-upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from

-it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is

-condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it

-is bound to perform.

-</p>

-<p>

-But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our

-epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less

-important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of

-the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard

-Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest

-enemy.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3">{3}</a></span>

-In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so

-treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a

-multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in

-activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one

-time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian

-sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?

-Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of

-Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather

-true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both

-require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate

-and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century

-remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that

-other question is not solved.

-</p>

-<p>

-I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these&mdash;"What

-shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose

-his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"

-[Footnote 5]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4">{4}</a></span>

-<p>

-"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the

-soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and

-body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach

-the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]

-<br><br>

-    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]

-</p>

-<p>

-The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the

-human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to

-save souls, all souls without exception,&mdash;souls of the powerful

-and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,

-happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is

-the foundation of the Christian Religion.

-</p>

-<p>

-The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere

-hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual

-being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,

-who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual

-condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an

-object of present solicitude.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5">{5}</a></span>

-To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a

-product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What

-have they to do with the words of the Gospel&mdash;with the immense

-value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them

-as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself

-forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who

-speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated

-tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because

-they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual

-man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What

-constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every

-human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that

-he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially

-in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation

-which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up

-to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use

-which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature

-of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,

-that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime

-a destiny.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6">{6}</a></span>

-Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great

-efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem

-of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel

-recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself

-about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely

-rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and

-responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which

-Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in

-every command that she gives to humanity.

-</p>

-<p>

-Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,

-and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of

-man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis

-and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most

-daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a

-point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity

-of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7">{7}</a></span>

-<p>

-Christianity does not confine itself to this;&mdash;after having laid

-down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical

-sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of

-resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the

-synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to

-speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John

-answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the

-sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."

-[Footnote 8]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to

-them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach

-in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than

-men." [Footnote 9]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of

-the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his

-faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the

-principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8">{8}</a></span>

-<p>

-The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,

-who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for

-dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he

-resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,

-"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to

-continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by

-much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.

-[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle

-of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that

-it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the

-principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and

-transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and

-eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms

-the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it

-equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of

-Authority.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9">{9}</a></span>

-I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made

-that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was

-permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar

-the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are

-God's," he established in principle the distinction between the

-religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.

-Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,

-between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful

-worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties

-which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.

-[Footnote 12]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,

-    p. 278. London: 1864.]

-</p>

-<p>

-It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest

-and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization

-commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted

-in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have

-strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded

-with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the

-seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,

-history has confirmed the Gospel.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10">{10}</a></span>

-<p>

-Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,

-Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,

-and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been

-able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity

-of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies

-required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at

-another liberty.

-</p>

-<p>

-Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to

-refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I

-remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that

-Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she

-was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from

-her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she

-alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls

-in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11">{11}</a></span>

-If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious

-establishments&mdash;Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism&mdash;have

-held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the

-world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,

-attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman

-Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism

-did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the

-enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the

-immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.

-Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated

-only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the

-sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of

-Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the

-soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it

-she awakened it.

-</p>

-<p>

-Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of

-Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have

-occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the

-Christian faith.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12">{12}</a></span>

-No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the

-work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,

-which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the

-purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the

-surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy

-atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part

-and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine

-it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats

-uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the

-excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not

-destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor

-make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work

-of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a

-Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,

-behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those

-stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only

-enables him to see them.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>

-When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal

-errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared

-under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit

-without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or

-ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore

-what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from

-her that which she has not promised.

-</p>

-<p>

-Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch

-and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to

-Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present

-day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting

-Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount

-them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What

-are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,

-the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an

-obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14">{14}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,

-men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre

-colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a

-prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as

-deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of

-amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at

-another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our

-vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not

-of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require

-to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness

-which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which

-cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the

-attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,

-is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent

-evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but

-that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we

-make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15">{15}</a></span>

-The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and

-evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic

-sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil

-which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first

-to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it

-appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages

-has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at

-least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if

-we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it

-matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would

-not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor

-should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.

-Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and

-different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we

-have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we

-have ever forgotten.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16">{16}</a></span>

-<p>

-And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain

-my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached

-its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance

-more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without

-numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape

-in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the

-selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of

-the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices

-of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political

-liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,

-the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the

-actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its

-tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in

-this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789

-was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant

-travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or

-is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had

-then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all

-mankind. Did she deceive herself?

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17">{17}</a></span>

-Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or

-in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we

-progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which

-eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every

-respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;

-for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but

-utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.

-</p>

-<p>

-I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked

-than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of

-opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never

-hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they

-deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to

-pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have

-originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront

-many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no

-sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18">{18}</a></span>

-But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have

-been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon

-the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,

-and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both

-of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the

-world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,

-and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra

-of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive

-motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas

-as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789

-contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,

-truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and

-which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the

-travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to

-France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,

-and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a

-cause of decline.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19">{19}</a></span>

-Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,

-the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past

-centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of

-French society in which it would have bettered its condition by

-halting, or to which it should wish to return.

-</p>

-<p>

-I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our

-social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment

-of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is

-Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us

-in such a work?

-</p>

-<p>

-All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,

-whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or

-Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in

-deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for

-physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and

-effeminacy which they generate.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20">{20}</a></span>

-<p>

-They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we

-consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even

-those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,

-in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his

-habitual language:&mdash;"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten

-o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."

-[Footnote 13]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se

-    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une

-    chemise blanche."]

-</p>

-<p>

-There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be

-vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should

-be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether

-individuals or nations, is that they should not have their

-attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely

-their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they

-have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and

-Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the

-Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort

-or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is

-permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21">{21}</a></span>

-Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and

-sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating

-and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of

-more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a

-state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and

-disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can

-supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.

-Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich

-and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;

-she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she

-inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer

-hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be

-powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can

-never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive

-motive to action, even in that principle of interest which

-politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to

-be a panacea.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22">{22}</a></span>

-Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,

-has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other

-sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an

-Epicurean nor an Egotist.

-</p>

-<p>

-This is the first and the greatest of the services which

-Christianity can and does render in our days to every society

-which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.

-</p>

-<p>

-There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are

-dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without

-incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the

-other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever

-be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or

-measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it

-is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free

-country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of

-society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments

-and nations, to enable them to support that license which they

-cannot suppress.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23">{23}</a></span>

-Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the

-most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license

-for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity

-maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without

-humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the

-rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in

-fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which

-authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the

-most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority

-suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely

-to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,

-that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves

-with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,

-turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as

-such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and

-Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great

-mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to

-order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom

-licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,

-and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims

-and the arms of Liberty.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24">{24}</a></span>

-History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The

-nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has

-not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,&mdash;the

-only nations which, although they have on different occasions and

-by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and

-of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and

-politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of

-the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;

-these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;

-but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once

-come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their

-subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less

-rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25">{25}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it

-that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as

-individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it

-generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already

-more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and

-sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,

-as well as strength to recover lost ground.

-</p>

-<p>

-It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the

-friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary

-admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than

-any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no

-longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the

-encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and

-transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the

-normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and

-with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26">{26}</a></span>

-Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,

-has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the

-conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong

-enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously

-the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the

-Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and

-independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when

-Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power

-and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no

-distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a

-similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the

-Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail

-wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and

-indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the

-permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more

-or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which

-fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly

-modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the

-exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these

-days free institutions can be founded.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27">{27}</a></span>

-<p>

-That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses

-and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with

-the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,

-that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of

-the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all

-other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which

-are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.

-Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every

-human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error

-press so very closely upon each other in this system, that

-Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is

-entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,

-nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to

-another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes

-to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to

-abrogate as it was to create.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28">{28}</a></span>

-The law paramount is the moral law,&mdash;the law laid down by God, to

-which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to

-submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is

-always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights

-of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of

-government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily

-forgets God&mdash;easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort

-of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,

-material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is

-incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with

-which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that

-the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only

-principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic

-of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two

-principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour

-and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29">{29}</a></span>

-A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning

-with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent

-admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and

-it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by

-Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a

-history, which does not come from man, but which, without

-offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,

-no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same

-time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic

-a society is, the more it is important that this double effect

-shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.

-</p>

-<p>

-I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The

-Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally

-against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how

-little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine

-to be good and salutary.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30">{30}</a></span>

-How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other

-respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have

-Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of

-the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty

-unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest

-nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state

-of opinions at the present day.

-</p>

-<p>

-As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst

-Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best

-results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,

-whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as

-the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly

-cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general

-religious community&mdash;between the spiritual and the lay members of

-the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by

-authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations

-which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving

-to the laity a share in the government of the Church.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31">{31}</a></span>

-The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time

-the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from

-their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but

-the relations between the two classes ceased to present the

-appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire

-subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and

-influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although

-remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to

-be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social

-institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one

-time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious

-society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of

-independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State

-and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their

-mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the

-two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have

-mutually recovered their independence;

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32">{32}</a></span>

-elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all

-ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been

-abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his

-individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.

-But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental

-characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from

-the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves

-constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and

-man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is

-particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction

-between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious

-and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its

-right and become an active influence in religious society itself.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33">{33}</a></span>

-<p>

-But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a

-persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much

-calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman

-Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and

-passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed

-with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their

-religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted

-therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to

-their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These

-are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof

-of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the

-holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.

-Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that

-this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will

-towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects

-for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that

-such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present

-constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to

-State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be

-injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to

-individuals.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34">{34}</a></span>

-From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most

-sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as

-Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst

-of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed

-and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in

-order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of

-humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to

-its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in

-all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;

-they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and

-tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;

-they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they

-rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the

-conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the

-guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and

-ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy

-effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate

-result of which has been so glorious.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35">{35}</a></span>

-<p>

-The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and

-useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which

-characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its

-Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,

-that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and

-religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and

-all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome

-and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?

-For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the

-aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and

-political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,

-onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced

-situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more

-menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than

-our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power

-in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in

-principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable

-with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to

-condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of

-modern civilization.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36">{36}</a></span>

-In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall

-here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as

-the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction

-that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and

-dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as

-well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without

-abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally

-essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the

-moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions

-also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,

-that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not

-have accepted and accomplished this work of

-conciliation&mdash;conciliation real and profound&mdash;the friends of

-Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and

-in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,

-those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37">{37}</a></span>

-But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance

-than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which

-utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,

-nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of

-events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and

-not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many

-probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the

-case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,

-many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward

-impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the

-conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less

-a certainty.

-</p>

-<p>

-This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.

-There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of

-different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle

-between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often

-committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly

-profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own

-defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38">{38}</a></span>

-The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,

-the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,

-the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the

-great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by

-the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time

-consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal

-regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and

-signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its

-consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the

-question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation

-between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the

-attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a

-decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of

-1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh

-vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39">{39}</a></span>

-When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism

-treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from

-the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church

-of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all

-that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,

-and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience

-and resignation. She is right.

-</p>

-<p>

-One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this

-stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,

-Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of

-fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody

-persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,

-bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,

-once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their

-cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40">{40}</a></span>

-The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person

-of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive

-but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor

-the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.

-And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what

-activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,

-Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,

-upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society

-had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of

-Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced

-on its road and towards its object.

-</p>

-<p>

-But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of

-Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and

-compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without

-doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she

-lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of

-reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is

-more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it

-and oppose it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41">{41}</a></span>

-This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman

-Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that

-group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which

-continues to play so active a part in struggling for the

-Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:

-these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its

-intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their

-views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux

-Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the

-greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the

-more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the

-disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and

-humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our

-provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have

-not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one

-might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving

-the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the

-people;

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42">{42}</a></span>

-they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the

-conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an

-influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its

-sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost

-without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of

-their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal

-tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman

-Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular

-militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of

-enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case

-by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the

-Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make

-their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its

-laws, and of its liberties.

-</p>

-<p>

-I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I

-observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to

-French institutions,&mdash;for I speak only of France,&mdash;the essential

-consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the

-relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43">{43}</a></span>

-<p>

-I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in

-France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past

-are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof

-from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights

-of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil

-society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts

-and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to

-the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from

-civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this

-respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these

-are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for

-religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to

-stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman

-Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of

-modern society, who most dispute about the general question of

-liberty.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44">{44}</a></span>

-<p>

-The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this

-question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in

-one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,

-on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from

-religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty

-in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy

-in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other

-solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and

-their mutual independence.

-</p>

-<p>

-That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State

-to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I

-well understand.

-</p>

-<p>

-She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of

-strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her

-stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves

-religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a

-fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially

-democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under

-the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the

-influence of the religious authorities.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45">{45}</a></span>

-This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental

-principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is

-impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded

-by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.

-But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance

-of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church

-would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious

-and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large

-measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the

-religious society and of the civil society which the Church and

-the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those

-who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective

-principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on

-in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the

-good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself

-is soon compromised.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46">{46}</a></span>

-The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of

-Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of

-Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because

-there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental

-institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon

-some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant

-guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and

-were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from

-which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed

-on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices

-for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,

-of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in

-Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is

-occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy

-and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church

-with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>

-In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,

-when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for

-any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever

-indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be

-serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting

-parties should recognise and accept in each other, without

-equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each

-really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an

-alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of

-the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring

-ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,

-obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret

-warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending

-any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust

-in it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48">{48}</a></span>

-As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without

-endangering her habits, at least without endangering her

-essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace

-with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual

-civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how

-to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give

-way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a

-source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she

-would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of

-separation and complete independence.

-</p>

-<p>

-As for the State, the system which separates the two societies

-would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it

-would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of

-many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle

-of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance

-which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such

-principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce

-Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous

-bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from

-every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy

-themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their

-thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and

-its affairs.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49">{49}</a></span>

-Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at

-the present day, a moral influence of great value from an

-alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one

-condition which is not only especially important in our days, but

-of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of

-manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the

-alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference

-in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the

-church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious

-discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving

-their indirect support to the state government, and which can

-purge their support of all impure motives.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50">{50}</a></span>

-The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain

-degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their

-respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part

-of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at

-the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the

-master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor

-priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and

-their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone

-give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,

-if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.

-</p>

-<p>

-Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the

-facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,

-Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be

-free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.

-Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave

-feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and

-distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles

-essential to civil society and religious society, of any

-compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the

-faults which the two institutions have committed towards each

-other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51">{51}</a></span>

-Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have

-become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,

-something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty

-neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their

-legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations

-to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,

-whether allied with or independent of the Church.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52">{52}</a></span>

-<br>

-           <h2>Second Meditation.

-<br><br>

-       Christianity And Morality.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different

-characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously

-minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves

-Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from

-Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea

-of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.

-Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour

-to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the

-abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its

-authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we

-find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the

-other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either

-natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days

-proclaimed and propagated with ardour.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53">{53}</a></span>

-<p>

-I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and

-upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.

-In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest

-intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.

-Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced

-that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested

-or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;

-they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth

-alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and

-which some now strive to accredit.

-</p>

-<p>

-The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the

-scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians

-are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of

-its efficacy.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54">{54}</a></span>

-A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate

-the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to

-it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate

-it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is

-here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent

-Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and

-to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being

-wrecked.

-</p>

-<p>

-The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who

-flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality

-standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,&mdash;and they who

-believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from

-religion,&mdash;err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential

-facts of human nature and of human society.

-</p>

-<p>

-Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete

-observation of these facts. I have already stated in these

-Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality

-from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55">{55}</a></span>

-At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,

-and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I

-affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary

-union between morality and religion.

-</p>

-<p>

-A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the

-theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there

-is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested

-motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and

-treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.

-</p>

-<p>

-I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they

-forget that it <i>has</i> been, and still <i>is</i>, strongly

-contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.

-Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the

-satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate

-aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,

-not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common

-welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could

-perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy

-of human sentiments.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56">{56}</a></span>

-The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the

-recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the

-most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,

-with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to

-other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding

-fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than

-in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive

-themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of

-religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,

-and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive

-themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a

-prey to the disputes of man.

-</p>

-<p>

-I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders

-of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it

-is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it

-contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential

-elements.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57">{57}</a></span>

-<p>

-These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral

-good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;

-the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and

-philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the

-natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human

-morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man

-is a moral being.

-</p>

-<p>

-I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I

-do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard

-or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any

-one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent

-morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and

-myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the

-true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its

-signification, and accept its results.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58">{58}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not

-satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to

-himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their

-origin and object, their import and bearing.

-</p>

-<p>

-In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from

-which science sets out; it is only after having well observed

-facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the

-questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which

-the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of

-human morality, such as I have just described it in its three

-constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot

-fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral

-law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the

-ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or

-violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes

-of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or

-elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man

-as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of

-man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three

-constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine

-rightly its source and bearing.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59">{59}</a></span>

-<p>

-Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring

-from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that

-he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.

-Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they

-depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,

-or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the

-feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them

-accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.

-</p>

-<p>

-But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral

-law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes

-its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their

-own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in

-refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may

-attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically

-possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another

-law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever

-they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,

-they bow before it as before something which does not emanate

-from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60">{60}</a></span>

-<p>

-The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the

-world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the

-characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the

-results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the

-forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations

-or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it

-addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of

-whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to

-crush him, still man would be more noble than that which

-destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the

-advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows

-nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,

-sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily&mdash;that he chooses

-to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61">{61}</a></span>

-<p>

-What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called

-Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command

-man's Liberty to respect it?

-</p>

-<p>

-Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority

-solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is

-said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his

-right that no human being shall attack his independence or his

-dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and

-therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual

-right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but

-the right which it is recognised that another possesses."

-[Footnote 14]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,

-    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62">{62}</a></span>

-<p>

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

-</p>

-<p>

-Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,

-does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises

-himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and

-admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which

-arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have

-done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest

-apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence

-and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to

-attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for

-himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental

-principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there

-is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the

-right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to

-it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has

-another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on

-the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the

-paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the

-moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63">{63}</a></span>

-<p>

-Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of

-the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to

-attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral

-law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and

-imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love

-them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love

-those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to

-you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."

-"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing

-again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the

-children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and

-to the evil." [Footnote 15]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of

-the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If

-we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other

-respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point

-with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64">{64}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion

-of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of

-those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is

-the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on

-the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law

-to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet

-melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a

-person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a

-modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light

-as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea

-of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a

-moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not

-a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the

-moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power

-attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the

-relations of men with one another.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65">{65}</a></span>

-Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there

-would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does

-not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to

-govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice

-cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,

-as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed

-to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as

-essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the

-social bond;&mdash;the means of peace and of Union amongst

-mankind;&mdash;the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and

-defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every

-man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep

-others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him

-to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and

-respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the

-man who has a right has absolutely nothing.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66">{66}</a></span>

-Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of

-physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ

-the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which

-triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify

-the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made

-his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis

-of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of

-right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the

-stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of

-duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of

-defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which

-serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society

-upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away

-the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir

-    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in

-    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur

-    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,

-    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"

-    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67">{67}</a></span>

-<p>

-This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in

-considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the

-independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the

-theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral

-elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,

-the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,

-sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the

-independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely

-strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of

-man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their

-duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for

-and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,

-and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to

-honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's

-existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which

-the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense

-which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:

-their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68">{68}</a></span>

-<p>

-I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the

-principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from

-man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man

-only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and

-mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free

-and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he

-is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his

-own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not

-make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even

-whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot

-withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his

-future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is

-essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its

-subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69">{69}</a></span>

-<p>

-Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working

-its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without

-further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When

-the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and

-acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his

-act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,

-for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not

-merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they

-find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced

-to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the

-laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal

-punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of

-remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the

-proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is

-that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the

-hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove

-that it may be always reawakened.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70">{70}</a></span>

-Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.

-Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that

-to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which

-feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.

-</p>

-<p>

-As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an

-idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made

-of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,

-ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of

-merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common

-sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the

-accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.

-It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and

-most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the

-political organisation of society, and in the problems which

-concern the eternal future.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71">{71}</a></span>

-However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or

-delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of

-a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the

-responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its

-complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and

-equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.

-</p>

-<p>

-Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have

-scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's

-nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have

-considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely

-apart from every other element and every other consideration.

-Those moral facts are briefly as follows:&mdash;

-</p>

-<p class="cite">

-  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.

-<br><br>

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

-<br><br>

-  Moral Liberty.

-<br><br>

-  Moral Responsibility.

-<br><br>

-  Moral merit and demerit.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72">{72}</a></span>

-<p>

-These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the

-proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these

-truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are

-they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,

-or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they

-self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which

-form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot

-elude this question.

-</p>

-<p>

-I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;

-that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not

-one of those laws of fate by which the material world is

-governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free

-world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as

-law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.

-Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man&mdash;upon man

-of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without

-enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life

-is passed?

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73">{73}</a></span>

-Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law

-emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense

-which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,

-Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order

-reigning in it:&mdash;

-<p class="cite">

-  "Je ne puis songer<br>

-  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."

-<br><br>

-  I cannot think<br>

-  This clock exists and never had a maker.

-</p>

-<p>

-In the moral world we have to do with something far different

-from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine

-constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is

-to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free

-agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to

-accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the

-supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the

-expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both

-contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant

-found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is

-nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human

-Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most

-clearly, most undeniably.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74">{74}</a></span>

-<p>

-Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose

-it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river

-without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free

-agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete

-and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and

-loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law

-reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility

-reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human

-invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral

-responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and

-just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is

-contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral

-responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that

-is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and

-impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in

-a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to

-establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75">{75}</a></span>

-<p>

-Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human

-nature&mdash;that is, the distinction between moral good and moral

-evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and

-demerit,&mdash;are necessarily and intimately connected with the

-truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God

-moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and

-essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a

-thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of

-man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble

-to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that

-ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is

-reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its

-authority.

-</p>

-<p>

-Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and

-described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable

-from Religion.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76">{76}</a></span>

-<p>

-What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the

-heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are

-distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to

-each other in the unity of the human being?

-</p>

-<p>

-The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the

-study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms

-Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most

-remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant

-struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle

-what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent

-an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and

-what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected

-in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by

-the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to

-all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the

-moral law, the moral judgment comes.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77">{77}</a></span>

-"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero

-prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up

-unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just

-providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of

-the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was

-the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman

-Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very

-Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after

-having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice

-of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on

-the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on

-account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had

-governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by

-those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is

-incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in

-this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and

-Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,

-sometimes manifests itself there with <i>éclat</i>, and sometimes

-remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre

-mysteries.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78">{78}</a></span>

-Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall

-truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now

-occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore

-order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;

-in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still

-mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is

-intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as

-little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in

-that of the individual man.

-</p>

-<p>

-In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far

-from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they

-progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days

-exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to

-events of the most contradictory character: everything in the

-world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts

-has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79">{79}</a></span>

-Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more

-than feeble convictions&mdash;dim hopes? On the other side, in the

-midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power

-over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and

-confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the

-material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and

-paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have

-plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the

-fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human

-conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in

-our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;

-intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's

-soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80">{80}</a></span>

-<p>

-Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and

-indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have

-limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the

-advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I

-have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,

-natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of

-man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the

-threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general

-that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which

-it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his

-unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity

-alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and

-security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is

-not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic

-value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human

-soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect

-harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already

-tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful

-expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the

-moral being.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81">{81}</a></span>

-<p>

-The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is

-the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral

-ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been

-contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour

-it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure

-their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,

-Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is

-singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most

-illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,

-understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and

-incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear

-light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to

-their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for

-conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they

-taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they

-founded schools or sects.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>

-The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a

-philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and

-instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around

-him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain

-special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of

-mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of

-discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to

-the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the

-moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his

-disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,

-and then to all men:&mdash;"Save your soul, for what would it profit a

-man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and

-preach to all nations."

-</p>

-<p>

-What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so

-ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so

-universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83">{83}</a></span>

-<p>

-And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has

-been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward

-movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly

-arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,

-it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of

-Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and

-the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen

-centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and

-evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that

-Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to

-fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same

-task, and promises herself fresh success.

-</p>

-<p>

-Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me

-at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the

-Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which

-she entertains in the midst of her trials.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84">{84}</a></span>

-<p>

-Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,

-cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them

-proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are

-solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,

-regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human

-actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a

-careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them

-to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both

-amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the

-regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how

-serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that

-sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the

-nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same

-time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the

-same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man

-the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his

-soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates

-it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it

-with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared

-for every sacrifice.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85">{85}</a></span>

-Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine

-of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin

-without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the

-sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so

-well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely

-and so austerely?

-</p>

-<p>

-Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with

-man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its

-rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment

-of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and

-thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he

-opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a

-hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness

-inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy

-the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to

-be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a

-recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the

-equitable benevolence of God.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86">{86}</a></span>

-The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man

-during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store

-for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom

-of God" and "the promises of eternal life."

-</p>

-<p>

-Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he

-keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,

-his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to

-fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the

-world, without any <i>dénouement</i>. He has a prospect, and a

-futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and

-superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain

-this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and

-respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality

-with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole

-view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny

-of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which

-weigh upon the thought and life of man!

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87">{87}</a></span>

-<p>

-I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the

-peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However

-high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely

-less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is

-purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours

-produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical

-work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of

-its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,

-the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from

-which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to

-induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine

-law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it

-is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its

-sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,

-we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon

-which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it

-undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to

-procure the salvation of man by his reformation.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88">{88}</a></span>

-<p>

-When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these

-Meditations&mdash;the subject of which is the actual state of the

-Christian Religion&mdash;I essayed to characterise therein the

-fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which

-combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my

-companion in life, and my <i>confrère</i> at the Institute, M.

-Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I

-maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,

-he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:&mdash;

-<p class="cite">

-  "My dear Friend,

-<br><br>

-  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I

-  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The

-  little difference between our opinions, which you have not

-  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the

-  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which

-  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the

-  nature of religion.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89">{89}</a></span>

-  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still

-  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an

-  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more

-  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself

-  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other

-  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from

-  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets

-  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by

-  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of

-  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,

-  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them

-  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the

-  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in

-  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of

-  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy

-  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must

-  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,

-  grandeur, and peace.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90">{90}</a></span>

-<p class="cite">

-  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,

-  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our

-  old and sincere friendship."

-</p>

-<p>

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

-</p>

-<p class="cite">

-  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our

-  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere

-  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,

-  because, independently of our particular and petty

-  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a

-  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that

-  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor

-  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their

-  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their

-  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91">{91}</a></span>

-  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,

-  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.

-  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin

-  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of

-  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which

-  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God

-  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to

-  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of

-  his free will.

-<br><br>

-  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions

-  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."

-</p>

-<p>

-I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at

-Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other

-afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed

-upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence

-we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole

-question.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92">{92}</a></span>

-It is this&mdash;What are the points of resemblance, and what of

-difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity

-and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the

-reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,

-we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their

-nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,

-and the character of their mission.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93">{93}</a></span>

-<br>

-           <h2>Third Meditation.

-<br><br>

-        Christianity And Science.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which

-Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account

-of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely

-inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that

-divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,

-and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man

-without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which

-Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make

-these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are

-possessed. &hellip; They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."

-[Footnote 18]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]

-<br><br>

-    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,

-    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.

-    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94">{94}</a></span>

-<p>

-The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a

-different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine

-inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work

-directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this

-themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly

-implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter

-and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it

-positively. [Footnote 19]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the

-    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"

-    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and

-    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only

-    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to

-    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his

-    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]

-</p>

-<p>

-This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of

-the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an

-acceptation as in later times.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95">{95}</a></span>

-In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the

-school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration

-of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,

-strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of

-inspiration, and to explain one by the other&mdash;"It is not by any

-effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,

-"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so

-divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the

-saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;

-pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the

-divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself

-from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the

-musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us

-the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,

-"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the

-other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of

-individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed

-aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing

-them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute

-the breath which makes it discourse its music."

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96">{96}</a></span>

-<p>

-Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of

-the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as

-to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence

-proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the

-formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But

-even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,

-great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and

-St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it

-was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they

-distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of

-God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms

-in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking

-of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken

-of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to

-speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97">{97}</a></span>

-Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. &hellip; When we meet

-with such diversity of expressions&mdash;although not in themselves

-contradictory&mdash;used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the

-words of each, only the intent with which the words are

-pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of

-truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the

-very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else

-which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."

-</p>

-<p>

-It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this

-explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine

-inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the

-fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.

-</p>

-<p>

-I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of

-darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of

-uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the

-invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;

-that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle

-Age.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98">{98}</a></span>

-<p>

-I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch

-of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned

-upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;

-for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been

-fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet

-destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the

-world.

-</p>

-<p>

-Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and

-events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of

-the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of

-Christian societies, I find that this question had received two

-solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its

-representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the

-Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The

-Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of

-the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;

-surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious

-reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these

-books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and

-canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they

-are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the

-ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the

-    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10&mdash;13. Paris, 1686.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99">{99}</a></span>

-<p>

-The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they

-began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts

-and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and

-complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,

-narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the

-old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's

-dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100">{100}</a></span>

-<p>

-The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church

-of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the

-sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly

-respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic

-sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the

-complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute

-infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make

-this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters

-of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of

-God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which

-they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we

-repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the

-two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.

-    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]

-</p>

-<p>

-"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and

-hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of

-humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their

-action and their force, you err. &hellip; God does everything by

-command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air

-with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to

-will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.

-    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres

-    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101">{101}</a></span>

-<p>

-The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the

-nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of

-these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of

-Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the

-Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the

-Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible

-authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,

-found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the

-movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the

-infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the

-present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new

-dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their

-ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,

-have pushed the two doctrines,&mdash;the former of ecclesiastical

-authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,&mdash;to their

-extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right

-and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102">{102}</a></span>

-I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines

-referred to,&mdash;they severally infringe, the one the rights of

-religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both

-cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they

-have, in these respects, severally ill understood.

-</p>

-<p>

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

-23]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.

-    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.

-    145-146. London, 1864.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in

-the Scriptures is divinely inspired&mdash;the words as well as the

-ideas, all the words used upon all subjects&mdash;the material of

-language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this

-assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound

-misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred

-books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in

-grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give

-instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>

-It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men

-towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of

-conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.

-It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,

-that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."

-</p>

-<p>

-I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over

-again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole

-object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.

-The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the

-Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine

-truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in

-intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and

-with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,

-in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the

-midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the

-unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,

-Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and

-of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of

-curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and

-perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104">{104}</a></span>

-What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their

-points of connection and their contests,&mdash;God watching over and

-acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,

-God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the

-expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each

-acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man

-after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,

-nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating

-man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he

-enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from

-heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious

-and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a

-free agent.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105">{105}</a></span>

-At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous

-action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his

-passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as

-he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the

-good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.

-This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the

-relations of Man with God.

-</p>

-<p>

-What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful

-connection exists, in this history, between those whom&mdash;how shall

-I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not

-appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so

-untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the

-plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,

-invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to

-us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no

-historical narrative or document, does man show himself more

-violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to

-ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst

-the Hebrews.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106">{106}</a></span>

-Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between

-the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and

-the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from

-God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,

-and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly

-violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in

-his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much

-from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not

-change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a

-witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his

-errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily

-before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to

-interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is

-ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and

-labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts

-and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the

-only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107">{107}</a></span>

-<p>

-In what do those relations consist? By what results does this

-continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this

-incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and

-commands, religious and moral&mdash;God proposes these to man; he

-enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands

-nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he

-commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's

-speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his

-prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.

-Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of

-possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human

-sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people

-whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance

-and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,

-in the midst of which they are living.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>

-When they are made the medium for the religious and moral

-precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer

-mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of

-divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it

-to all around them.

-</p>

-<p>

-I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I

-regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,&mdash;the

-simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human

-element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its

-imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his

-religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere

-the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points

-of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his

-barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider

-some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,

-which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109">{109}</a></span>

-<p>

-I open the book of Genesis and read:&mdash;

-</p>

-<p class="cite">

-  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt

-  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here

-  I am.

-<br><br>

-  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou

-  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him

-  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I

-  will tell thee of.

-<br><br>

-  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,

-  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and

-  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went

-  unto the place of which God had told him.

-<br><br>

-  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the

-  place afar off.

-<br><br>

-  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the

-  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come

-  again to you.

-<br><br>

-  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it

-  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a

-  knife: and they went both of them together.

-<br><br>

-  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:

-  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire

-  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?

-<br><br>

-  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a

-  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110">{110}</a></span>

-  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and

-  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and

-  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.

-<br><br>

-  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to

-  slay his son.

-<br><br>

-  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and

-  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.

-<br><br>

-  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou

-  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,

-  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

-<br><br>

-  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind

-  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went

-  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in

-  the stead of his son."

-</p>

-<p>

-A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his

-mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is

-an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean

-of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the

-Biblical truths to which I am referring.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111">{111}</a></span>

-<p>

-"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of

-religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong

-tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest

-feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes

-suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and

-with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to

-propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by

-surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the

-source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct

-that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,

-or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.

-On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these

-two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of

-evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness

-in the life of Abraham. &hellip;

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112">{112}</a></span>

-The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the

-son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.

-The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than

-sacrifice,&mdash;that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest

-offering that God can receive. &hellip; We have a proverb which tells

-us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.

-    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,

-    1867.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in

-the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been

-forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and

-the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the

-hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from

-the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law

-and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.

-</p>

-<p>

-The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full

-concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is

-in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more

-than he points out.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113">{113}</a></span>

-This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which

-he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the

-Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but

-Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such

-sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and

-manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even

-of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he

-pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is

-beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine

-command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac

-is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of

-course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition

-of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he

-believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;

-    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively

-    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.

-    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114">{114}</a></span>

-<p>

-It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,

-in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental

-characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,

-although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the

-divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and

-word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my

-conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in

-the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,

-which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement

-of progress.

-</p>

-<p>

-I say progress,&mdash;progress immense, infinitely grander than man's

-imagination could ever have conceived,&mdash;and at the same time the

-character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is

-no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the

-continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world

-and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the

-New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to

-recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer

-directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115">{115}</a></span>

-It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,

-and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under

-a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,

-intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of

-suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the

-victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,

-God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.

-Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He

-manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by

-natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!

-what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of

-His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself

-upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,

-separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw

-it from the contagion of idolatry;&mdash;but now it is for the whole

-world, for all nations, for future as well as for living

-generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the

-barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the

-God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over

-the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His

-servants to extend His empire.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116">{116}</a></span>

-<p>

-He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to

-spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate

-from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.

-Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,

-although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human

-errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the

-law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors

-with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature

-of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,

-and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.

-He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and

-brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and

-perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will

-not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very

-texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their

-most essential precepts.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117">{117}</a></span>

-<p>

-I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,

-foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for

-stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this <i>lex talionis</i>.

-"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy

-neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your

-enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate

-you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute

-you." [Footnote 27]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-<br><br>

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

-</p>

-<p>

-It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a

-wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour

-in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then

-let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,

-an</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118">{118}</a></span>

-<p>

-I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and

-asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? &hellip; And

-he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And

-they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to

-put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the

-hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the

-beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this

-cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his

-wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more

-twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,

-let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be

-found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall

-both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the

-woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119">{119}</a></span>

-<p>

-Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the

-scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;

-and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,

-Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now

-Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but

-what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might

-have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger

-wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they

-continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,

-He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at

-her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they

-which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out

-one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and

-Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When

-Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said

-unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man

-condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,

-Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120">{120}</a></span>

-<p>

-The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of

-rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain

-external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration

-and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and

-Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the

-acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a

-lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;

-and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of

-Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and

-ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.

-&hellip; Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, &hellip; the hour cometh,

-and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in

-spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.

-God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in

-spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121">{121}</a></span>

-<p>

-Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and

-to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is

-about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man

-had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;

-he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity

-and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious

-and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the

-religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and

-extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself

-with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;

-political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all

-in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either

-social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make

-neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions

-advanced, he sets them aside;

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122">{122}</a></span>

-"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the

-things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and

-earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and

-prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human

-being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every

-man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every

-human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole

-idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that

-when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary

-consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his

-righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."

-[Footnote 34]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>

-<p>

-I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its

-different and special objects,&mdash;whether astronomy, geology,

-geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,&mdash;is as

-foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred

-Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man

-left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,

-assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious

-exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,

-then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts

-declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to

-facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no

-disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine

-torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the

-language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak

-according to the measure of their knowledge or of their

-ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order

-to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that

-men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124">{124}</a></span>

-In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,

-and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,

-aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to

-employ a similar language,&mdash;a language comprehended and received

-by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their

-inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters

-purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the

-mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of

-science, but according to their appearances, and so men

-comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear

-them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of

-ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.

-What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the

-person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his

-missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which

-turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that

-it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its

-circumference?

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125">{125}</a></span>

-What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the

-language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific

-imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that

-language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or

-moral law of humanity?

-</p>

-<p>

-No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater

-admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and

-it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of

-man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no

-sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,

-to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of

-publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely

-human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is

-essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in

-need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of

-God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the

-religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his

-life, and to decide his lot in eternity.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126">{126}</a></span>

-It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of

-all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated

-philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the

-most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,

-thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from

-being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. &hellip;

-After death the reason,&mdash;just ideas survive; all the rest

-perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even

-from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in

-God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them

-only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble

-souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made

-up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish

-almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple

-accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul

-of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely

-troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the

-consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really

-are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of

-soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation

-    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127">{127}</a></span>

-<p>

-I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought

-showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the

-favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour

-at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not

-believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is

-declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good

-their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128">{128}</a></span>

-<br>

-           <h2>Fourth Meditation.

-<br><br>

-          Christian Ignorance.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have

-either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the

-intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that

-it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,

-to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any

-kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind

-limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there

-a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the

-objects are different to which it is applied? These are

-questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words

-"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to

-offer what appears to me to be the right solution.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129">{129}</a></span>

-<p>

-I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or

-systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to

-make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,

-Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these

-sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,

-Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.

-I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these

-systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to

-undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all

-philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special

-questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between

-Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus

-only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to

-the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,

-their bearing and their limitation.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>

-<p>

-I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the

-first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,

-Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the

-distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,

-Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology

-is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great

-philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which

-Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more

-eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak

-more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of

-Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible

-to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or

-non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for

-which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.

-    By M. Littré, p. 519.]

-</p>

-<p>

-That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,

-Ontology, and Theology are not&mdash;cannot be&mdash;sciences.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131">{131}</a></span>

-As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,

-and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of

-Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of

-Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three

-schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them

-the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term

-"Christian Ignorance."

-</p>

-<p>

-It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and

-with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this

-question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which

-they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as

-Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of

-the four sciences&mdash;Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and

-Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there

-to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there

-discovered.

-</p>

-<p>

-When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is

-indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more

-so, than Spiritualism itself.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132">{132}</a></span>

-It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all

-Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal

-in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other

-questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and

-Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between

-Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between

-Rationalistic science and Christian science.

-</p>

-<p>

-Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of

-Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it

-admits that these different sciences owe their birth and

-development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men

-and of things, and have for their object the solution of the

-questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once

-admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology

-alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of

-Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which

-the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to

-say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for

-human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source

-other than human reason.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133">{133}</a></span>

-Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and

-other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts

-supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it

-recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are

-bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand

-that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human

-mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the

-history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth

-of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have

-testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as

-well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact

-proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,

-the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical

-Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which

-Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data

-and the legitimate bases of science.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134">{134}</a></span>

-<p>

-I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and

-to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to

-the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human

-experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no

-intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great

-question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with

-respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall

-return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has

-not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it

-demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas&mdash;facts,

-rather&mdash;absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic

-opponents of the supernatural.

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.

-    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,

-    1864.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal

-causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and

-distinctive characteristic of man.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135">{135}</a></span>

-It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself

-above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things

-determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it

-in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any

-general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such

-facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a

-machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to

-drive man back to the condition of that nature which is

-substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish

-at one blow human morality and human liberty.

-</p>

-<p>

-The blow strikes still higher&mdash;it would abolish God. God, who

-created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his

-creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the

-daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that

-human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies

-to the source from which it emanates.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>

-By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the

-condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble

-of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;

-that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of

-Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical

-reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,

-nothing more than Atheism.

-</p>

-<p>

-The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this

-consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being

-disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the

-most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from

-entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be

-finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not

-assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical

-consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident

-in the moral and social condition of humanity.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137">{137}</a></span>

-<p>

-There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of

-the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that

-the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and

-permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential

-laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings

-whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject

-absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of

-necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in

-harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly

-perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If

-the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will

-venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even

-there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that

-the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small

-Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every

-place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in

-the midst of space and of time?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138">{138}</a></span>

-<p>

-Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it

-admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe&mdash;an unknown

-incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and

-admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.

-de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime

-flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing

-in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows

-how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the

-fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches

-us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the

-discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in

-the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest

-and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in

-the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to

-these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality

-of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely

-minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the

-reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects

-than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it

-discovers.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>

-What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the

-worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no

-more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that

-all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those

-inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same

-conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our

-science becomes very modest when set side by side with our

-ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,

-however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may

-be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is

-either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing

-this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,

-Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which

-outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140">{140}</a></span>

-<p>

-Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity

-has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the

-reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one

-side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life

-of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life

-of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,

-a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the

-other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and

-with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of

-the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible

-laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places

-itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the

-spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the

-extent.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141">{141}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another

-adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by

-asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts

-and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,

-let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I

-address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by

-the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before

-speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,

-I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is

-here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion

-in the great struggle in which it is engaged.

-</p>

-<p>

-The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an

-uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.

-Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these

-documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the

-facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the

-less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a

-poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion

-of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of

-the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius

-were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral

-precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes

-and subjects.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142">{142}</a></span>

-I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human

-imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books

-which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time

-incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential

-characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its

-latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the

-Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing

-centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil

-society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another

-and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a

-religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have

-been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of

-God upon the destinies of Mankind.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>

-<p>

-In proportion to the vigour with which these events have

-developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed

-to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its

-peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.

-</p>

-<p>

-What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the

-means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays

-to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he

-believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his

-thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to

-attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the

-Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,

-he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,

-cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does

-Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,

-to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very

-presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of

-God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow

-the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him

-imperfectly,&mdash;where he attempts to carry the torch of human

-science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144">{144}</a></span>

-<p>

-I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two

-examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.

-</p>

-<p>

-The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and

-Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly

-repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive

-documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that

-"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the

-Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all

-theological controversies. To disregard this fact&mdash;to deny the

-divinity of Jesus Christ&mdash;is to deny, to overthrow the Christian

-religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never

-have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation

-was its principle, and Jesus Christ&mdash;God and Man&mdash;its author."

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of

-    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145">{145}</a></span>

-<p>

-But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this

-sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought

-to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the

-human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such

-union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's

-personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,

-which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the

-divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the

-councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and

-agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.

-</p>

-<p>

-Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of

-divine History.

-</p>

-<p>

-The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as

-unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the

-Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of

-Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy

-Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146">{146}</a></span>

-The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its

-place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very

-beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves

-to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to

-determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the

-religions truth; in other words, to transform history into

-science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the

-authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,

-rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of

-the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,

-and Holy Ghost.

-</p>

-<p>

-I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the

-doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either

-originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their

-essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to

-human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less

-legitimate, of Religion.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147">{147}</a></span>

-<p>

-When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of

-Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do

-not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The

-scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,

-always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of

-the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves

-to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and

-thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause

-of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral

-influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and

-authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have

-been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than

-efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their

-mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The

-Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this

-was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;

-forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they

-have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by

-explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an

-intermixture of man's work.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148">{148}</a></span>

-Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same

-time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can

-recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man

-to make of them a science.

-</p>

-<p>

-Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his

-explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:

-"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,

-or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add

-to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity

-and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this

-is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."

-[Footnote 39]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.

-    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian

-ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to

-take refuge.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149">{149}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are

-unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a

-serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and

-what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to

-believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of

-man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in

-religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only

-their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own

-work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most

-logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this

-respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly

-be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian

-ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to

-moderation and charity than Theological science.

-</p>

-<p>

-But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and

-efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human

-science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the

-same error and the same peril.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150">{150}</a></span>

-The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God

-to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and

-inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and

-mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon

-certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations

-of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the

-hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and

-the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter

-themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the

-solution of such questions is hidden.

-</p>

-<p>

-I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious

-impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets

-of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling

-curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?

-Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself

-under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be

-possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and

-powerless?

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151">{151}</a></span>

-There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and

-under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost

-recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding

-from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to

-them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who

-of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of

-a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,

-conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,

-in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of

-human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event

-brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to

-which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine

-Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt

-the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve

-problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to

-rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine

-author.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152">{152}</a></span>

-But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No

-doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by

-his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to

-our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and

-his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their

-effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general

-problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions

-touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of

-Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into

-ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at

-limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific

-vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to

-overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon

-man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,

-"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his

-charity, and his liberty.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153">{153}</a></span>

-<br>

-           <h2>Fifth Meditation.

-<br><br>

-           Christian Faith.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé

-Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the

-Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue

-Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is

-called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it

-expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.

-Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in

-its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to

-my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages

-which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the

-imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to

-regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a

-starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I

-now give to the press.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154">{154}</a></span>

-<p>

-By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in

-facts or dogmas of a special nature&mdash;in facts or dogmas of

-religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in

-speaking of <i>the faith</i> the term is used alone and

-absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its

-fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from

-which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the

-following are met with:&mdash;"I have full <i>faith</i> in your words;

-this man has <i>faith</i> in himself&mdash;in his strength&mdash;in his

-fortune, &amp;c." This employment of the word <i>faith</i> in secular

-matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it

-is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never

-been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had

-also other significations attached to it.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155">{155}</a></span>

-<p>

-It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular

-opinion, 1st, that the word <i>faith</i> designates a certain

-internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a

-certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of

-the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,

-nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied

-to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its

-special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the

-variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are

-taking place every day?

-</p>

-<p>

-Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a

-religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy

-of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing

-in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction

-of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called

-<i>Faith</i>; a name which neither masters and disciples will

-repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156">{156}</a></span>

-Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the

-truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the

-conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been

-generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;

-that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name

-of <i>Faith</i>, is its energy, is the empire which that energy

-gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith

-of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth

-century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of

-Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.

-</p>

-<p>

-The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it

-was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by

-an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of

-persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened

-reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral

-affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to

-feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave

-the name of <i>Faith</i> to the result of their action, just as

-they had done so to the result of the process essentially

-intellectual of which I was before speaking.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157">{157}</a></span>

-Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by

-reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is

-the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.

-</p>

-<p>

-Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always

-sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has

-been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to

-practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach

-ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a

-meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind

-was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to

-certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it

-had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission

-of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to

-govern man's life and to regulate his thought.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158">{158}</a></span>

-<p>

-Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated

-in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the

-intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation

-of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that

-it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by

-any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention

-and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became

-thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive

-character.

-</p>

-<p>

-The word <i>faith</i> has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,

-a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human

-intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the

-sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often

-even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's

-long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to

-command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural

-means,&mdash;by divine grace.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159">{159}</a></span>

-<p>

-What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may

-emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What

-is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider

-it independently of its origin and of its object?

-</p>

-<p>

-Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it

-innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,

-but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and

-establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being

-aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or

-volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and

-the influence of that external world in the midst of which his

-life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of

-laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary

-study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all

-his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering

-it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there

-taking place&mdash;to render an account thereof to himself, and thus

-to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge

-which he did not before possess, although the facts which form

-its object nevertheless existed as facts external&mdash;and which he

-might see by his eyes,&mdash;or as facts which were taking place

-within him.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160">{160}</a></span>

-<p>

-Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of

-<i>faith</i>?

-</p>

-<p>

-It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to

-that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:

-such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man

-in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he

-dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,

-unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it

-the characteristics of <i>faith?</i>

-</p>

-<p>

-Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time

-others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost

-unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and

-spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without

-which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct

-without having given it any intimate and personal assent.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161">{161}</a></span>

-It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,

-admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to

-say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him

-to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful

-principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the

-profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which

-reigns over him. <i>Faith</i>, on the contrary, has this power;

-faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which

-faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account

-to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will

-do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind

-it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of

-human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of

-gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth

-which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,

-of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much

-more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does

-much more than direct him, it enlightens him.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>

-How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and

-instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without

-our being able to affirm that they have <i>faith</i> in them.

-Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,

-nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without

-seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,

-however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,

-should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction

-between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their

-nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their

-legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by

-comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying

-it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a

-sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and

-establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;

-this is no longer simple natural belief, it is <i>faith</i>.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163">{163}</a></span>

-<p>

-Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two

-kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them

-the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous

-belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and

-science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is

-individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,

-dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison

-with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,

-faith is the full security of man in the possession of his

-belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path

-which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and

-a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent

-harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man

-whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition

-present no longer any problems for solution as to the things

-which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full

-possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and

-in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>

-As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,

-it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external

-conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from

-other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its

-object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined

-and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature

-itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may

-be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the

-intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in

-the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory

-of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so

-forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of

-every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally

-oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of

-the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the

-exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long

-obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the

-three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,

-and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously

-satisfied.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165">{165}</a></span>

-Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a

-situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of

-its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need

-be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his

-faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral

-nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.

-</p>

-<p>

-The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith

-would seem <i>à priori</i> to be intellectual beauty, and

-practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the

-mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent

-or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but

-the name of <i>faith</i> would not be suitably applied to it.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166">{166}</a></span>

-Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an

-idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also

-attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the

-pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple

-belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may

-become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure

-to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to

-awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin

-and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall

-be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and

-the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the

-other, and to unite them.

-</p>

-<p>

-It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost

-exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief

-possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote

-40] which provoke the development of faith.

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167">{167}</a></span>

-<p>

-Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful

-applications; political theories may strike the mind by the

-elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of

-their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more

-surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor

-have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in

-the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression

-at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their

-practical importance, a certain measure of science and of

-sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as

-the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does

-not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on

-the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in

-itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;

-having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and

-undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however

-rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once

-sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an

-habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him

-access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual

-life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;

-it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over

-him the empire of the most powerful interest.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168">{168}</a></span>

-Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition

-to a state of <i>faith</i> should be so rapid and so general? But

-it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to

-transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary

-energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free

-and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to

-impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith

-which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which

-addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the

-loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,

-can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral

-nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to

-the mission prescribed to him by his thought.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169">{169}</a></span>

-But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of

-the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience

-proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the

-different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more

-its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by

-his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections

-or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the

-abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring

-from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once

-there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to

-diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law

-of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,

-it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its

-designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost

-always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this

-mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any

-other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and

-of society falling under oppression.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170">{170}</a></span>

-<p>

-For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in

-belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his

-will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,

-has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith

-fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty

-does not exist, faith first usurps,&mdash;then becomes

-bewildered&mdash;finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to

-the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its

-efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it

-abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we

-have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the

-tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.

-In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces

-consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et

-    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of

-    1861).]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171">{171}</a></span>

-<p>

-If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I

-rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it

-Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as

-characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon

-which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold

-merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which

-has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other

-side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in

-sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in

-sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.

-</p>

-<p>

-What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the

-principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man

-incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each

-man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and

-more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the

-present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;

-in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172">{172}</a></span>

-<p>

-The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less

-evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical

-importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor

-de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of

-Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit

-of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and

-adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the

-sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally

-certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or

-Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere

-believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and

-imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of

-fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and

-strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.

-As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has

-presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever

-seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to

-make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has

-nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of

-the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very

-efficacious influence to the principle of authority.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>

-<p>

-Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and

-assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,

-let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is

-engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What

-is the principle of this contest, and what its character?

-</p>

-<p>

-Here we are met by that all-important question, the question

-which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which

-all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the

-Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm

-that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of

-these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,

-and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:

-whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such

-contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as

-they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174">{174}</a></span>

-<p>

-In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that

-which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is

-profound; but I do not think that the question between the two

-has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition

-has been rightly defined.

-</p>

-<p>

-To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,

-first, to the philosophers.

-</p>

-<p>

-We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to

-what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:

-"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with

-respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,

-than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then

-either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the

-old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the

-standard of reason."

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175">{175}</a></span>

-Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him

-in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,&mdash;"My

-first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,

-unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to

-avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to

-follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but

-what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as

-to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,

-    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]

-</p>

-<p>

-More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace

-to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the

-history of its progressive development, did far more than

-obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his

-labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its

-proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of

-a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and

-then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,

-all his knowledge,&mdash;in fact, the entire man himself.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>

-<p>

-Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have

-their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.

-Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to

-know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by

-the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a

-<i>tabula rasa</i>, and to fill up the void which he has so made,

-he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so

-clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to

-doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses

-not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without

-reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a

-statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this

-statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the

-man&mdash;the entire man&mdash;with all the developments of his nature and

-of his thought.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177">{177}</a></span>

-<p>

-I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting

-point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very

-commencement of philosophy,&mdash;in short, a mere hypothesis.

-Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and

-of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress

-of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and

-scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the

-material world; but from their very commencement both these

-philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight

-road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a

-mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete

-appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss

-either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two

-hypotheses, the <i>tabula rasa</i> of Descartes, and the statue

-of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they

-are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to

-inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle

-which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,

-and Christian faith.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178">{178}</a></span>

-<p>

-The true point of departure of this history and the first of the

-facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and

-the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the

-other, the "<i>moi</i>" and the "<i>non moi</i>," the subject and

-the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I

-repudiate absolutely the different systems,&mdash;Pantheism, whether

-materialistic or idealistic,&mdash;Scepticism, whether idealistic or

-absolute,&mdash;which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the

-reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge

-of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the

-relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe

-together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a

-pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these

-different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have

-to deal with something very different from the question to which

-I am applying myself at this moment.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179">{179}</a></span>

-Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form

-of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it

-admits the reality and the distinction of the "<i>moi</i>" and of

-the "<i>non moi</i>" of the subject and the object, of the

-spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the

-universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for

-Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and

-under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's

-life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all

-simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the

-spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being

-from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself

-and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the

-diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives

-from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has

-a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and

-also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows

-not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive

-and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,

-yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180">{180}</a></span>

-Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,

-by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and

-which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that

-external world. He observes and notes both what takes place

-without him and within him. The results of this observation he

-terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations

-merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him

-of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands

-in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is

-highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,

-but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of

-science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein

-involved.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181">{181}</a></span>

-<p>

-Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,

-I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,

-or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;

-first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which

-mankind professes, although under very different forms and in

-very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of

-philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in

-order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,

-and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side

-is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other

-is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of

-disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is

-called religious philosophy.

-</p>

-<p>

-Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no

-other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these

-systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,

-and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the

-religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of

-religion?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182">{182}</a></span>

-<p>

-To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,

-Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.

-</p>

-<p>

-In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the

-instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of

-human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and

-proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active

-presence of God in the life of man and in the history of

-humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and

-active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of

-Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active

-presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the

-mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and

-of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,

-are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological

-and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which

-it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183">{183}</a></span>

-<p>

-Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and

-disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which

-all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always

-confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,

-greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is

-looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is

-immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,

-diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is

-situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence

-reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision

-more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He

-observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts

-which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion

-amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in

-appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their

-character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the

-question antecedent to and which governs all the others.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>

-<p>

-The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not

-a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and

-a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith

-as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at

-the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,

-as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they

-themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only

-the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the

-life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these

-psychological and historic facts which reason and science are

-bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians

-justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence

-alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and

-permanent laws assigned to all other existences?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185">{185}</a></span>

-<p>

-As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are

-concerned, this is the real question at issue.

-</p>

-<p>

-Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which

-we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.

-</p>

-<p>

-Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and

-those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to

-demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of

-God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all

-their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these

-days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.

-Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made

-earnest&mdash;I would willingly say pious&mdash;efforts to elucidate the

-proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid

-that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the

-religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive

-themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain

-to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of

-the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186">{186}</a></span>

-In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which

-Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and

-unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of

-each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic

-Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to

-prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of

-the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the

-place of the real action of God.

-</p>

-<p>

-In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"

-another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and

-with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different

-systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to

-polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear

-enunciation of his own thought.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187">{187}</a></span>

-"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend

-against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law

-of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would

-not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a

-commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and

-product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,

-to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in

-opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a

-supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be

-perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he

-is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of

-spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in

-ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,

-he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind

-supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an

-unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,

-inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that

-emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he

-would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a

-divine Reason.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188">{188}</a></span>

-<p>

-Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living

-God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves &hellip; A God

-that loved not would not be worthy of being adored &hellip; We do not

-adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in

-consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however

-potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure

-it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being

-who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its

-highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a

-contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if

-the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.

-</p>

-<p>

-This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious

-conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."

-[Footnote 43]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.

-    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189">{189}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions

-still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from

-philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.

-</p>

-<p>

-Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the

-philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle

-of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon

-the soul of man.

-</p>

-<p>

-Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,

-continually present, and active in the government of the

-Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the

-human race.

-</p>

-<p>

-Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short

-there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts

-which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these

-facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that

-Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190">{190}</a></span>

-<br>

-           <h2>Sixth Meditation.

-<br><br>

-            Christian Life.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit

-to a test&mdash;the great test&mdash;the practical application. The idea

-has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.

-</p>

-<p>

-Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,

-upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their

-ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are

-right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is

-in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its

-object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man

-pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever

-the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it

-believes that it has attained to the truth.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191">{191}</a></span>

-<p>

-This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only

-ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under

-its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those

-who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the

-principle that we should be indifferent whether we are

-essentially in the right, and that practically there is no

-difference between truth and error.

-</p>

-<p>

-But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than

-the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human

-mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,

-that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves

-itself?

-</p>

-<p>

-To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a

-denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every

-doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a

-test,&mdash;the practical application.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192">{192}</a></span>

-The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;

-these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically

-true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which

-it is bound to give.

-</p>

-<p>

-There is a radical difference between the material world and the

-intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in

-the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought

-and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is

-ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has

-no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot

-influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite

-of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if

-Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,

-and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's

-principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to

-the general system of the world. <i>There</i> man's error is

-absolutely without effect or influence.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>

-<p>

-In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is

-not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act&mdash;

-to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to

-the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant

-of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside

-here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and

-independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here

-without real and serious consequences; they have the power of

-sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual

-and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to

-the disputes of men.

-</p>

-<p>

-Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,

-separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from

-its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific

-investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and

-admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of

-society or the results of their own labours.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194">{194}</a></span>

-Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave

-inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world

-are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;

-man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the

-profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,

-procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative

-description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no

-general disturbance results in that material world upon which

-naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will

-not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their

-ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,

-on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its

-teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and

-make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape

-the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in

-its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world

-to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,

-incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not

-here the object of science, it is still its necessary and

-appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the

-truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195">{195}</a></span>

-<p>

-Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen

-centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue

-ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace

-here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and

-surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of

-Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single

-small part of this history, the most modest part, the least

-pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what

-Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian

-Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different

-situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day

-accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the

-furtherance of his ultimate destiny.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>

-<p>

-Three words, "<i>Rights of Man</i>" inscribed upon the banners of

-the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man

-as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his

-humanity. Three other words, <i>Liberty, Equality,

-Fraternity</i>, have served as a commentary upon the three

-former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French

-Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources

-of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the

-ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.

-</p>

-<p>

-Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is

-Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have

-of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by

-Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does

-Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and

-condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity

-alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral

-force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the

-good also to perish.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197">{197}</a></span>

-<p>

-It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride

-that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,

-the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his

-rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential

-objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the

-rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the

-individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,

-where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human

-creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a

-single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,

-Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not

-only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The

-right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of

-the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,

-constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant

-precept of the Christian religion.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>

-It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian

-Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put

-into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as

-the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the

-chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that

-Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was

-amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as

-brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although

-sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a

-stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less

-potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it

-maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over

-distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil

-society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are

-most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the

-iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices

-have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the

-Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the

-earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church

-itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and

-acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199">{199}</a></span>

-Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never

-afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any

-human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of

-earthly power, the appellation, <i>brethren</i>, never ceased to

-be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all

-the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only

-in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear

-themselves greeted as <i>brethren</i>.

-</p>

-<p>

-The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence

-in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand

-to the political authorities, or in which the different classes

-stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the

-constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,

-called family.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200">{200}</a></span>

-There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the

-despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of

-wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If

-we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as

-religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of

-antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman

-family,&mdash;we shall not need to examine long before we discern

-clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just

-appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and

-liberty.

-</p>

-<p>

-I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and

-puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular

-maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and

-fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of

-false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the

-history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not

-merely in the records of a few years, but through three

-centuries.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201">{201}</a></span>

-Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying

-claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the

-same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show

-of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim

-to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner

-of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did

-they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon

-authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,

-and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.

-Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of

-Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to

-the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of

-this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its

-cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its

-liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either

-in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,

-and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which

-the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202">{202}</a></span>

-They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor

-humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and

-disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage

-to its right at the same time that they maintained their own

-right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished

-at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not

-as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,

-and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen

-me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go

-and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."

-[Footnote 45]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]

-</p>

-<p>

-And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and

-struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the

-doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every

-soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but

-of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. &hellip; Wherefore ye

-must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for

-conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203">{203}</a></span>

-<p>

-Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself

-addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which

-are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote

-47]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]

-</p>

-<p>

-The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of

-power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of

-religious life from civil life,&mdash;all these were not, for the

-primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their

-situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles

-of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the

-name of justice and of truth.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204">{204}</a></span>

-<p>

-Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,

-greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the

-history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to

-the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once

-became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by

-earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the

-arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil

-inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and

-combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity

-had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,

-nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary

-doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted

-and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape

-and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they

-never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they

-survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the

-broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,

-Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled

-against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite

-of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of

-violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,

-the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205">{205}</a></span>

-Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious

-and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of

-human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and

-these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,

-traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable

-them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and

-corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.

-Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which

-agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely

-healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant

-subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of

-sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated

-herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she

-has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against

-which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which

-she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over

-the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of

-promise. This she owes to her origin&mdash;she was born in the manger

-of Jesus.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206">{206}</a></span>

-<p>

-There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened

-men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has

-rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality

-of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of

-Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,

-the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality

-is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be

-separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but

-its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not

-disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and

-empire of morality, I have established in this volume of

-Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,

-and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart

-from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,

-and powerless&mdash;a branch without root and without fruit.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207">{207}</a></span>

-I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is

-Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as

-the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,

-but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have

-taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still

-higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did

-not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of

-doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a

-truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and

-superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as

-such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,

-and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and

-vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and

-learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the

-fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208">{208}</a></span>

-At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw

-in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a

-sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by

-Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his

-appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;

-but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who

-detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council

-and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and

-the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to

-have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,

-a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in

-reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the

-apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of

-Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching

-these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself

-to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,

-joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,

-were scattered and brought to nought.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209">{209}</a></span>

-After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the

-taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;

-and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I

-say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if

-this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But

-if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found

-even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<p>

-The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity

-at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already

-made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the

-living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son

-of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210">{210}</a></span>

-<p>

-The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A

-short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as

-their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide

-the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in

-repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof

-was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries

-of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of

-Christianity,&mdash;the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,

-the Inspiration of the Scriptures,&mdash;became the grand dogmas of

-Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its

-turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed

-from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to

-undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly

-interests and human errors and passions had a great part;

-Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes

-converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so

-constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was

-theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of

-practical application in every form and every shape.

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211">{211}</a></span>

-The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all

-these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows

-of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and

-is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the

-same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,

-with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and

-the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.

-The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its

-Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The

-authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of

-the next and last series of my "Meditations."

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212">{212}</a></span>

-<br>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213">{213}</a></span>

-<br>

-               <h2>Appendix.</h2>

-<br>

-<p>

-Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at

-London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance

-a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:

-all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or

-simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or

-attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,

-perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,

-has just made it the subject of three articles, which are

-remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They

-appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his

-country. [Footnote 50]

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

-    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by

-    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen

-    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of

-    January, February, and March, 1868.]

-</p>

-<p class="cite">

-  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'

-  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be

-  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified

-  authorship&mdash;that has appeared within the same interval, has

-  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism

-  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled

-  'Ecce Homo.'"

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214">{214}</a></span>

-<p>

-The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his

-intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental

-ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current

-conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a

-definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons

-not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They

-may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the

-beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time

-when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as

-St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with

-those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to

-trace his biography from point to point, and accept those

-conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles

-have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,

-critically weighed, appear to warrant.

-</p>

-<p>

-"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the

-satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good

-many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that

-there was no historical character whose motives, objects and

-feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which

-proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.

-</p>

-<p>

-"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions

-whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern

-Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;

-which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time

-to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an

-answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the

-Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to

-attain that object?'"

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215">{215}</a></span>

-<p>

-On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief

-words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not

-to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,

-I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in

-the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very

-outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study

-the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering

-him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer

-all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire

-to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating

-him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when

-living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the

-ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,

-in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a

-person unknown to us&mdash;a fossil man, so to say, of which the

-features might be traceable in some contemporary document,

-showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to

-supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he

-performed;&mdash;this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,

-one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true

-comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus

-mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer

-limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent

-thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and

-its nature verified in its positive and vast development.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216">{216}</a></span>

-<p>

-This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of

-history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like

-anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and

-comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their

-different elements and in all the development of their life. They

-form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we

-are deciphering.

-</p>

-<p>

-I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce

-Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it

-within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also

-understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed

-and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these

-days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?&mdash;a

-man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine

-nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he

-really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such

-things as miracles? What are we to understand by the

-supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and

-accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style

-Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably

-suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and

-violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce

-Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to

-study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it

-because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no

-positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a

-certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of

-some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of

-him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact

-not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to

-the sole and proper force of mankind?

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217">{217}</a></span>

-<p>

-Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous

-author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:

-what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book

-"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed

-to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has

-proposed to explain Christianity.

-</p>

-<p>

-I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of

-the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a

-strange one,&mdash;it is condemnatory and destructive of the

-fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and

-honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the

-facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human

-nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural

-operations of humanity.

-</p>

-<p>

-The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether

-twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of

-Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing

-with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,

-the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the

-authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,

-the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the

-systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its

-fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and

-sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn

-the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.

-Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and

-striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,

-however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,

-and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218">{218}</a></span>

-<p>

-All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the

-vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the

-perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the

-solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not

-enter.

-</p>

-<p>

-I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an

-account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's

-opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my

-aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show

-plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There

-precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with

-the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of

-Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of

-Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he

-departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he

-appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought

-seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly

-contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts

-or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is

-more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he

-believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity

-find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they

-encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or

-the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.

-</p>

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219">{219}</a></span>

-<p>

-There are several passages of this remarkable work which are

-particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I

-feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of

-the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,

-entitled <i>Christ's Credentials</i>, and chapter ninth,

-[Footnote 51] entitled <i>Reflections on the Nature of Christ's

-Society;</i> in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled

-<i>Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems</i>,

-and chapter the eleventh, <i>The Christian Republic</i> [Footnote

-52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,

-fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and

-satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the

-author's inconsistency with respect to religion.

-</p>

-<p class="footnote">

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

-<br><br>

-    [Footnote 52: <i>Ibid</i>, pp. 108&mdash;119, 120&mdash;126.]

-</p>

-<p>

-Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply

-remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and

-particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and

-call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a

-singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a

-subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with

-philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of

-human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and

-religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and

-painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a

-grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,

-however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no

-idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable

-work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to

-which I have already referred, and indeed it appears

-incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the

-human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as

-of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his

-book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another

-volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the

-Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."

-<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220">{220}</a></span>

-He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking

-inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ

-much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however

-superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary

-humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and

-is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not

-have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.

-</p>

-<br>

-                 <h3>The End.</h3>

-

-<br><br>

-

-

-

-

-  <h3>Bradbury, Evans, And Co., Printers, Whitefriars.</h3>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

-

-

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-</pre>

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+<meta content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type">
+<title>
+Christianity Viewed In Relation To
+The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
+By M. Guizot.
+</title>
+
+<style type="text/css">
+
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+            margin-right:8%;}
+
+.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */
+    /*  visibility: hidden;  */
+    position: absolute;
+    left: 92%;
+    font-size: smaller;
+    text-align: right;
+} /* page numbers */
+
+</style>
+
+</head>
+
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60815 ***</div>
+
+<p>
+[Transcriber's note: This production is based on
+https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_i">{i}</a></span>
+
+         <h1>Christianity Viewed In Relation To
+<br><br>
+     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.</h1>
+<br>
+                  <h2>By M. Guizot.
+</h2>
+
+  <h3>Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.
+<br><br><br>
+
+                    London:
+<br><br>
+         John Murray, Albemarle Street.
+<br><br>
+                     1871.</h3>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ii">{ii}</a></span>
+
+             <h2>By The Same Author.</h2>
+
+       <h3>The Essence Of Christianity.<br>
+             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.</h3>
+<p>
+  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances
+  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable
+  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."<br>
+    &mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>.
+</p>
+<br>
+
+      <h3>The Present State Of Christianity.<br>
+          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.</h3>
+<p>
+  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a
+  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,
+  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further
+  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great
+  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future
+  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great
+  interest."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iii">{iii}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iv">{iv}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_v">{v}</a></span>
+<br>
+                   <h2>Preface.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the
+facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and
+the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I
+retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during
+the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and
+Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated
+amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent
+trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in
+these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,
+Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the
+fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those
+systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the
+office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and
+destiny.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vi">{vi}</a></span>
+That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why
+is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has
+had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been
+made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely
+better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of
+humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which
+vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in
+review? because it fills up the void that those systems either
+create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts
+man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.
+    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this
+question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas
+and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them
+more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vii">{vii}</a></span>
+Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity
+can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that
+morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious
+Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the
+very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those
+who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe
+Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each
+other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as
+naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that
+Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,
+that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I
+establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I
+then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and
+determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical
+Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the
+bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_viii">{viii}</a></span>
+I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the
+law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I
+interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show
+that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.
+"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the
+Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the
+present series concludes.
+</p>
+<p>
+But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the
+historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of
+retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its
+course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor
+wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts
+which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine
+origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and
+destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a
+summary:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  1. The authority of the sacred books.
+<br><br>
+  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.
+<br><br>
+  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ix">{ix}</a></span>
+<br>
+  4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.
+<br><br>
+  5. Romanism and Protestantism.
+<br><br>
+  6. The different Antichristian crises, their
+     character and their issue.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they
+suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised
+itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe
+and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one
+of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my
+Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real
+value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical
+Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of
+Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed
+to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious
+study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many
+quicksands.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_x">{x}</a></span>
+<p>
+But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I
+been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work
+into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are
+agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding
+their instant solution? What good result can I expect from
+studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my
+country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the
+actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that
+which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many
+troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I
+scrutinize generations&mdash;the honour and the destiny of which I
+have so much at heart, for my children form part of them&mdash;the
+more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the
+general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself
+in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the
+grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xi">{xi}</a></span>
+I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,
+France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems
+and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their
+gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not
+having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from
+not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when
+she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary
+forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.
+</p>
+<p>
+Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some
+question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in
+events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and
+the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than
+the era of modern history&mdash;in the sixteenth century the question
+of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth
+century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad
+and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the
+operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in
+France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the
+different objects which each social movement had specially in
+view.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xii">{xii}</a></span>
+The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the
+struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on
+high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite
+complications of a labyrinth.
+</p>
+<p>
+And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of
+essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,
+contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is
+plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I
+propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.
+</p>
+<p>
+First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of
+the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which
+concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of
+populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly
+these questions were all reducible to one&mdash;the aggrandizement or
+the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or
+the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the
+balance of power in Europe.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span>
+War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled
+this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and
+Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation
+so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and
+ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and
+entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the
+question of nationalities, the question of little states and of
+great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and
+of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their
+midst,&mdash;all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a
+routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the
+maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking
+themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial
+organizations and the external relations of States.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span>
+<p>
+Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle
+itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new
+ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual
+theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of
+men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good
+their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any
+respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a
+principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which
+the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name
+of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from
+participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or
+eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.
+Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently
+against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick
+does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of
+which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of
+language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some
+general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased
+to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,
+and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more
+legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his
+successors.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xv">{xv}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men
+follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part
+of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain
+share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the
+possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a
+moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of
+this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But
+policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to
+these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and
+right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common
+sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,
+maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,
+and which, up to the present time, have presided over the
+relations of States.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span>
+The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial
+agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be
+independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect
+for ancient treaties,&mdash;all these elements of European order have
+not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory
+of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political
+unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with
+justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western
+Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both
+in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow
+countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal
+of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?
+Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere
+Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations
+of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which
+draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories
+all foreign domination.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span>
+But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of
+union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and
+the <i>régime</i> of a confederation of States might have been
+established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the
+foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have
+been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the
+interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the
+preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at
+the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that
+any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of
+that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized
+world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally
+compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the
+preservation of peace between the different States.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span>
+<p>
+What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the
+sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,
+the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a
+population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,
+and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute
+themselves into new and independent States? What would become of
+the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also
+were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating
+wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its
+members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations
+or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding
+or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does
+he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in
+the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.
+The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being
+rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to
+the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his
+country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to
+strive to lay the foundation of a new country.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xix">{xix}</a></span>
+We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen
+some of the States which form the nation of the United States of
+America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an
+independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in
+their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the
+right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to
+change its government at discretion. The States which remained
+faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the
+principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in
+maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am
+one of those who think that they had both right and reason on
+their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the
+most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character
+as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the
+interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for
+negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to
+me all that he had written and said upon the subject.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xx">{xx}</a></span>
+I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he
+expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the
+efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and
+by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He
+would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living
+reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle
+Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much
+sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced
+that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of
+which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the
+danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of
+slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the
+great American State which was their country. Motive detestable
+for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,
+has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a
+Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern
+times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising
+resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an
+unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of
+States.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span>
+<p>
+So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the
+external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the
+future has in store for those which involve domestic order and
+the organization of government. I meet here with the same
+confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between
+ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at
+the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in
+collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments
+in opinions.
+</p>
+<p>
+The proposition is now universally received that society has the
+right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own
+government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a
+manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span>
+The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to
+attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the
+monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the
+other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the
+great representatives of public power. But neither the
+constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded
+amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of
+events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in
+spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of
+liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on
+its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was
+affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and
+sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional
+monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of
+government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of
+personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the
+essay have greater success? Events will decide.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxiii">{xxiii}</a></span>
+In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so
+many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the
+disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its
+governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our
+ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,
+have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of
+impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very
+well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed
+and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no
+fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield
+ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our
+very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but
+soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less
+exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our
+most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as
+precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are
+again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in
+the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have
+taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet
+these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found
+any free government.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxiv">{xxiv}</a></span>
+<p>
+I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the
+state of our political institutions to that of the relations
+existent between the different parts of society. I say the
+<i>different parts</i> to avoid saying <i>different classes</i>,
+for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking
+that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges
+and exclusions, of that entire <i>régime</i> with its narrow
+compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were
+formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their
+name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental
+qualification they might possess. In effect, this <i>régime</i>
+has fallen&mdash;fallen completely and definitively; all legal
+barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:
+by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to
+everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxv">{xxv}</a></span>
+This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate
+it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it
+ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of
+jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they
+have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they
+persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in
+defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration
+was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils
+that the <i>bourgeoisie</i> had to endure, and the risks which it
+had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of
+July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were
+the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle
+classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such
+assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the
+intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been
+already often produced on the stage of the world,&mdash;theories which
+have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxvi">{xxvi}</a></span>
+Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial
+distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have
+served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,
+sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon
+things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises
+were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to
+give.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good
+observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that
+even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as
+to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial
+settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the
+distribution of the material means of existence, are in
+discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,
+although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume
+the form of Socialism.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxvii">{xxvii}</a></span>
+I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find
+their field in facts affecting the sphere of material
+subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most
+recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier
+to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the
+ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,
+that errors such as those which presented themselves under the
+names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much
+noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that
+they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof
+of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it
+leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst
+us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst
+of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in
+order to surmount this danger.
+</p>
+<p>
+Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,
+who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the
+following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between
+the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in
+their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for
+books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly
+workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as
+is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxviii">{xxviii}</a></span>
+After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are
+two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I
+added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you
+great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be
+the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the
+honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I
+congratulated him this time still more.
+</p>
+<p>
+In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which
+afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their
+disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which
+the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace
+social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of
+distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a
+little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by
+all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations
+from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which
+they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous
+and full of hazard.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxix">{xxix}</a></span>
+The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,
+when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true
+to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of
+the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond
+doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously
+excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of
+hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as
+the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it
+devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it
+before them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxx">{xxx}</a></span>
+Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well
+living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with
+efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and
+resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the
+spectacle of the world which surrounds them,&mdash;a world now at
+length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,
+the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to
+the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our
+villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people
+from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,
+unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral
+discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which
+religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives
+subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely
+religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and
+Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and
+this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant
+regions of society!
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxi">{xxxi}</a></span>
+<p>
+These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of
+unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,
+of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,
+open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a
+tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity
+counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name
+of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it
+with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical
+deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,
+in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their
+force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the
+incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's
+opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which
+are only simply political and social; many they are who would be
+inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they
+are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all
+these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring
+to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which
+receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ
+which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt
+and exposed to peril.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxii">{xxxii}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating
+the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,
+questions of political organization, questions of social
+institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I
+encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great
+complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his
+efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every
+kind&mdash;doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and
+oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,
+immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to
+travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to
+feel their way through a labyrinth.
+</p>
+<p>
+Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and
+impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope
+for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we
+have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign
+power called by some Providence, by others Fate?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxiii">{xxxiii}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am far from thinking so.
+</p>
+<p>
+Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of
+convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion
+Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day
+detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal
+or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"
+said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to
+disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence
+and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I
+am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military
+sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always
+applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in
+order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,
+to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its
+apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most
+efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the
+number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others
+possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same
+spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,
+single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon
+attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,
+without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxiv">{xxxiv}</a></span>
+We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of
+influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if
+we adopt it.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which
+torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the
+rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its
+economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an
+evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of
+French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the
+moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them
+attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its
+removal.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxv">{xxxv}</a></span>
+But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,
+a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and
+developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a
+good current which is impelling us forwards;&mdash;at the same time
+that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the
+principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to
+control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the
+maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at
+least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions
+of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of
+political economy have defenders no less zealous than the
+presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism
+raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is
+advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress
+also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical
+applications.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxvi">{xxxvi}</a></span>
+Following respectively their different objects, there are on both
+sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and
+influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several
+causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is
+solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,
+contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our
+history is made up of this great struggle and of its
+vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats
+sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of
+our country.
+</p>
+<p>
+They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and
+keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human
+sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated
+by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the
+disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought
+back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the
+modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of
+their situation than with the rights of thought, but always
+remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty
+even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only
+defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than
+shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in
+spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent
+indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in
+spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble
+desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxvii">{xxxvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius
+of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed
+with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of
+individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,
+and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as
+well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and
+the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who
+are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxviii">{xxxviii}</a></span>
+<p>
+What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the
+conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have
+it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil
+current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions
+and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good
+sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and
+to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation
+which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?
+</p>
+<p>
+Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society
+in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free
+Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we
+should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease
+of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our
+conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our
+understanding.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxix">{xxxix}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the
+abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to
+guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to
+individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and
+material. The right of France to these liberties, and their
+opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in
+their clearest light, and established in all their force on their
+highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]
+It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,
+the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,
+that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the
+two great remedies against this ill.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, <i>Sur les libertés
+    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse</i>, in the séances of
+    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,
+    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xl">{xl}</a></span>
+<p>
+When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are
+perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is
+that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in
+conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of
+so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,
+does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the
+confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,
+provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its
+effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the
+understandings: the different facts, and problems which these
+facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only
+for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow
+accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise
+conceptions of them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions
+define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation
+of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular
+form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so
+salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a
+liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it
+would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle
+opinions still more.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xli">{xli}</a></span>
+<p>
+Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more
+important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of
+practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the
+thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,
+and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the
+effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs
+riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to
+liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,&mdash;when,
+instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be
+virtually solved,&mdash;when men are charged as real actors to
+transform into facts their own opinions or those of the
+spectators who are looking on,&mdash;then it is that the human mind,
+making its own strength the object of its reflection and
+examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose
+at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy
+itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good
+sense, by justice, and by possibility,&mdash;then it is that it learns
+to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.
+Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by
+liberty alone.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlii">{xlii}</a></span>
+<p>
+Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the
+salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an
+escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving
+questions the most different&mdash;I might say the most contrary&mdash;in
+their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary
+histories of England, of the United States of America, and of
+France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as
+precedents.
+</p>
+<p>
+From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against
+the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.
+Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With
+what forces and with what arms did England support these two
+formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political
+liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xliii">{xliii}</a></span>
+It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued
+in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,
+&mdash;it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,&mdash;it was by
+setting in action all the springs of a free and representative
+government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most
+potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated
+Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,
+during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office
+by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a
+different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,
+sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place
+of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path
+that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,
+sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,
+improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of
+the country, all the strength of its government. Political
+Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause
+and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,
+at another of that of progress.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xliv">{xliv}</a></span>
+<p>
+The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder
+trial. Their government has had to struggle against the
+insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a
+civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular
+independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted
+an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to
+maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the
+national existence of the State against the attempts which were
+made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same
+motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the
+course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,
+and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed
+by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the
+abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the
+right of insurrection.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlv">{xlv}</a></span>
+It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the
+institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this
+victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once
+over, the civil <i>régime</i> of American society resumed its
+action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical
+usurpation or military tyranny.
+</p>
+<p>
+Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so
+well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts
+remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848
+France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been
+preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.
+Neither of the <i>régimes</i> in operation immediately previous
+to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly
+changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks
+to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which
+owed their existence to the previous <i>régime</i>, a regular
+government was promptly established, and a new constitutional
+monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlvi">{xlvi}</a></span>
+On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary
+movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect
+for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and
+feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical
+fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the
+victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was
+more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the
+funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,
+celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been
+assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be
+tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the
+archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,
+which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being
+closed for many months.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlvii">{xlvii}</a></span>
+In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set
+men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more
+profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor
+the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities
+were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of
+the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free
+even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four
+years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments
+which were then in force without leaving their traces; their
+traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary
+influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction
+which put an end to it.
+</p>
+<p>
+That this influence may still surmount the great trials through
+which governments and people may have both to pass, two things
+are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real
+citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to
+make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by
+their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at
+the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,
+should accept its inconveniences and its perils.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlviii">{xlviii}</a></span>
+A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it
+does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with
+resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of
+every human situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room
+to nations for&mdash;what do I say? they demand from them&mdash;great
+activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude
+their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of
+action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer
+anything but a picture-frame without the picture&mdash;a drama
+written, not represented&mdash;in which the actors fail to assume
+their parts or to co-operate to produce the <i>dénouement</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public
+in the life of free government which gives so capital an
+importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlix">{xlix}</a></span>
+When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a
+sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may
+have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am
+not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily
+hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of
+private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What
+is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled
+moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and
+religious&mdash;beliefs which recognize and attest that man is
+naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something
+essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the
+midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by
+such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free
+<i>régime</i> a large share both of its responsibility and of its
+active duties: it is only when so animated that they give
+consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it
+stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe
+in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than
+once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty
+when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a
+tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral
+combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of
+the material forces which assail them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_l">{l}</a></span>
+Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free
+country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who
+profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all
+which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in
+favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete
+misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human
+society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove
+incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in
+tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man
+isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a
+falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the
+supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this
+is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated
+individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his
+silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon
+the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the
+falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of
+respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their
+opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of
+humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in
+such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_li">{li}</a></span>
+To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to
+refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,
+moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,
+is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very
+impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society
+calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the
+intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and
+practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether
+moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to
+be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the
+people.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lii">{lii}</a></span>
+<p>
+I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in
+all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,
+it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on
+the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil
+Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable
+with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I
+have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I
+am now publishing.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task
+to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day
+to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of
+which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,
+stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only
+here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two
+contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as
+well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups
+profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals
+and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and
+Disbelievers.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_liii">{liii}</a></span>
+No one of these groups really represents a dominant party
+in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and
+hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,
+vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,
+wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing
+clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of
+truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's
+thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused
+and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of
+thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to
+appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in
+reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a
+vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a
+field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and
+incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to
+bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French
+society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and
+under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here
+described it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_liv">{liv}</a></span>
+Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful
+and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find
+everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes
+devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the
+most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in
+search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most
+different directions. Upon this population it is that we must
+act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive
+conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious
+instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are
+by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to
+transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must
+accommodate ourselves to the general character of this
+population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an
+adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence
+must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious
+to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should
+give in return its soul.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lv">{lv}</a></span>
+It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is
+not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of
+Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should
+know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the
+society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they
+should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under
+their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under
+their blows.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it
+prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such
+success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different
+epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did
+Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their
+times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so
+extraordinary an influence?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lvi">{lvi}</a></span>
+First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked
+was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also
+because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they
+were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different
+processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with
+the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that
+they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political
+transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it
+on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They
+more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,
+the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;
+still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one
+by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern
+literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having
+re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this
+is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against
+them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France
+felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their
+glory, because it believed in their sympathy.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lvii">{lvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are
+rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of
+their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with
+them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion
+and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church
+of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more
+liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father
+Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice
+of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already
+more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different
+origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same
+cause and to the same work.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lviii">{lviii}</a></span>
+At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,
+two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I
+have the honour to know, men very different in position and in
+ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a
+great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;
+both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,
+the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent
+in the present state of French society; both having the
+resolution and the ability required in order to present
+Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most
+proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur
+Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor
+at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his
+diocese, (Lent, 1868,) <i>A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of
+Christianity</i>. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th
+of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical
+Conference assembled at Nérac, <i>A Report as to the Actual
+Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches</i>.
+[Footnote 4]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length
+    in the <i>Gazette de France</i>, on the 25th and 26th of
+    February, 1868.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the
+    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lix">{lix}</a></span>
+<p>
+I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially
+analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here
+because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each
+reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being
+prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony
+between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the
+present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far
+as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch
+is Christian.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was
+contemporary with primitive man&mdash;a fact present in all ages, ever
+paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same
+degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind
+man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent
+of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the
+Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and
+upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet
+raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,
+constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His
+creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty
+lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses
+more or less unanimous.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lx">{lx}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Heathen nations&mdash;their history proves it&mdash;have preserved
+something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected
+with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of
+Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions
+which they received from their grandsire, and which are the
+common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions
+are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of
+fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East
+and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the
+multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and
+its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily
+distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of
+Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original
+fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality
+of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all
+these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the
+depths of the conscience of the people.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxi">{lxi}</a></span>
+Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify
+in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be
+condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but
+for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful
+work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious
+wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too
+much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and
+Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained
+Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political
+charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,
+breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism
+remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxii">{lxii}</a></span>
+<p>
+"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many
+generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner
+and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred
+and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and
+in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations&mdash;this fact, what
+is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that
+it is purely natural&mdash;the spontaneous production of our habits,
+the simple result of our instincts&mdash;and, so to say, an
+irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is
+divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly
+created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as
+a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common
+sense which tells us this.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,
+as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely
+the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its
+own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it
+and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with
+a force which renews itself every day.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxiii">{lxiii}</a></span>
+It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious
+effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and
+nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to
+its effects a supernatural character. &hellip; Supernatural means were
+necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in
+relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the
+constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of
+the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no
+longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions
+should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,
+infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary
+a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His
+envoys by extraordinary facts&mdash;facts of a superhuman power,
+miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of
+the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,
+intervening with supernatural <i>éclat</i> to enable the mission
+to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and
+more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and
+their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their
+religious and predestined course.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxiv">{lxiv}</a></span>
+<p>
+"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the
+highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies
+of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a
+prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with
+signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive
+ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,
+and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His
+character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,
+the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;
+finally, the survival and the development of His work through
+centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the
+direct intervention of God&mdash;sole possible means of finding a
+satisfactory explanation of such grand results."
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxv">{lxv}</a></span>
+<p>
+The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas
+recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited&mdash;a
+development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to
+assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always
+faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no
+discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of
+ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class
+of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of
+Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of
+man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity
+in particular; considered as a grand fact&mdash;a fact universal and
+permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst
+the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the
+scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst
+Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and
+Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,
+by the same title, if not in the same degree;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxvi">{lxvi}</a></span>
+a fact at once human and divine&mdash;human by its accordance with
+man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of
+God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power
+reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of
+events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the
+accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus
+associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle
+of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of
+Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without
+any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage
+rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at
+the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority
+of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not
+justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented
+under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most
+proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,
+on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and
+pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian
+Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so
+many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxvii">{lxvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more
+vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop
+of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he
+traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and
+requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and
+describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated
+and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in
+search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to
+be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,
+he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly
+and without compromise.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in
+insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds
+in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its
+prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the
+preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxviii">{lxviii}</a></span>
+Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not
+live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,
+they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow
+its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its
+aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are
+of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate
+and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in
+many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In
+France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which
+have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as
+preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every
+symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To
+neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of
+addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who
+neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the
+objections which we attribute to them.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxix">{lxix}</a></span>
+<p>
+"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is
+easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others&mdash;it is that
+of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery
+or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally
+even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons
+more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of
+the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is
+noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our
+generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of
+its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of
+Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant
+now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,
+whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is
+impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a
+fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of
+Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of
+incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is
+definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface
+God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an
+obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxx">{lxx}</a></span>
+<p>
+"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in
+these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt
+or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having
+for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery
+from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are
+combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,
+Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a
+personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of
+the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a
+God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten
+civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,
+and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long
+as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. &hellip; Let nothing
+henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the
+human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God
+than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all
+things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxi">{lxxi}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their
+weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is
+not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its
+lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and
+its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated
+at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical
+which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it
+is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in
+France, Germany, and Italy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical
+Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to
+destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former
+never will go so far as these.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxii">{lxxii}</a></span>
+But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing
+hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it
+we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,
+stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when
+merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious
+life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,
+without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of
+destruction.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have
+we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most
+painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,
+with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph
+attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,
+how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the
+Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are
+the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by
+which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in
+discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of
+general interest?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxiii">{lxxiii}</a></span>
+The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful
+to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul
+from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after
+the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have
+to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to
+souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?
+</p>
+<p>
+"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we
+are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees
+everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to
+note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting
+the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous
+aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas
+of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social
+application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The
+age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;
+it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the
+union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material
+happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxiv">{lxxiv}</a></span>
+Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,
+men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more
+than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their
+rights as individuals, and of <i>self-government</i>, and
+consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here
+assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious <i>points
+d'appui</i> for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread
+for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.
+Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel
+leads to Liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought
+we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who
+demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question
+overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his
+weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate
+himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from
+him the cry of the prophet&mdash;'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot
+speak, for I am a child!'
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxv">{lxxv}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,
+much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of
+Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.
+Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the
+origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and
+more scientific than all that in these days men seek to
+substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the
+supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of
+Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of
+Religion itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to
+establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and
+Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace
+Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not
+more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxvi">{lxxvi}</a></span>
+Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the
+materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian
+Conscience.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her
+spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the
+progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make
+herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let
+her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must
+be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to
+everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize
+all his arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our
+special mission in the special position in which God has placed
+us?"
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxvii">{lxxvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of
+his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,
+M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the
+preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and
+evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to
+the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the
+general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of
+general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and
+urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend
+Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that
+comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that
+comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear
+to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its
+most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with
+anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is
+necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we
+must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect
+fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxviii">{lxxviii}</a></span>
+Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to
+confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the
+contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a
+<i>point d'appui</i> for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us
+strive, we also, to find these <i>points d'appui</i>, those
+keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be
+made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country
+that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark
+applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the
+educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as
+it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let
+us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its
+liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and
+demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign
+reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by
+science.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxix">{lxxix}</a></span>
+The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human
+activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained
+in the principles of the Gospel."
+</p>
+<p>
+I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of
+the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two
+documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main
+and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,
+but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at
+leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,
+to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the
+one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.
+The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,
+or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging
+to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by
+each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw
+to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and
+are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxx">{lxxx}</a></span>
+<p>
+I think that they are right both in their hope and their
+endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons
+pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of
+religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain
+and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of
+religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern
+Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,
+France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being
+informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as
+well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement
+between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The
+profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not
+part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater
+development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the
+events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding
+upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,
+to which such subjects are all very strange.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxi">{lxxxi}</a></span>
+The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that
+France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with
+religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and
+fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable
+grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,
+at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well
+entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long
+life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part
+in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer
+anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been
+essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made
+no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the
+world, but nothing attaches me to it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxii">{lxxxii}</a></span>
+Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my
+eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and
+the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with
+thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that
+eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:&mdash;
+<p class="cite">
+  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.
+<br><br>
+    Guizot.<br>
+    Paris, <i>April</i>, 1868.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxiii">{lxxxiii}</a></span>
+<br><br>
+                <h2>Contents.</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+	<td></td>
+	<td></td>
+	<td>Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>Preface</td>
+	<td></td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>I.</td>
+	<td>Christianity and Liberty</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>II.</td>
+	<td>Christianity and Morality</td>
+	<td> <a href="#Page_52">52</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>III.</td>
+	<td>Christianity and Science</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>IV.</td>
+	<td>Christian Ignorance</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>V.</td>
+	<td>Christian Faith</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>VI.</td>
+	<td>Christian Life</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>Appendix</td>
+	<td>Observations upon the Work
+             called "Ecce Homo"</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxiv">{lxxxiv}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1">{1}</a></span>
+<br>
+      <h1>Meditations On Christianity
+<br><br>
+               in its
+<br><br>
+     Relation To The Actual State<br>
+       Of Society And Opinion.</h1>
+<br>
+
+
+           <h2>First Meditation.
+<br><br>
+       Christianity And Liberty.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days
+for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant
+in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object
+Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both
+simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and
+respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and
+ill-regulated impulse.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2">{2}</a></span>
+Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it
+develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,
+and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions
+have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time
+men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are
+discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they
+vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to
+exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion
+may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered
+upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from
+it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is
+condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it
+is bound to perform.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our
+epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less
+important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of
+the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard
+Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest
+enemy.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3">{3}</a></span>
+In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so
+treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a
+multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in
+activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one
+time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian
+sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?
+Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of
+Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather
+true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both
+require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate
+and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century
+remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that
+other question is not solved.
+</p>
+<p>
+I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these&mdash;"What
+shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
+his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
+[Footnote 5]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 5: Mark viii. 36, 37.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4">{4}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the
+soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and
+body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach
+the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the
+human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to
+save souls, all souls without exception,&mdash;souls of the powerful
+and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
+happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is
+the foundation of the Christian Religion.
+</p>
+<p>
+The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere
+hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual
+being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,
+who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual
+condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an
+object of present solicitude.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5">{5}</a></span>
+To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a
+product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What
+have they to do with the words of the Gospel&mdash;with the immense
+value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them
+as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself
+forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who
+speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated
+tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because
+they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual
+man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What
+constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every
+human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that
+he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially
+in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation
+which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up
+to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use
+which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature
+of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,
+that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime
+a destiny.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6">{6}</a></span>
+Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great
+efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem
+of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel
+recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself
+about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely
+rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and
+responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which
+Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in
+every command that she gives to humanity.
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,
+and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of
+man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis
+and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most
+daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a
+point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity
+of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7">{7}</a></span>
+<p>
+Christianity does not confine itself to this;&mdash;after having laid
+down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical
+sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of
+resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the
+synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to
+speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John
+answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the
+sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+[Footnote 8]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to
+them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach
+in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than
+men." [Footnote 9]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of
+the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his
+faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the
+principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8">{8}</a></span>
+<p>
+The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,
+who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for
+dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he
+resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,
+"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to
+continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by
+much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.
+[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle
+of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 11: Acts xiv. 19, 22.]
+</p>
+<p>
+It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that
+it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the
+principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and
+transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and
+eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms
+the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it
+equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of
+Authority.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9">{9}</a></span>
+I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made
+that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was
+permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar
+the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are
+God's," he established in principle the distinction between the
+religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.
+Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,
+between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful
+worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties
+which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.
+[Footnote 12]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,
+    p. 278. London: 1864.]
+</p>
+<p>
+It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest
+and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization
+commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted
+in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have
+strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded
+with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the
+seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,
+history has confirmed the Gospel.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10">{10}</a></span>
+<p>
+Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,
+Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,
+and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been
+able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity
+of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies
+required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at
+another liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to
+refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I
+remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that
+Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she
+was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from
+her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she
+alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls
+in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11">{11}</a></span>
+If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious
+establishments&mdash;Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism&mdash;have
+held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the
+world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,
+attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman
+Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism
+did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the
+enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the
+immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.
+Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated
+only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the
+sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of
+Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the
+soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it
+she awakened it.
+</p>
+<p>
+Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of
+Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have
+occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the
+Christian faith.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12">{12}</a></span>
+No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the
+work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,
+which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the
+purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the
+surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy
+atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part
+and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine
+it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats
+uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the
+excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not
+destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor
+make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work
+of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a
+Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,
+behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those
+stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only
+enables him to see them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>
+When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal
+errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared
+under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit
+without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or
+ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore
+what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from
+her that which she has not promised.
+</p>
+<p>
+Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch
+and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to
+Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present
+day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting
+Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount
+them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What
+are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,
+the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an
+obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14">{14}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,
+men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre
+colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a
+prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as
+deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of
+amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at
+another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our
+vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not
+of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require
+to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness
+which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which
+cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the
+attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,
+is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent
+evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but
+that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we
+make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15">{15}</a></span>
+The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and
+evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic
+sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil
+which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first
+to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it
+appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages
+has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at
+least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if
+we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it
+matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would
+not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor
+should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.
+Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and
+different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we
+have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we
+have ever forgotten.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16">{16}</a></span>
+<p>
+And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain
+my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached
+its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance
+more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without
+numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape
+in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the
+selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of
+the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices
+of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political
+liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,
+the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the
+actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its
+tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in
+this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789
+was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant
+travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or
+is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had
+then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all
+mankind. Did she deceive herself?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17">{17}</a></span>
+Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or
+in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we
+progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which
+eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every
+respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;
+for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but
+utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked
+than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of
+opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never
+hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they
+deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to
+pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have
+originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront
+many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no
+sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18">{18}</a></span>
+But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have
+been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon
+the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,
+and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both
+of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the
+world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,
+and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra
+of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive
+motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas
+as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789
+contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,
+truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and
+which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the
+travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to
+France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,
+and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a
+cause of decline.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19">{19}</a></span>
+Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,
+the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past
+centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of
+French society in which it would have bettered its condition by
+halting, or to which it should wish to return.
+</p>
+<p>
+I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our
+social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment
+of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is
+Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us
+in such a work?
+</p>
+<p>
+All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,
+whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or
+Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in
+deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for
+physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and
+effeminacy which they generate.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20">{20}</a></span>
+<p>
+They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we
+consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even
+those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,
+in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his
+habitual language:&mdash;"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten
+o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."
+[Footnote 13]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se
+    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une
+    chemise blanche."]
+</p>
+<p>
+There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be
+vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should
+be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether
+individuals or nations, is that they should not have their
+attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely
+their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they
+have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and
+Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the
+Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort
+or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is
+permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21">{21}</a></span>
+Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and
+sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating
+and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of
+more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a
+state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and
+disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can
+supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.
+Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich
+and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;
+she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she
+inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer
+hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be
+powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can
+never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive
+motive to action, even in that principle of interest which
+politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to
+be a panacea.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22">{22}</a></span>
+Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,
+has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other
+sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an
+Epicurean nor an Egotist.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is the first and the greatest of the services which
+Christianity can and does render in our days to every society
+which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are
+dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without
+incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the
+other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever
+be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or
+measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it
+is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free
+country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of
+society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments
+and nations, to enable them to support that license which they
+cannot suppress.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23">{23}</a></span>
+Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the
+most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license
+for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity
+maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without
+humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the
+rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in
+fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which
+authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the
+most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority
+suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely
+to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,
+that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves
+with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,
+turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as
+such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and
+Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great
+mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to
+order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom
+licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,
+and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims
+and the arms of Liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24">{24}</a></span>
+History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The
+nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has
+not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,&mdash;the
+only nations which, although they have on different occasions and
+by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and
+of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and
+politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of
+the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;
+these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;
+but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once
+come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their
+subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less
+rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25">{25}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it
+that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as
+individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it
+generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already
+more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and
+sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,
+as well as strength to recover lost ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the
+friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary
+admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than
+any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no
+longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the
+encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and
+transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the
+normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and
+with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26">{26}</a></span>
+Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,
+has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the
+conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong
+enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously
+the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the
+Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and
+independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when
+Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power
+and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no
+distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a
+similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the
+Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail
+wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and
+indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the
+permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more
+or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which
+fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly
+modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the
+exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these
+days free institutions can be founded.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27">{27}</a></span>
+<p>
+That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses
+and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with
+the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,
+that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of
+the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all
+other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which
+are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.
+Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every
+human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error
+press so very closely upon each other in this system, that
+Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is
+entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,
+nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to
+another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes
+to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to
+abrogate as it was to create.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28">{28}</a></span>
+The law paramount is the moral law,&mdash;the law laid down by God, to
+which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to
+submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is
+always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights
+of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of
+government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily
+forgets God&mdash;easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort
+of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,
+material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is
+incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with
+which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that
+the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only
+principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic
+of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two
+principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour
+and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29">{29}</a></span>
+A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning
+with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent
+admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and
+it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by
+Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a
+history, which does not come from man, but which, without
+offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,
+no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same
+time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic
+a society is, the more it is important that this double effect
+shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.
+</p>
+<p>
+I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The
+Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally
+against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how
+little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine
+to be good and salutary.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30">{30}</a></span>
+How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other
+respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have
+Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of
+the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty
+unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest
+nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state
+of opinions at the present day.
+</p>
+<p>
+As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst
+Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best
+results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,
+whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as
+the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly
+cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general
+religious community&mdash;between the spiritual and the lay members of
+the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by
+authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations
+which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving
+to the laity a share in the government of the Church.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31">{31}</a></span>
+The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time
+the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from
+their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but
+the relations between the two classes ceased to present the
+appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire
+subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and
+influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although
+remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to
+be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social
+institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one
+time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious
+society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of
+independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State
+and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their
+mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the
+two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have
+mutually recovered their independence;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32">{32}</a></span>
+elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all
+ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been
+abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his
+individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.
+But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental
+characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from
+the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves
+constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and
+man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is
+particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction
+between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious
+and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its
+right and become an active influence in religious society itself.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33">{33}</a></span>
+<p>
+But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a
+persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much
+calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman
+Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and
+passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed
+with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their
+religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted
+therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to
+their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These
+are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof
+of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the
+holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.
+Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that
+this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will
+towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects
+for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that
+such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present
+constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to
+State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be
+injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to
+individuals.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34">{34}</a></span>
+From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most
+sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as
+Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst
+of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed
+and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in
+order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of
+humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to
+its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in
+all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;
+they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and
+tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;
+they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they
+rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the
+conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the
+guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and
+ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy
+effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate
+result of which has been so glorious.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35">{35}</a></span>
+<p>
+The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and
+useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which
+characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its
+Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,
+that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and
+religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and
+all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome
+and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?
+For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the
+aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and
+political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,
+onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced
+situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more
+menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than
+our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power
+in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in
+principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable
+with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to
+condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of
+modern civilization.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36">{36}</a></span>
+In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall
+here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as
+the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction
+that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and
+dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as
+well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without
+abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally
+essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the
+moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions
+also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,
+that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not
+have accepted and accomplished this work of
+conciliation&mdash;conciliation real and profound&mdash;the friends of
+Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and
+in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,
+those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37">{37}</a></span>
+But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance
+than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which
+utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,
+nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of
+events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and
+not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many
+probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the
+case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,
+many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward
+impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the
+conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less
+a certainty.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.
+There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of
+different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle
+between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often
+committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly
+profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own
+defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38">{38}</a></span>
+The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,
+the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,
+the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the
+great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by
+the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time
+consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal
+regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and
+signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its
+consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the
+question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation
+between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the
+attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a
+decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of
+1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh
+vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39">{39}</a></span>
+When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism
+treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from
+the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church
+of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all
+that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,
+and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience
+and resignation. She is right.
+</p>
+<p>
+One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this
+stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,
+Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of
+fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody
+persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,
+bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,
+once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their
+cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40">{40}</a></span>
+The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person
+of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive
+but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor
+the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.
+And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what
+activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,
+Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,
+upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society
+had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of
+Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced
+on its road and towards its object.
+</p>
+<p>
+But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of
+Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and
+compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without
+doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she
+lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of
+reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is
+more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it
+and oppose it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41">{41}</a></span>
+This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman
+Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that
+group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which
+continues to play so active a part in struggling for the
+Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:
+these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its
+intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their
+views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux
+Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the
+greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the
+more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the
+disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and
+humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our
+provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have
+not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one
+might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving
+the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the
+people;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42">{42}</a></span>
+they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the
+conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an
+influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its
+sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost
+without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of
+their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal
+tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman
+Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular
+militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of
+enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case
+by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the
+Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make
+their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its
+laws, and of its liberties.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I
+observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to
+French institutions,&mdash;for I speak only of France,&mdash;the essential
+consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the
+relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43">{43}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in
+France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past
+are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof
+from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights
+of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil
+society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts
+and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to
+the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from
+civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this
+respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these
+are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for
+religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to
+stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman
+Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of
+modern society, who most dispute about the general question of
+liberty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44">{44}</a></span>
+<p>
+The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this
+question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in
+one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,
+on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from
+religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty
+in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy
+in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other
+solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and
+their mutual independence.
+</p>
+<p>
+That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State
+to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I
+well understand.
+</p>
+<p>
+She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of
+strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her
+stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves
+religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a
+fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially
+democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under
+the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the
+influence of the religious authorities.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45">{45}</a></span>
+This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental
+principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is
+impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded
+by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.
+But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance
+of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church
+would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious
+and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large
+measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the
+religious society and of the civil society which the Church and
+the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those
+who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective
+principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on
+in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the
+good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself
+is soon compromised.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46">{46}</a></span>
+The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of
+Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of
+Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because
+there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental
+institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon
+some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant
+guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and
+were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from
+which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed
+on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices
+for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,
+of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in
+Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is
+occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy
+and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church
+with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>
+In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,
+when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for
+any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever
+indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be
+serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting
+parties should recognise and accept in each other, without
+equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each
+really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an
+alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of
+the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring
+ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,
+obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret
+warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending
+any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust
+in it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48">{48}</a></span>
+As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without
+endangering her habits, at least without endangering her
+essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace
+with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual
+civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how
+to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give
+way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a
+source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she
+would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of
+separation and complete independence.
+</p>
+<p>
+As for the State, the system which separates the two societies
+would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it
+would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of
+many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle
+of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance
+which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such
+principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce
+Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous
+bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from
+every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy
+themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their
+thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and
+its affairs.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49">{49}</a></span>
+Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at
+the present day, a moral influence of great value from an
+alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one
+condition which is not only especially important in our days, but
+of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of
+manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the
+alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference
+in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the
+church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious
+discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving
+their indirect support to the state government, and which can
+purge their support of all impure motives.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50">{50}</a></span>
+The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain
+degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their
+respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part
+of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at
+the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the
+master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor
+priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and
+their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone
+give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,
+if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.
+</p>
+<p>
+Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the
+facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,
+Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be
+free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.
+Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave
+feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and
+distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles
+essential to civil society and religious society, of any
+compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the
+faults which the two institutions have committed towards each
+other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51">{51}</a></span>
+Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have
+become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,
+something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty
+neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their
+legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations
+to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,
+whether allied with or independent of the Church.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52">{52}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Second Meditation.
+<br><br>
+       Christianity And Morality.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different
+characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously
+minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves
+Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from
+Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea
+of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.
+Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour
+to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the
+abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its
+authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we
+find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the
+other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either
+natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days
+proclaimed and propagated with ardour.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53">{53}</a></span>
+<p>
+I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and
+upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.
+In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest
+intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.
+Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced
+that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested
+or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;
+they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth
+alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and
+which some now strive to accredit.
+</p>
+<p>
+The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the
+scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians
+are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of
+its efficacy.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54">{54}</a></span>
+A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate
+the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to
+it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate
+it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is
+here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent
+Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and
+to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being
+wrecked.
+</p>
+<p>
+The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who
+flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality
+standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,&mdash;and they who
+believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from
+religion,&mdash;err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential
+facts of human nature and of human society.
+</p>
+<p>
+Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete
+observation of these facts. I have already stated in these
+Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality
+from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55">{55}</a></span>
+At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,
+and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I
+affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary
+union between morality and religion.
+</p>
+<p>
+A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the
+theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there
+is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested
+motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and
+treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.
+</p>
+<p>
+I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they
+forget that it <i>has</i> been, and still <i>is</i>, strongly
+contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.
+Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the
+satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate
+aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,
+not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common
+welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could
+perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy
+of human sentiments.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56">{56}</a></span>
+The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the
+recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the
+most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,
+with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to
+other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding
+fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than
+in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive
+themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of
+religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,
+and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive
+themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a
+prey to the disputes of man.
+</p>
+<p>
+I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders
+of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it
+is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it
+contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential
+elements.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57">{57}</a></span>
+<p>
+These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral
+good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;
+the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and
+philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the
+natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human
+morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man
+is a moral being.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I
+do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard
+or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any
+one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent
+morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and
+myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the
+true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its
+signification, and accept its results.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58">{58}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not
+satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to
+himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their
+origin and object, their import and bearing.
+</p>
+<p>
+In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from
+which science sets out; it is only after having well observed
+facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the
+questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which
+the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of
+human morality, such as I have just described it in its three
+constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot
+fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral
+law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the
+ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or
+violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes
+of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or
+elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man
+as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of
+man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three
+constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine
+rightly its source and bearing.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59">{59}</a></span>
+<p>
+Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring
+from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that
+he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.
+Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they
+depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,
+or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the
+feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them
+accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.
+</p>
+<p>
+But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral
+law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes
+its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their
+own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in
+refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may
+attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically
+possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another
+law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever
+they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,
+they bow before it as before something which does not emanate
+from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60">{60}</a></span>
+<p>
+The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the
+world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the
+characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the
+results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the
+forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations
+or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it
+addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of
+whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to
+crush him, still man would be more noble than that which
+destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the
+advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows
+nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,
+sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily&mdash;that he chooses
+to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61">{61}</a></span>
+<p>
+What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called
+Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command
+man's Liberty to respect it?
+</p>
+<p>
+Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority
+solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is
+said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his
+right that no human being shall attack his independence or his
+dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and
+therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual
+right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but
+the right which it is recognised that another possesses."
+[Footnote 14]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,
+    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62">{62}</a></span>
+<p>
+There is here a profound mistake, and a strange forgetfulness.
+</p>
+<p>
+Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,
+does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises
+himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and
+admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which
+arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have
+done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest
+apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence
+and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to
+attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for
+himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental
+principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there
+is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the
+right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to
+it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has
+another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on
+the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the
+paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the
+moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63">{63}</a></span>
+<p>
+Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of
+the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to
+attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral
+law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and
+imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love
+them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love
+those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to
+you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."
+"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing
+again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
+children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and
+to the evil." [Footnote 15]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]
+</p>
+<p>
+"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of
+the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If
+we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other
+respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point
+with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64">{64}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion
+of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of
+those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is
+the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on
+the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law
+to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet
+melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a
+person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a
+modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light
+as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea
+of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a
+moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not
+a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the
+moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power
+attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the
+relations of men with one another.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65">{65}</a></span>
+Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there
+would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does
+not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to
+govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice
+cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,
+as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed
+to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as
+essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the
+social bond;&mdash;the means of peace and of Union amongst
+mankind;&mdash;the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and
+defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every
+man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep
+others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him
+to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and
+respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the
+man who has a right has absolutely nothing.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66">{66}</a></span>
+Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of
+physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ
+the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which
+triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify
+the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made
+his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis
+of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of
+right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the
+stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of
+duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of
+defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which
+serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society
+upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away
+the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir
+    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in
+    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur
+    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,
+    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"
+    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67">{67}</a></span>
+<p>
+This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in
+considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the
+independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the
+theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral
+elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,
+the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,
+sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the
+independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely
+strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of
+man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their
+duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for
+and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,
+and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to
+honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's
+existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which
+the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense
+which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:
+their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68">{68}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the
+principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from
+man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man
+only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and
+mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free
+and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he
+is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his
+own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not
+make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even
+whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot
+withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his
+future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is
+essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its
+subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69">{69}</a></span>
+<p>
+Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working
+its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without
+further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When
+the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and
+acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his
+act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,
+for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not
+merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they
+find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced
+to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the
+laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal
+punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of
+remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the
+proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is
+that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the
+hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove
+that it may be always reawakened.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70">{70}</a></span>
+Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.
+Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that
+to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which
+feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.
+</p>
+<p>
+As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an
+idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made
+of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,
+ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of
+merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common
+sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the
+accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.
+It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and
+most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the
+political organisation of society, and in the problems which
+concern the eternal future.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71">{71}</a></span>
+However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or
+delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of
+a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the
+responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its
+complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and
+equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have
+scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's
+nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have
+considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely
+apart from every other element and every other consideration.
+Those moral facts are briefly as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.
+<br><br>
+  The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.
+<br><br>
+  Moral Liberty.
+<br><br>
+  Moral Responsibility.
+<br><br>
+  Moral merit and demerit.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72">{72}</a></span>
+<p>
+These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the
+proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these
+truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are
+they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,
+or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they
+self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which
+form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot
+elude this question.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;
+that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not
+one of those laws of fate by which the material world is
+governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free
+world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as
+law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.
+Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man&mdash;upon man
+of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without
+enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life
+is passed?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73">{73}</a></span>
+Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law
+emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense
+which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,
+Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order
+reigning in it:&mdash;
+<p class="cite">
+  "Je ne puis songer<br>
+  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."
+<br><br>
+  I cannot think<br>
+  This clock exists and never had a maker.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the moral world we have to do with something far different
+from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine
+constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is
+to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free
+agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to
+accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the
+supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the
+expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both
+contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant
+found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is
+nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human
+Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most
+clearly, most undeniably.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74">{74}</a></span>
+<p>
+Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose
+it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river
+without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free
+agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete
+and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and
+loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law
+reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility
+reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human
+invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral
+responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and
+just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is
+contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral
+responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that
+is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and
+impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in
+a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to
+establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75">{75}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human
+nature&mdash;that is, the distinction between moral good and moral
+evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and
+demerit,&mdash;are necessarily and intimately connected with the
+truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God
+moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and
+essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a
+thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of
+man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble
+to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that
+ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is
+reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its
+authority.
+</p>
+<p>
+Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and
+described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable
+from Religion.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76">{76}</a></span>
+<p>
+What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the
+heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are
+distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to
+each other in the unity of the human being?
+</p>
+<p>
+The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the
+study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms
+Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most
+remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant
+struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle
+what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent
+an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and
+what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected
+in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by
+the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to
+all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the
+moral law, the moral judgment comes.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77">{77}</a></span>
+"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero
+prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up
+unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just
+providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of
+the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was
+the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman
+Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very
+Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after
+having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice
+of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on
+the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on
+account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had
+governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by
+those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is
+incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in
+this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and
+Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,
+sometimes manifests itself there with <i>éclat</i>, and sometimes
+remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre
+mysteries.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78">{78}</a></span>
+Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall
+truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now
+occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore
+order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;
+in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still
+mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is
+intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as
+little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in
+that of the individual man.
+</p>
+<p>
+In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far
+from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they
+progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days
+exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to
+events of the most contradictory character: everything in the
+world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts
+has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79">{79}</a></span>
+Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more
+than feeble convictions&mdash;dim hopes? On the other side, in the
+midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power
+over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and
+confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the
+material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and
+paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have
+plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human
+conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in
+our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;
+intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's
+soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80">{80}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and
+indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have
+limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the
+advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I
+have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,
+natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of
+man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the
+threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general
+that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which
+it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his
+unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity
+alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and
+security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is
+not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic
+value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human
+soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect
+harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already
+tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful
+expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the
+moral being.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81">{81}</a></span>
+<p>
+The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is
+the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral
+ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been
+contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour
+it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure
+their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,
+Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is
+singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most
+illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,
+understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and
+incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear
+light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to
+their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for
+conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they
+taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they
+founded schools or sects.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>
+The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a
+philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and
+instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around
+him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain
+special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of
+mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of
+discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to
+the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the
+moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his
+disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,
+and then to all men:&mdash;"Save your soul, for what would it profit a
+man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and
+preach to all nations."
+</p>
+<p>
+What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so
+ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so
+universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83">{83}</a></span>
+<p>
+And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has
+been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward
+movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly
+arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,
+it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of
+Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and
+the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen
+centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and
+evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that
+Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to
+fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same
+task, and promises herself fresh success.
+</p>
+<p>
+Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me
+at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the
+Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which
+she entertains in the midst of her trials.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84">{84}</a></span>
+<p>
+Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,
+cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them
+proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are
+solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,
+regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human
+actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a
+careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them
+to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both
+amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the
+regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how
+serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that
+sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the
+nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same
+time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the
+same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man
+the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his
+soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates
+it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it
+with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared
+for every sacrifice.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85">{85}</a></span>
+Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine
+of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin
+without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the
+sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so
+well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely
+and so austerely?
+</p>
+<p>
+Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with
+man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its
+rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment
+of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and
+thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he
+opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a
+hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness
+inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy
+the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to
+be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a
+recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the
+equitable benevolence of God.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86">{86}</a></span>
+The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man
+during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store
+for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom
+of God" and "the promises of eternal life."
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he
+keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,
+his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to
+fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the
+world, without any <i>dénouement</i>. He has a prospect, and a
+futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and
+superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain
+this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and
+respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality
+with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole
+view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny
+of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which
+weigh upon the thought and life of man!
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87">{87}</a></span>
+<p>
+I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the
+peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However
+high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely
+less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is
+purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours
+produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical
+work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of
+its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,
+the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from
+which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to
+induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine
+law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it
+is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its
+sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,
+we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon
+which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it
+undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to
+procure the salvation of man by his reformation.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88">{88}</a></span>
+<p>
+When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these
+Meditations&mdash;the subject of which is the actual state of the
+Christian Religion&mdash;I essayed to characterise therein the
+fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which
+combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my
+companion in life, and my <i>confrère</i> at the Institute, M.
+Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I
+maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,
+he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:&mdash;
+<p class="cite">
+  "My dear Friend,
+<br><br>
+  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I
+  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The
+  little difference between our opinions, which you have not
+  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the
+  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which
+  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the
+  nature of religion.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89">{89}</a></span>
+  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still
+  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an
+  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more
+  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself
+  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other
+  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from
+  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets
+  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by
+  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of
+  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,
+  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them
+  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the
+  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in
+  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of
+  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy
+  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must
+  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,
+  grandeur, and peace.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90">{90}</a></span>
+<p class="cite">
+  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,
+  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our
+  old and sincere friendship."
+</p>
+<p>
+I replied to him on the 13th of June:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our
+  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere
+  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,
+  because, independently of our particular and petty
+  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a
+  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that
+  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor
+  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their
+  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their
+  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91">{91}</a></span>
+  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,
+  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.
+  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin
+  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of
+  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which
+  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God
+  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to
+  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of
+  his free will.
+<br><br>
+  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions
+  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."
+</p>
+<p>
+I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at
+Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other
+afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed
+upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence
+we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole
+question.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92">{92}</a></span>
+It is this&mdash;What are the points of resemblance, and what of
+difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity
+and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the
+reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,
+we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their
+nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,
+and the character of their mission.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93">{93}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Third Meditation.
+<br><br>
+        Christianity And Science.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which
+Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account
+of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely
+inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that
+divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,
+and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man
+without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which
+Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make
+these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are
+possessed. &hellip; They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."
+[Footnote 18]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,
+    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.
+    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94">{94}</a></span>
+<p>
+The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a
+different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine
+inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work
+directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this
+themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly
+implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter
+and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it
+positively. [Footnote 19]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the
+    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"
+    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and
+    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only
+    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to
+    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his
+    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]
+</p>
+<p>
+This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of
+the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an
+acceptation as in later times.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95">{95}</a></span>
+In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the
+school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration
+of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,
+strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of
+inspiration, and to explain one by the other&mdash;"It is not by any
+effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,
+"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so
+divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the
+saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;
+pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the
+divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself
+from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the
+musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us
+the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,
+"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the
+other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of
+individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed
+aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing
+them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute
+the breath which makes it discourse its music."
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96">{96}</a></span>
+<p>
+Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of
+the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as
+to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence
+proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the
+formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But
+even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,
+great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and
+St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it
+was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they
+distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of
+God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms
+in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking
+of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken
+of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to
+speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97">{97}</a></span>
+Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. &hellip; When we meet
+with such diversity of expressions&mdash;although not in themselves
+contradictory&mdash;used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the
+words of each, only the intent with which the words are
+pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of
+truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the
+very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else
+which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this
+explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine
+inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the
+fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.
+</p>
+<p>
+I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of
+darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of
+uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the
+invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;
+that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle
+Age.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98">{98}</a></span>
+<p>
+I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch
+of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned
+upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;
+for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been
+fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet
+destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the
+world.
+</p>
+<p>
+Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and
+events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of
+the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of
+Christian societies, I find that this question had received two
+solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its
+representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the
+Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The
+Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of
+the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;
+surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious
+reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these
+books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and
+canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they
+are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the
+ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the
+    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10&mdash;13. Paris, 1686.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99">{99}</a></span>
+<p>
+The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they
+began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts
+and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and
+complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,
+narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the
+old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's
+dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100">{100}</a></span>
+<p>
+The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church
+of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the
+sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly
+respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic
+sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the
+complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute
+infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make
+this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters
+of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of
+God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which
+they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we
+repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the
+two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.
+    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]
+</p>
+<p>
+"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and
+hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of
+humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their
+action and their force, you err. &hellip; God does everything by
+command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air
+with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to
+will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.
+    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres
+    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101">{101}</a></span>
+<p>
+The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the
+nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of
+these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of
+Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the
+Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the
+Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible
+authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,
+found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the
+movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the
+infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the
+present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new
+dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their
+ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,
+have pushed the two doctrines,&mdash;the former of ecclesiastical
+authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,&mdash;to their
+extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right
+and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102">{102}</a></span>
+I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines
+referred to,&mdash;they severally infringe, the one the rights of
+religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both
+cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they
+have, in these respects, severally ill understood.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have already expressed my views upon this subject. [Footnote
+23]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.
+    145-146. London, 1864.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in
+the Scriptures is divinely inspired&mdash;the words as well as the
+ideas, all the words used upon all subjects&mdash;the material of
+language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this
+assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound
+misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred
+books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in
+grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give
+instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>
+It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men
+towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of
+conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.
+It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,
+that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."
+</p>
+<p>
+I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over
+again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole
+object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.
+The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the
+Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine
+truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in
+intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and
+with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,
+in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the
+midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the
+unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,
+Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and
+of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of
+curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and
+perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104">{104}</a></span>
+What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their
+points of connection and their contests,&mdash;God watching over and
+acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,
+God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the
+expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each
+acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man
+after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,
+nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating
+man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he
+enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from
+heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious
+and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a
+free agent.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105">{105}</a></span>
+At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous
+action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his
+passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as
+he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the
+good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.
+This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the
+relations of Man with God.
+</p>
+<p>
+What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful
+connection exists, in this history, between those whom&mdash;how shall
+I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not
+appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so
+untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the
+plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,
+invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to
+us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no
+historical narrative or document, does man show himself more
+violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to
+ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst
+the Hebrews.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106">{106}</a></span>
+Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between
+the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and
+the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from
+God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,
+and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly
+violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in
+his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much
+from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not
+change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a
+witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his
+errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily
+before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to
+interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is
+ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and
+labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts
+and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the
+only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107">{107}</a></span>
+<p>
+In what do those relations consist? By what results does this
+continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this
+incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and
+commands, religious and moral&mdash;God proposes these to man; he
+enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands
+nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he
+commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's
+speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his
+prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.
+Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of
+possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human
+sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people
+whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance
+and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,
+in the midst of which they are living.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>
+When they are made the medium for the religious and moral
+precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer
+mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of
+divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it
+to all around them.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I
+regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,&mdash;the
+simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human
+element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its
+imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his
+religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere
+the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points
+of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his
+barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider
+some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,
+which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109">{109}</a></span>
+<p>
+I open the book of Genesis and read:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
+  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here
+  I am.
+<br><br>
+  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
+  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
+  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
+  will tell thee of.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,
+  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and
+  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went
+  unto the place of which God had told him.
+<br><br>
+  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the
+  place afar off.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the
+  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come
+  again to you.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it
+  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a
+  knife: and they went both of them together.
+<br><br>
+  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
+  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire
+  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a
+  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110">{110}</a></span>
+  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and
+  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and
+  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
+  slay his son.
+<br><br>
+  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and
+  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.
+<br><br>
+  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
+  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,
+  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind
+  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went
+  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in
+  the stead of his son."
+</p>
+<p>
+A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his
+mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is
+an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean
+of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the
+Biblical truths to which I am referring.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111">{111}</a></span>
+<p>
+"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of
+religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong
+tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest
+feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes
+suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and
+with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to
+propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by
+surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the
+source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct
+that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,
+or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.
+On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these
+two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of
+evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness
+in the life of Abraham. &hellip;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112">{112}</a></span>
+The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the
+son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.
+The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than
+sacrifice,&mdash;that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest
+offering that God can receive. &hellip; We have a proverb which tells
+us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.
+    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,
+    1867.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in
+the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been
+forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and
+the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the
+hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from
+the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law
+and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.
+</p>
+<p>
+The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full
+concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is
+in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more
+than he points out.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113">{113}</a></span>
+This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which
+he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the
+Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but
+Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such
+sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and
+manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even
+of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he
+pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is
+beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine
+command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac
+is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of
+course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition
+of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he
+believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;
+    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively
+    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.
+    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114">{114}</a></span>
+<p>
+It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,
+in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental
+characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,
+although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the
+divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and
+word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my
+conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in
+the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,
+which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement
+of progress.
+</p>
+<p>
+I say progress,&mdash;progress immense, infinitely grander than man's
+imagination could ever have conceived,&mdash;and at the same time the
+character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is
+no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the
+continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world
+and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the
+New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to
+recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer
+directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115">{115}</a></span>
+It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,
+and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under
+a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,
+intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of
+suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the
+victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,
+God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.
+Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He
+manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by
+natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!
+what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of
+His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself
+upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,
+separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw
+it from the contagion of idolatry;&mdash;but now it is for the whole
+world, for all nations, for future as well as for living
+generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the
+barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the
+God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over
+the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His
+servants to extend His empire.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116">{116}</a></span>
+<p>
+He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to
+spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate
+from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.
+Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,
+although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human
+errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the
+law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors
+with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature
+of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,
+and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.
+He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and
+brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and
+perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will
+not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very
+texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their
+most essential precepts.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117">{117}</a></span>
+<p>
+I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
+foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for
+stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this <i>lex talionis</i>.
+"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
+neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
+enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
+you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute
+you." [Footnote 27]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 26: Exodus xxi. 24, 25.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 27: Matthew v. 43, 44.]
+</p>
+<p>
+It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a
+wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour
+in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then
+let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,
+an</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118">{118}</a></span>
+<p>
+I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and
+asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? &hellip; And
+he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And
+they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to
+put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the
+hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the
+beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this
+cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his
+wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more
+twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,
+let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 29: Mark x. 2-9;  Matthew xix. 3-9.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be
+found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall
+both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the
+woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119">{119}</a></span>
+<p>
+Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the
+scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;
+and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,
+Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now
+Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but
+what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might
+have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger
+wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they
+continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,
+He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at
+her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they
+which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
+one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
+Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When
+Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said
+unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man
+condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
+Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 31: John viii. 3-11.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120">{120}</a></span>
+<p>
+The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of
+rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain
+external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration
+and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and
+Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the
+acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a
+lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;
+and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of
+Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and
+ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
+&hellip; Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, &hellip; the hour cometh,
+and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in
+spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
+God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in
+spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 32: John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121">{121}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and
+to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is
+about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man
+had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;
+he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity
+and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious
+and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the
+religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and
+extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself
+with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;
+political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all
+in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either
+social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make
+neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions
+advanced, he sets them aside;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122">{122}</a></span>
+"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the
+things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and
+earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and
+prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 33: Matthew xxii. 21; xi. 25.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human
+being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every
+man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every
+human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole
+idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that
+when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary
+consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
+righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
+[Footnote 34]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>
+<p>
+I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its
+different and special objects,&mdash;whether astronomy, geology,
+geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,&mdash;is as
+foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred
+Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man
+left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,
+assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious
+exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,
+then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts
+declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to
+facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no
+disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine
+torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the
+language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak
+according to the measure of their knowledge or of their
+ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order
+to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that
+men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124">{124}</a></span>
+In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,
+and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,
+aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to
+employ a similar language,&mdash;a language comprehended and received
+by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their
+inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters
+purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the
+mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of
+science, but according to their appearances, and so men
+comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear
+them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of
+ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.
+What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the
+person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his
+missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which
+turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that
+it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its
+circumference?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125">{125}</a></span>
+What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the
+language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific
+imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that
+language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or
+moral law of humanity?
+</p>
+<p>
+No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater
+admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and
+it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of
+man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no
+sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,
+to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of
+publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely
+human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is
+essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in
+need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of
+God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the
+religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his
+life, and to decide his lot in eternity.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126">{126}</a></span>
+It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of
+all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated
+philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the
+most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,
+thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from
+being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. &hellip;
+After death the reason,&mdash;just ideas survive; all the rest
+perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even
+from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in
+God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them
+only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble
+souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made
+up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish
+almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple
+accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul
+of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely
+troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the
+consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really
+are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of
+soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation
+    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127">{127}</a></span>
+<p>
+I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought
+showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the
+favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour
+at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not
+believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is
+declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good
+their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128">{128}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Fourth Meditation.
+<br><br>
+          Christian Ignorance.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have
+either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the
+intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that
+it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,
+to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any
+kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind
+limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there
+a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the
+objects are different to which it is applied? These are
+questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words
+"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to
+offer what appears to me to be the right solution.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129">{129}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or
+systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to
+make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these
+sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,
+Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.
+I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these
+systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to
+undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all
+philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special
+questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between
+Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus
+only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to
+the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,
+their bearing and their limitation.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the
+first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,
+Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the
+distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,
+Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology
+is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great
+philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which
+Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more
+eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak
+more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of
+Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible
+to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or
+non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for
+which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.
+    By M. Littré, p. 519.]
+</p>
+<p>
+That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,
+Ontology, and Theology are not&mdash;cannot be&mdash;sciences.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131">{131}</a></span>
+As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,
+and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of
+Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three
+schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them
+the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term
+"Christian Ignorance."
+</p>
+<p>
+It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and
+with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this
+question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which
+they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as
+Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of
+the four sciences&mdash;Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and
+Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there
+to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there
+discovered.
+</p>
+<p>
+When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is
+indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more
+so, than Spiritualism itself.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132">{132}</a></span>
+It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all
+Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal
+in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other
+questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and
+Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between
+Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between
+Rationalistic science and Christian science.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of
+Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it
+admits that these different sciences owe their birth and
+development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men
+and of things, and have for their object the solution of the
+questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once
+admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology
+alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of
+Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which
+the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to
+say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for
+human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source
+other than human reason.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133">{133}</a></span>
+Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and
+other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts
+supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it
+recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are
+bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand
+that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human
+mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the
+history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth
+of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have
+testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as
+well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact
+proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,
+the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical
+Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which
+Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data
+and the legitimate bases of science.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134">{134}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and
+to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to
+the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human
+experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no
+intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great
+question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with
+respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall
+return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has
+not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it
+demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas&mdash;facts,
+rather&mdash;absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic
+opponents of the supernatural.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,
+    1864.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal
+causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and
+distinctive characteristic of man.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135">{135}</a></span>
+It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself
+above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things
+determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it
+in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any
+general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such
+facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a
+machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to
+drive man back to the condition of that nature which is
+substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish
+at one blow human morality and human liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+The blow strikes still higher&mdash;it would abolish God. God, who
+created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his
+creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the
+daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that
+human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies
+to the source from which it emanates.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>
+By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the
+condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble
+of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;
+that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of
+Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical
+reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,
+nothing more than Atheism.
+</p>
+<p>
+The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this
+consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being
+disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the
+most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from
+entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be
+finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not
+assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical
+consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident
+in the moral and social condition of humanity.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137">{137}</a></span>
+<p>
+There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of
+the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that
+the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and
+permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential
+laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings
+whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject
+absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of
+necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in
+harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly
+perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If
+the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will
+venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even
+there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that
+the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small
+Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every
+place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in
+the midst of space and of time?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138">{138}</a></span>
+<p>
+Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it
+admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe&mdash;an unknown
+incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and
+admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.
+de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime
+flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing
+in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows
+how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the
+fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches
+us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the
+discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in
+the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest
+and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in
+the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to
+these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality
+of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely
+minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the
+reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects
+than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it
+discovers.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>
+What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the
+worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no
+more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that
+all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those
+inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same
+conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our
+science becomes very modest when set side by side with our
+ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,
+however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may
+be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is
+either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing
+this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,
+Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which
+outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140">{140}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity
+has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the
+reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one
+side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life
+of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life
+of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,
+a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the
+other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and
+with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of
+the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible
+laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places
+itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the
+spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the
+extent.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141">{141}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another
+adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by
+asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts
+and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,
+let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I
+address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by
+the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before
+speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,
+I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is
+here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion
+in the great struggle in which it is engaged.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an
+uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.
+Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these
+documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the
+facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the
+less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a
+poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion
+of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of
+the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius
+were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral
+precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes
+and subjects.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142">{142}</a></span>
+I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human
+imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books
+which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time
+incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential
+characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its
+latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the
+Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing
+centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil
+society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another
+and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a
+religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have
+been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of
+God upon the destinies of Mankind.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>
+<p>
+In proportion to the vigour with which these events have
+developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed
+to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its
+peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.
+</p>
+<p>
+What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the
+means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays
+to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he
+believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his
+thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to
+attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the
+Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,
+he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,
+cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does
+Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,
+to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very
+presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of
+God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow
+the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him
+imperfectly,&mdash;where he attempts to carry the torch of human
+science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144">{144}</a></span>
+<p>
+I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two
+examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and
+Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly
+repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive
+documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that
+"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the
+Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all
+theological controversies. To disregard this fact&mdash;to deny the
+divinity of Jesus Christ&mdash;is to deny, to overthrow the Christian
+religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never
+have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation
+was its principle, and Jesus Christ&mdash;God and Man&mdash;its author."
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of
+    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145">{145}</a></span>
+<p>
+But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this
+sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought
+to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the
+human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such
+union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's
+personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,
+which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the
+divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the
+councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and
+agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.
+</p>
+<p>
+Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of
+divine History.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as
+unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the
+Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of
+Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146">{146}</a></span>
+The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its
+place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very
+beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves
+to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to
+determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the
+religions truth; in other words, to transform history into
+science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the
+authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,
+rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of
+the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,
+and Holy Ghost.
+</p>
+<p>
+I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the
+doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either
+originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their
+essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to
+human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less
+legitimate, of Religion.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147">{147}</a></span>
+<p>
+When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of
+Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do
+not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The
+scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,
+always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of
+the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves
+to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and
+thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause
+of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral
+influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and
+authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have
+been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than
+efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their
+mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The
+Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this
+was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;
+forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they
+have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by
+explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an
+intermixture of man's work.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148">{148}</a></span>
+Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same
+time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can
+recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man
+to make of them a science.
+</p>
+<p>
+Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his
+explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:
+"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,
+or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add
+to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity
+and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this
+is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."
+[Footnote 39]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.
+    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian
+ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to
+take refuge.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149">{149}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are
+unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a
+serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and
+what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to
+believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of
+man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in
+religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only
+their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own
+work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most
+logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this
+respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly
+be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian
+ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to
+moderation and charity than Theological science.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and
+efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human
+science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the
+same error and the same peril.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150">{150}</a></span>
+The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God
+to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and
+inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and
+mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon
+certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations
+of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the
+hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and
+the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter
+themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the
+solution of such questions is hidden.
+</p>
+<p>
+I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious
+impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets
+of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling
+curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?
+Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself
+under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be
+possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and
+powerless?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151">{151}</a></span>
+There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and
+under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost
+recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding
+from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to
+them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who
+of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of
+a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,
+conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,
+in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of
+human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event
+brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to
+which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine
+Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt
+the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve
+problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to
+rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine
+author.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152">{152}</a></span>
+But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No
+doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by
+his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to
+our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and
+his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their
+effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general
+problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions
+touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of
+Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into
+ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at
+limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific
+vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to
+overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon
+man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,
+"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his
+charity, and his liberty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153">{153}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Fifth Meditation.
+<br><br>
+           Christian Faith.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé
+Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the
+Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue
+Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is
+called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it
+expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.
+Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in
+its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to
+my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages
+which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the
+imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to
+regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a
+starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I
+now give to the press.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154">{154}</a></span>
+<p>
+By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in
+facts or dogmas of a special nature&mdash;in facts or dogmas of
+religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in
+speaking of <i>the faith</i> the term is used alone and
+absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its
+fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from
+which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the
+following are met with:&mdash;"I have full <i>faith</i> in your words;
+this man has <i>faith</i> in himself&mdash;in his strength&mdash;in his
+fortune, &amp;c." This employment of the word <i>faith</i> in secular
+matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it
+is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never
+been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had
+also other significations attached to it.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155">{155}</a></span>
+<p>
+It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular
+opinion, 1st, that the word <i>faith</i> designates a certain
+internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a
+certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of
+the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,
+nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied
+to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its
+special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the
+variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are
+taking place every day?
+</p>
+<p>
+Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a
+religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy
+of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing
+in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction
+of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called
+<i>Faith</i>; a name which neither masters and disciples will
+repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156">{156}</a></span>
+Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the
+truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the
+conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been
+generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;
+that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name
+of <i>Faith</i>, is its energy, is the empire which that energy
+gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith
+of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth
+century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of
+Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.
+</p>
+<p>
+The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it
+was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by
+an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of
+persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened
+reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral
+affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to
+feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave
+the name of <i>Faith</i> to the result of their action, just as
+they had done so to the result of the process essentially
+intellectual of which I was before speaking.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157">{157}</a></span>
+Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by
+reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is
+the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.
+</p>
+<p>
+Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always
+sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has
+been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to
+practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach
+ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a
+meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind
+was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to
+certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it
+had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission
+of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to
+govern man's life and to regulate his thought.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158">{158}</a></span>
+<p>
+Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated
+in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the
+intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation
+of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that
+it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by
+any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention
+and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became
+thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive
+character.
+</p>
+<p>
+The word <i>faith</i> has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,
+a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human
+intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the
+sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often
+even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's
+long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to
+command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural
+means,&mdash;by divine grace.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159">{159}</a></span>
+<p>
+What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may
+emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What
+is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider
+it independently of its origin and of its object?
+</p>
+<p>
+Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it
+innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,
+but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and
+establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being
+aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or
+volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and
+the influence of that external world in the midst of which his
+life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of
+laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary
+study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all
+his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering
+it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there
+taking place&mdash;to render an account thereof to himself, and thus
+to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge
+which he did not before possess, although the facts which form
+its object nevertheless existed as facts external&mdash;and which he
+might see by his eyes,&mdash;or as facts which were taking place
+within him.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160">{160}</a></span>
+<p>
+Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of
+<i>faith</i>?
+</p>
+<p>
+It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to
+that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:
+such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man
+in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he
+dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,
+unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it
+the characteristics of <i>faith?</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time
+others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost
+unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and
+spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without
+which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct
+without having given it any intimate and personal assent.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161">{161}</a></span>
+It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,
+admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to
+say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him
+to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful
+principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the
+profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which
+reigns over him. <i>Faith</i>, on the contrary, has this power;
+faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which
+faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account
+to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will
+do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind
+it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of
+human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of
+gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth
+which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,
+of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much
+more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does
+much more than direct him, it enlightens him.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>
+How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and
+instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without
+our being able to affirm that they have <i>faith</i> in them.
+Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,
+nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without
+seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,
+however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,
+should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction
+between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their
+nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their
+legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by
+comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying
+it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a
+sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and
+establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;
+this is no longer simple natural belief, it is <i>faith</i>.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163">{163}</a></span>
+<p>
+Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two
+kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them
+the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous
+belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and
+science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is
+individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,
+dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison
+with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,
+faith is the full security of man in the possession of his
+belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path
+which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and
+a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent
+harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man
+whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition
+present no longer any problems for solution as to the things
+which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full
+possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and
+in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>
+As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,
+it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external
+conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from
+other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its
+object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined
+and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature
+itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may
+be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the
+intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in
+the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory
+of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so
+forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of
+every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally
+oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of
+the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the
+exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long
+obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the
+three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,
+and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously
+satisfied.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165">{165}</a></span>
+Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a
+situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of
+its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need
+be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his
+faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral
+nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.
+</p>
+<p>
+The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith
+would seem <i>à priori</i> to be intellectual beauty, and
+practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the
+mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent
+or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but
+the name of <i>faith</i> would not be suitably applied to it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166">{166}</a></span>
+Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an
+idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also
+attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the
+pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple
+belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may
+become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure
+to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to
+awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin
+and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall
+be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and
+the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the
+other, and to unite them.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost
+exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief
+possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote
+40] which provoke the development of faith.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167">{167}</a></span>
+<p>
+Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful
+applications; political theories may strike the mind by the
+elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of
+their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more
+surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor
+have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in
+the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression
+at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their
+practical importance, a certain measure of science and of
+sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as
+the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does
+not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on
+the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in
+itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;
+having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and
+undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however
+rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once
+sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an
+habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him
+access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual
+life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;
+it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over
+him the empire of the most powerful interest.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168">{168}</a></span>
+Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition
+to a state of <i>faith</i> should be so rapid and so general? But
+it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to
+transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary
+energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free
+and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to
+impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith
+which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which
+addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the
+loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,
+can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral
+nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to
+the mission prescribed to him by his thought.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169">{169}</a></span>
+But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of
+the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience
+proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the
+different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more
+its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by
+his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections
+or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the
+abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring
+from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once
+there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to
+diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law
+of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,
+it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its
+designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost
+always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this
+mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any
+other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and
+of society falling under oppression.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170">{170}</a></span>
+<p>
+For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in
+belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his
+will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,
+has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith
+fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty
+does not exist, faith first usurps,&mdash;then becomes
+bewildered&mdash;finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to
+the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its
+efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it
+abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we
+have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the
+tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.
+In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces
+consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et
+    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of
+    1861).]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171">{171}</a></span>
+<p>
+If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I
+rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it
+Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as
+characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon
+which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold
+merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which
+has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other
+side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in
+sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in
+sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.
+</p>
+<p>
+What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the
+principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man
+incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each
+man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and
+more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the
+present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;
+in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172">{172}</a></span>
+<p>
+The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less
+evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical
+importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor
+de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of
+Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit
+of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and
+adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the
+sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally
+certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or
+Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere
+believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and
+imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of
+fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and
+strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.
+As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has
+presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever
+seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to
+make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has
+nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of
+the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very
+efficacious influence to the principle of authority.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>
+<p>
+Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and
+assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,
+let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is
+engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What
+is the principle of this contest, and what its character?
+</p>
+<p>
+Here we are met by that all-important question, the question
+which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which
+all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the
+Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm
+that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of
+these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,
+and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:
+whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such
+contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as
+they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174">{174}</a></span>
+<p>
+In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that
+which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is
+profound; but I do not think that the question between the two
+has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition
+has been rightly defined.
+</p>
+<p>
+To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,
+first, to the philosophers.
+</p>
+<p>
+We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to
+what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:
+"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with
+respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,
+than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then
+either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the
+old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the
+standard of reason."
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175">{175}</a></span>
+Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him
+in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,&mdash;"My
+first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,
+unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to
+avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to
+follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but
+what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as
+to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,
+    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]
+</p>
+<p>
+More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace
+to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the
+history of its progressive development, did far more than
+obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his
+labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its
+proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of
+a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and
+then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,
+all his knowledge,&mdash;in fact, the entire man himself.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have
+their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.
+Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to
+know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by
+the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a
+<i>tabula rasa</i>, and to fill up the void which he has so made,
+he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so
+clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to
+doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses
+not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without
+reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a
+statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this
+statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the
+man&mdash;the entire man&mdash;with all the developments of his nature and
+of his thought.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177">{177}</a></span>
+<p>
+I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting
+point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very
+commencement of philosophy,&mdash;in short, a mere hypothesis.
+Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and
+of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress
+of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and
+scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the
+material world; but from their very commencement both these
+philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight
+road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a
+mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete
+appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss
+either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two
+hypotheses, the <i>tabula rasa</i> of Descartes, and the statue
+of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they
+are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to
+inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle
+which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,
+and Christian faith.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178">{178}</a></span>
+<p>
+The true point of departure of this history and the first of the
+facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and
+the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the
+other, the "<i>moi</i>" and the "<i>non moi</i>," the subject and
+the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I
+repudiate absolutely the different systems,&mdash;Pantheism, whether
+materialistic or idealistic,&mdash;Scepticism, whether idealistic or
+absolute,&mdash;which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the
+reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge
+of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the
+relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe
+together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a
+pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these
+different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have
+to deal with something very different from the question to which
+I am applying myself at this moment.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179">{179}</a></span>
+Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form
+of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it
+admits the reality and the distinction of the "<i>moi</i>" and of
+the "<i>non moi</i>" of the subject and the object, of the
+spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the
+universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for
+Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and
+under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's
+life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all
+simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the
+spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being
+from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself
+and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the
+diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives
+from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has
+a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and
+also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows
+not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive
+and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,
+yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180">{180}</a></span>
+Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,
+by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and
+which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that
+external world. He observes and notes both what takes place
+without him and within him. The results of this observation he
+terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations
+merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him
+of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands
+in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is
+highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,
+but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of
+science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein
+involved.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181">{181}</a></span>
+<p>
+Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,
+I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,
+or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;
+first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which
+mankind professes, although under very different forms and in
+very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of
+philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in
+order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,
+and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side
+is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other
+is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of
+disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is
+called religious philosophy.
+</p>
+<p>
+Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no
+other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these
+systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,
+and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the
+religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of
+religion?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182">{182}</a></span>
+<p>
+To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,
+Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.
+</p>
+<p>
+In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the
+instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of
+human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and
+proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active
+presence of God in the life of man and in the history of
+humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and
+active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of
+Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active
+presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the
+mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and
+of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,
+are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological
+and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which
+it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183">{183}</a></span>
+<p>
+Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and
+disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which
+all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always
+confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,
+greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is
+looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is
+immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,
+diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is
+situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence
+reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision
+more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He
+observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts
+which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion
+amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in
+appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their
+character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the
+question antecedent to and which governs all the others.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>
+<p>
+The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not
+a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and
+a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith
+as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at
+the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,
+as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they
+themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only
+the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the
+life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these
+psychological and historic facts which reason and science are
+bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians
+justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence
+alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and
+permanent laws assigned to all other existences?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185">{185}</a></span>
+<p>
+As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are
+concerned, this is the real question at issue.
+</p>
+<p>
+Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which
+we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and
+those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to
+demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of
+God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all
+their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these
+days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.
+Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made
+earnest&mdash;I would willingly say pious&mdash;efforts to elucidate the
+proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid
+that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the
+religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive
+themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain
+to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of
+the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186">{186}</a></span>
+In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which
+Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and
+unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of
+each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic
+Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to
+prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of
+the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the
+place of the real action of God.
+</p>
+<p>
+In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"
+another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and
+with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different
+systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to
+polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear
+enunciation of his own thought.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187">{187}</a></span>
+"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend
+against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law
+of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would
+not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a
+commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and
+product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,
+to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in
+opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a
+supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be
+perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he
+is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of
+spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in
+ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,
+he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind
+supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an
+unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,
+inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that
+emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he
+would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a
+divine Reason.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188">{188}</a></span>
+<p>
+Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living
+God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves &hellip; A God
+that loved not would not be worthy of being adored &hellip; We do not
+adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in
+consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however
+potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure
+it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being
+who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its
+highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a
+contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if
+the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious
+conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."
+[Footnote 43]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.
+    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189">{189}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions
+still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from
+philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the
+philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle
+of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon
+the soul of man.
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,
+continually present, and active in the government of the
+Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the
+human race.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short
+there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts
+which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these
+facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that
+Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190">{190}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Sixth Meditation.
+<br><br>
+            Christian Life.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit
+to a test&mdash;the great test&mdash;the practical application. The idea
+has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.
+</p>
+<p>
+Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,
+upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their
+ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are
+right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is
+in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its
+object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man
+pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever
+the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it
+believes that it has attained to the truth.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191">{191}</a></span>
+<p>
+This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only
+ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under
+its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those
+who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the
+principle that we should be indifferent whether we are
+essentially in the right, and that practically there is no
+difference between truth and error.
+</p>
+<p>
+But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than
+the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human
+mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,
+that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves
+itself?
+</p>
+<p>
+To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a
+denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every
+doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a
+test,&mdash;the practical application.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192">{192}</a></span>
+The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;
+these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically
+true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which
+it is bound to give.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is a radical difference between the material world and the
+intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in
+the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought
+and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is
+ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has
+no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot
+influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite
+of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if
+Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,
+and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's
+principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to
+the general system of the world. <i>There</i> man's error is
+absolutely without effect or influence.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>
+<p>
+In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is
+not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act&mdash;
+to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to
+the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant
+of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside
+here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and
+independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here
+without real and serious consequences; they have the power of
+sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual
+and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to
+the disputes of men.
+</p>
+<p>
+Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,
+separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from
+its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific
+investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and
+admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of
+society or the results of their own labours.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194">{194}</a></span>
+Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave
+inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world
+are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;
+man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the
+profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,
+procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative
+description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no
+general disturbance results in that material world upon which
+naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will
+not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their
+ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,
+on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its
+teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and
+make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape
+the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in
+its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world
+to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,
+incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not
+here the object of science, it is still its necessary and
+appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the
+truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195">{195}</a></span>
+<p>
+Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen
+centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue
+ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace
+here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and
+surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of
+Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single
+small part of this history, the most modest part, the least
+pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what
+Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian
+Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different
+situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day
+accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the
+furtherance of his ultimate destiny.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>
+<p>
+Three words, "<i>Rights of Man</i>" inscribed upon the banners of
+the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man
+as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his
+humanity. Three other words, <i>Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity</i>, have served as a commentary upon the three
+former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French
+Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources
+of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the
+ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.
+</p>
+<p>
+Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is
+Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have
+of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by
+Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does
+Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and
+condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity
+alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral
+force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the
+good also to perish.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197">{197}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride
+that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,
+the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his
+rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential
+objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the
+rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the
+individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,
+where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human
+creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a
+single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,
+Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not
+only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The
+right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of
+the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,
+constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant
+precept of the Christian religion.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>
+It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian
+Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put
+into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as
+the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the
+chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that
+Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was
+amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as
+brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although
+sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a
+stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less
+potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it
+maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over
+distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil
+society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are
+most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the
+iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices
+have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the
+Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the
+earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church
+itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and
+acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199">{199}</a></span>
+Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never
+afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any
+human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of
+earthly power, the appellation, <i>brethren</i>, never ceased to
+be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all
+the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only
+in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear
+themselves greeted as <i>brethren</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence
+in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand
+to the political authorities, or in which the different classes
+stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the
+constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,
+called family.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200">{200}</a></span>
+There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the
+despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of
+wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If
+we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as
+religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of
+antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman
+family,&mdash;we shall not need to examine long before we discern
+clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just
+appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and
+liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and
+puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular
+maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and
+fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of
+false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the
+history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not
+merely in the records of a few years, but through three
+centuries.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201">{201}</a></span>
+Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying
+claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the
+same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show
+of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim
+to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner
+of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did
+they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon
+authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,
+and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.
+Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of
+Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to
+the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of
+this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its
+cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its
+liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either
+in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,
+and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which
+the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202">{202}</a></span>
+They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor
+humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and
+disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage
+to its right at the same time that they maintained their own
+right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished
+at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not
+as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,
+and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen
+me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
+and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."
+[Footnote 45]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]
+</p>
+<p>
+And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and
+struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the
+doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every
+soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but
+of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. &hellip; Wherefore ye
+must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for
+conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 46: Romans xiii. 1, 5. ]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203">{203}</a></span>
+<p>
+Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself
+addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which
+are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote
+47]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of
+power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of
+religious life from civil life,&mdash;all these were not, for the
+primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their
+situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles
+of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the
+name of justice and of truth.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204">{204}</a></span>
+<p>
+Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,
+greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the
+history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to
+the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once
+became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by
+earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the
+arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil
+inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and
+combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity
+had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,
+nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary
+doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted
+and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape
+and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they
+never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they
+survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the
+broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,
+Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled
+against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite
+of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of
+violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,
+the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205">{205}</a></span>
+Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious
+and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of
+human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and
+these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,
+traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable
+them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and
+corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.
+Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which
+agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely
+healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant
+subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of
+sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated
+herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she
+has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against
+which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which
+she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over
+the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of
+promise. This she owes to her origin&mdash;she was born in the manger
+of Jesus.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206">{206}</a></span>
+<p>
+There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened
+men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has
+rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality
+of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of
+Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,
+the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality
+is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be
+separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but
+its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not
+disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and
+empire of morality, I have established in this volume of
+Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,
+and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart
+from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,
+and powerless&mdash;a branch without root and without fruit.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207">{207}</a></span>
+I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is
+Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as
+the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,
+but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have
+taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still
+higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did
+not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of
+doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a
+truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and
+superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as
+such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,
+and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and
+vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and
+learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the
+fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208">{208}</a></span>
+At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw
+in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a
+sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by
+Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his
+appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;
+but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who
+detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council
+and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and
+the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to
+have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,
+a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in
+reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the
+apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of
+Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching
+these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself
+to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,
+joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,
+were scattered and brought to nought.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209">{209}</a></span>
+After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the
+taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;
+and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I
+say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if
+this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But
+if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found
+even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 48: Acts v. 21, 33&mdash;39.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity
+at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already
+made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the
+living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
+of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 49: Matthew xxvi. 63, 64.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210">{210}</a></span>
+<p>
+The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A
+short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as
+their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide
+the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in
+repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof
+was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries
+of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of
+Christianity,&mdash;the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,
+the Inspiration of the Scriptures,&mdash;became the grand dogmas of
+Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its
+turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed
+from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to
+undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly
+interests and human errors and passions had a great part;
+Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes
+converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so
+constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was
+theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of
+practical application in every form and every shape.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211">{211}</a></span>
+The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all
+these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows
+of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and
+is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the
+same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,
+with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and
+the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.
+The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its
+Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The
+authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of
+the next and last series of my "Meditations."
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212">{212}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213">{213}</a></span>
+<br>
+               <h2>Appendix.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at
+London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance
+a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:
+all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or
+simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or
+attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,
+perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,
+has just made it the subject of three articles, which are
+remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They
+appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his
+country. [Footnote 50]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by
+    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen
+    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of
+    January, February, and March, 1868.]
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'
+  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be
+  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified
+  authorship&mdash;that has appeared within the same interval, has
+  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism
+  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled
+  'Ecce Homo.'"
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214">{214}</a></span>
+<p>
+The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his
+intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental
+ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current
+conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a
+definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons
+not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They
+may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the
+beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time
+when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as
+St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with
+those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to
+trace his biography from point to point, and accept those
+conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles
+have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,
+critically weighed, appear to warrant.
+</p>
+<p>
+"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+there was no historical character whose motives, objects and
+feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern
+Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;
+which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an
+answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the
+Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to
+attain that object?'"
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215">{215}</a></span>
+<p>
+On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief
+words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not
+to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,
+I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in
+the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very
+outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study
+the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering
+him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer
+all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire
+to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating
+him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when
+living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the
+ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,
+in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a
+person unknown to us&mdash;a fossil man, so to say, of which the
+features might be traceable in some contemporary document,
+showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to
+supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he
+performed;&mdash;this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,
+one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true
+comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus
+mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer
+limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent
+thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and
+its nature verified in its positive and vast development.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216">{216}</a></span>
+<p>
+This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of
+history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like
+anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and
+comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their
+different elements and in all the development of their life. They
+form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we
+are deciphering.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce
+Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it
+within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also
+understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed
+and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these
+days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?&mdash;a
+man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine
+nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he
+really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such
+things as miracles? What are we to understand by the
+supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and
+accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style
+Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably
+suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and
+violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce
+Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to
+study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it
+because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no
+positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a
+certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of
+some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of
+him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact
+not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to
+the sole and proper force of mankind?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217">{217}</a></span>
+<p>
+Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous
+author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:
+what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book
+"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed
+to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has
+proposed to explain Christianity.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of
+the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a
+strange one,&mdash;it is condemnatory and destructive of the
+fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and
+honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the
+facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human
+nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural
+operations of humanity.
+</p>
+<p>
+The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether
+twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of
+Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing
+with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,
+the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the
+authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,
+the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the
+systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its
+fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and
+sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn
+the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.
+Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and
+striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,
+however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,
+and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218">{218}</a></span>
+<p>
+All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the
+vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the
+perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the
+solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not
+enter.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an
+account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's
+opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my
+aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show
+plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There
+precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with
+the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of
+Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of
+Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he
+departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he
+appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought
+seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly
+contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts
+or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is
+more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he
+believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity
+find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they
+encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or
+the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219">{219}</a></span>
+<p>
+There are several passages of this remarkable work which are
+particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I
+feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of
+the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,
+entitled <i>Christ's Credentials</i>, and chapter ninth,
+[Footnote 51] entitled <i>Reflections on the Nature of Christ's
+Society;</i> in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled
+<i>Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems</i>,
+and chapter the eleventh, <i>The Christian Republic</i> [Footnote
+52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,
+fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and
+satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the
+author's inconsistency with respect to religion.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 51: Ecce Homo, ed. 1866, pp. 41-51, 81&mdash;102.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 52: <i>Ibid</i>, pp. 108&mdash;119, 120&mdash;126.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply
+remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and
+particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and
+call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a
+singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a
+subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with
+philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of
+human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and
+religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and
+painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a
+grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,
+however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no
+idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable
+work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to
+which I have already referred, and indeed it appears
+incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the
+human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as
+of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his
+book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another
+volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the
+Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220">{220}</a></span>
+He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking
+inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ
+much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however
+superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary
+humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and
+is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not
+have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.
+</p>
+<br>
+                 <h3>The End.</h3>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+
+  <h3>Bradbury, Evans, And Co., Printers, Whitefriars.</h3>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 60815 ***</div>
+</body>
+
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The
+Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Christianity Viewed In Relation To The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
+
+Author: François Guizot
+
+Release Date: November 30, 2019 [EBook #60815]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIANITY VIEWED IN RELATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Don Kostuch
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note: This production is based on
+https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]
+
+{i}
+
+         Christianity Viewed In Relation To
+
+     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
+
+                  By M. Guizot.
+
+
+  Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.
+
+
+                    London:
+
+         John Murray, Albemarle Street.
+
+                     1871.
+
+{ii}
+
+             By The Same Author.
+
+       The Essence Of Christianity.
+             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.
+
+  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances
+  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable
+  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."
+    --_Edinburgh Review_.
+
+
+
+      The Present State Of Christianity.
+          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.
+
+  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a
+  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,
+  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further
+  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great
+  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future
+  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great
+  interest."--_Pall Mall Gazette_.
+
+{iii}
+
+{iv}
+
+{v}
+
+                   Preface.
+
+
+In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the
+facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and
+the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I
+retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during
+the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and
+Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated
+amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent
+trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in
+these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,
+Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the
+fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those
+systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the
+office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and
+destiny.
+{vi}
+That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why
+is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has
+had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been
+made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely
+better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of
+humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which
+vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in
+review? because it fills up the void that those systems either
+create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts
+man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]
+
+    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.
+    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]
+
+Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this
+question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas
+and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them
+more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.
+{vii}
+Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity
+can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that
+morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious
+Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the
+very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those
+who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe
+Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each
+other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as
+naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that
+Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,
+that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I
+establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I
+then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and
+determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical
+Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the
+bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.
+{viii}
+I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the
+law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I
+interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show
+that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.
+"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the
+Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the
+present series concludes.
+
+But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the
+historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of
+retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its
+course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor
+wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts
+which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine
+origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and
+destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a
+summary:--
+
+  1. The authority of the sacred books.
+
+  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.
+
+  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.
+
+{ix}
+
+  4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.
+
+  5. Romanism and Protestantism.
+
+  6. The different Antichristian crises, their
+     character and their issue.
+
+It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they
+suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised
+itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe
+and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one
+of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my
+Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real
+value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical
+Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of
+Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed
+to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious
+study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many
+quicksands.
+
+{x}
+
+But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I
+been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work
+into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are
+agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding
+their instant solution? What good result can I expect from
+studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my
+country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the
+actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that
+which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many
+troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I
+scrutinize generations--the honour and the destiny of which I
+have so much at heart, for my children form part of them--the
+more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the
+general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself
+in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the
+grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.
+{xi}
+I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,
+France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems
+and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their
+gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not
+having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from
+not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when
+she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary
+forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.
+
+Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some
+question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in
+events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and
+the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than
+the era of modern history--in the sixteenth century the question
+of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth
+century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad
+and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the
+operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in
+France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the
+different objects which each social movement had specially in
+view.
+{xii}
+The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the
+struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on
+high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite
+complications of a labyrinth.
+
+And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of
+essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,
+contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is
+plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I
+propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.
+
+First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of
+the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which
+concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of
+populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly
+these questions were all reducible to one--the aggrandizement or
+the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or
+the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the
+balance of power in Europe.
+{xiii}
+War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled
+this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and
+Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation
+so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and
+ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and
+entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the
+question of nationalities, the question of little states and of
+great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and
+of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their
+midst,--all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a
+routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the
+maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking
+themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial
+organizations and the external relations of States.
+
+{xiv}
+
+Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle
+itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new
+ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual
+theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of
+men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good
+their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any
+respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a
+principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which
+the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name
+of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from
+participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or
+eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.
+Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently
+against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick
+does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of
+which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of
+language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some
+general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased
+to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,
+and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more
+legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his
+successors.
+
+{xv}
+
+I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men
+follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part
+of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain
+share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the
+possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a
+moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of
+this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But
+policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to
+these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and
+right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common
+sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,
+maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,
+and which, up to the present time, have presided over the
+relations of States.
+{xvi}
+The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial
+agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be
+independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect
+for ancient treaties,--all these elements of European order have
+not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory
+of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political
+unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with
+justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western
+Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both
+in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow
+countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal
+of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?
+Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere
+Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations
+of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which
+draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories
+all foreign domination.
+{xvii}
+But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of
+union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and
+the _régime_ of a confederation of States might have been
+established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the
+foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have
+been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the
+interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the
+preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at
+the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that
+any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of
+that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized
+world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally
+compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the
+preservation of peace between the different States.
+
+{xviii}
+
+What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the
+sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,
+the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a
+population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,
+and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute
+themselves into new and independent States? What would become of
+the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also
+were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating
+wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its
+members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations
+or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding
+or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does
+he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in
+the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.
+The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being
+rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to
+the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his
+country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to
+strive to lay the foundation of a new country.
+{xix}
+We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen
+some of the States which form the nation of the United States of
+America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an
+independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in
+their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the
+right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to
+change its government at discretion. The States which remained
+faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the
+principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in
+maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am
+one of those who think that they had both right and reason on
+their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the
+most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character
+as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the
+interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for
+negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to
+me all that he had written and said upon the subject.
+{xx}
+I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he
+expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the
+efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and
+by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He
+would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living
+reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle
+Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much
+sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced
+that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of
+which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the
+danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of
+slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the
+great American State which was their country. Motive detestable
+for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,
+has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a
+Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern
+times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising
+resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an
+unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of
+States.
+
+{xxi}
+
+So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the
+external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the
+future has in store for those which involve domestic order and
+the organization of government. I meet here with the same
+confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between
+ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at
+the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in
+collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments
+in opinions.
+
+The proposition is now universally received that society has the
+right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own
+government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a
+manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.
+{xxii}
+The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to
+attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the
+monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the
+other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the
+great representatives of public power. But neither the
+constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded
+amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of
+events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in
+spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of
+liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on
+its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was
+affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and
+sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional
+monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of
+government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of
+personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the
+essay have greater success? Events will decide.
+{xxiii}
+In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so
+many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the
+disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its
+governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our
+ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,
+have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of
+impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very
+well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed
+and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no
+fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield
+ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our
+very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but
+soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less
+exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our
+most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as
+precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are
+again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in
+the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have
+taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet
+these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found
+any free government.
+
+{xxiv}
+
+I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the
+state of our political institutions to that of the relations
+existent between the different parts of society. I say the
+_different parts_ to avoid saying _different classes_,
+for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking
+that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges
+and exclusions, of that entire _régime_ with its narrow
+compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were
+formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their
+name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental
+qualification they might possess. In effect, this _régime_
+has fallen--fallen completely and definitively; all legal
+barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:
+by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to
+everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.
+{xxv}
+This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate
+it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it
+ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of
+jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they
+have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they
+persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in
+defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration
+was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils
+that the _bourgeoisie_ had to endure, and the risks which it
+had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of
+July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were
+the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle
+classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such
+assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the
+intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been
+already often produced on the stage of the world,--theories which
+have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.
+{xxvi}
+Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial
+distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have
+served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,
+sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon
+things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises
+were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to
+give.
+
+I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good
+observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that
+even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as
+to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial
+settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the
+distribution of the material means of existence, are in
+discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,
+although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume
+the form of Socialism.
+{xxvii}
+I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find
+their field in facts affecting the sphere of material
+subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most
+recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier
+to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the
+ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,
+that errors such as those which presented themselves under the
+names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much
+noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that
+they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof
+of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it
+leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst
+us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst
+of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in
+order to surmount this danger.
+
+Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,
+who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the
+following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between
+the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in
+their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for
+books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly
+workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as
+is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"
+{xxviii}
+After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are
+two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I
+added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you
+great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be
+the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the
+honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I
+congratulated him this time still more.
+
+In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which
+afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their
+disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which
+the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace
+social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of
+distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a
+little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by
+all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations
+from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which
+they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous
+and full of hazard.
+{xxix}
+The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,
+when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true
+to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of
+the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond
+doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously
+excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of
+hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as
+the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it
+devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it
+before them.
+{xxx}
+Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well
+living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with
+efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and
+resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the
+spectacle of the world which surrounds them,--a world now at
+length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,
+the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to
+the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our
+villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people
+from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,
+unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral
+discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which
+religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives
+subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely
+religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and
+Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and
+this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant
+regions of society!
+
+{xxxi}
+
+These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of
+unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,
+of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,
+open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a
+tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity
+counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name
+of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it
+with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical
+deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,
+in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their
+force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the
+incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's
+opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which
+are only simply political and social; many they are who would be
+inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they
+are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all
+these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring
+to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which
+receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ
+which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt
+and exposed to peril.
+
+{xxxii}
+
+I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating
+the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,
+questions of political organization, questions of social
+institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I
+encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great
+complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his
+efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every
+kind--doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and
+oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,
+immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to
+travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to
+feel their way through a labyrinth.
+
+Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and
+impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope
+for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we
+have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign
+power called by some Providence, by others Fate?
+
+{xxxiii}
+
+I am far from thinking so.
+
+Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of
+convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion
+Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day
+detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal
+or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"
+said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to
+disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence
+and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I
+am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military
+sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always
+applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in
+order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,
+to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its
+apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most
+efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the
+number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others
+possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same
+spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,
+single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon
+attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,
+without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.
+{xxxiv}
+We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of
+influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if
+we adopt it.
+
+I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which
+torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the
+rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its
+economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an
+evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of
+French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the
+moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them
+attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its
+removal.
+{xxxv}
+But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,
+a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and
+developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a
+good current which is impelling us forwards;--at the same time
+that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the
+principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to
+control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the
+maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at
+least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions
+of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of
+political economy have defenders no less zealous than the
+presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism
+raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is
+advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress
+also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical
+applications.
+{xxxvi}
+Following respectively their different objects, there are on both
+sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and
+influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several
+causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is
+solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,
+contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our
+history is made up of this great struggle and of its
+vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats
+sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of
+our country.
+
+They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and
+keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human
+sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated
+by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the
+disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought
+back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the
+modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of
+their situation than with the rights of thought, but always
+remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty
+even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only
+defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than
+shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in
+spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent
+indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in
+spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble
+desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.
+
+{xxxvii}
+
+We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius
+of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed
+with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of
+individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,
+and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as
+well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and
+the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who
+are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.
+
+{xxxviii}
+
+What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the
+conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have
+it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil
+current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions
+and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good
+sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and
+to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation
+which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?
+
+Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society
+in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free
+Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we
+should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease
+of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our
+conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our
+understanding.
+
+{xxxix}
+
+I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the
+abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to
+guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to
+individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and
+material. The right of France to these liberties, and their
+opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in
+their clearest light, and established in all their force on their
+highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]
+It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,
+the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,
+that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the
+two great remedies against this ill.
+
+    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, _Sur les libertés
+    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse_, in the séances of
+    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,
+    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]
+
+{xl}
+
+When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are
+perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is
+that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in
+conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of
+so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,
+does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the
+confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,
+provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its
+effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the
+understandings: the different facts, and problems which these
+facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only
+for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow
+accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise
+conceptions of them.
+
+Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions
+define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation
+of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular
+form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so
+salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a
+liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it
+would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle
+opinions still more.
+
+{xli}
+
+Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more
+important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of
+practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the
+thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,
+and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the
+effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs
+riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to
+liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,--when,
+instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be
+virtually solved,--when men are charged as real actors to
+transform into facts their own opinions or those of the
+spectators who are looking on,--then it is that the human mind,
+making its own strength the object of its reflection and
+examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose
+at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy
+itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good
+sense, by justice, and by possibility,--then it is that it learns
+to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.
+Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by
+liberty alone.
+
+{xlii}
+
+Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the
+salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an
+escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving
+questions the most different--I might say the most contrary--in
+their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary
+histories of England, of the United States of America, and of
+France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as
+precedents.
+
+From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against
+the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.
+Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With
+what forces and with what arms did England support these two
+formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political
+liberty.
+{xliii}
+It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued
+in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,
+--it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,--it was by
+setting in action all the springs of a free and representative
+government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most
+potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated
+Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,
+during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office
+by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a
+different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,
+sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place
+of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path
+that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,
+sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,
+improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of
+the country, all the strength of its government. Political
+Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause
+and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,
+at another of that of progress.
+
+{xliv}
+
+The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder
+trial. Their government has had to struggle against the
+insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a
+civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular
+independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted
+an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to
+maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the
+national existence of the State against the attempts which were
+made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same
+motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the
+course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,
+and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed
+by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the
+abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the
+right of insurrection.
+{xlv}
+It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the
+institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this
+victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once
+over, the civil _régime_ of American society resumed its
+action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical
+usurpation or military tyranny.
+
+Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so
+well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts
+remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848
+France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been
+preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.
+Neither of the _régimes_ in operation immediately previous
+to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly
+changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks
+to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which
+owed their existence to the previous _régime_, a regular
+government was promptly established, and a new constitutional
+monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.
+{xlvi}
+On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary
+movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect
+for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and
+feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical
+fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the
+victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was
+more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the
+funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,
+celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been
+assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be
+tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the
+archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,
+which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being
+closed for many months.
+{xlvii}
+In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set
+men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more
+profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor
+the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities
+were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of
+the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free
+even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four
+years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments
+which were then in force without leaving their traces; their
+traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary
+influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction
+which put an end to it.
+
+That this influence may still surmount the great trials through
+which governments and people may have both to pass, two things
+are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real
+citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to
+make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by
+their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at
+the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,
+should accept its inconveniences and its perils.
+{xlviii}
+A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it
+does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with
+resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of
+every human situation.
+
+Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room
+to nations for--what do I say? they demand from them--great
+activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude
+their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of
+action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer
+anything but a picture-frame without the picture--a drama
+written, not represented--in which the actors fail to assume
+their parts or to co-operate to produce the _dénouement_.
+
+It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public
+in the life of free government which gives so capital an
+importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.
+{xlix}
+When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a
+sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may
+have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am
+not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily
+hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of
+private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What
+is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled
+moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and
+religious--beliefs which recognize and attest that man is
+naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something
+essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the
+midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by
+such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free
+_régime_ a large share both of its responsibility and of its
+active duties: it is only when so animated that they give
+consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it
+stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe
+in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than
+once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty
+when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a
+tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral
+combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of
+the material forces which assail them.
+{l}
+Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free
+country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who
+profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all
+which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in
+favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete
+misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human
+society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove
+incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in
+tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man
+isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a
+falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the
+supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this
+is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated
+individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his
+silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon
+the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the
+falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of
+respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their
+opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of
+humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in
+such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.
+{li}
+To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to
+refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,
+moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,
+is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very
+impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society
+calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the
+intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and
+practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether
+moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to
+be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the
+people.
+
+{lii}
+
+I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in
+all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,
+it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on
+the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil
+Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable
+with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I
+have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I
+am now publishing.
+
+I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task
+to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day
+to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of
+which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,
+stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only
+here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two
+contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as
+well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups
+profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals
+and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and
+Disbelievers.
+{liii}
+No one of these groups really represents a dominant party
+in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and
+hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,
+vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,
+wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing
+clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of
+truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's
+thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused
+and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of
+thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to
+appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in
+reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a
+vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a
+field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and
+incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to
+bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French
+society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and
+under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here
+described it.
+{liv}
+Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful
+and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find
+everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes
+devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the
+most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in
+search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most
+different directions. Upon this population it is that we must
+act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive
+conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious
+instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are
+by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to
+transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must
+accommodate ourselves to the general character of this
+population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an
+adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence
+must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious
+to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should
+give in return its soul.
+{lv}
+It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is
+not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of
+Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should
+know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the
+society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they
+should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under
+their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under
+their blows.
+
+Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it
+prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such
+success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different
+epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did
+Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their
+times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so
+extraordinary an influence?
+{lvi}
+First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked
+was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also
+because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they
+were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different
+processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with
+the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that
+they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political
+transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it
+on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They
+more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,
+the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;
+still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one
+by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern
+literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having
+re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this
+is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against
+them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France
+felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their
+glory, because it believed in their sympathy.
+
+{lvii}
+
+Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are
+rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of
+their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with
+them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion
+and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church
+of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more
+liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father
+Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice
+of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already
+more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different
+origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same
+cause and to the same work.
+{lviii}
+At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,
+two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I
+have the honour to know, men very different in position and in
+ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a
+great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;
+both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,
+the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent
+in the present state of French society; both having the
+resolution and the ability required in order to present
+Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most
+proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur
+Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor
+at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his
+diocese, (Lent, 1868,) _A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of
+Christianity_. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th
+of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical
+Conference assembled at Nérac, _A Report as to the Actual
+Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches_.
+[Footnote 4]
+
+    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length
+    in the _Gazette de France_, on the 25th and 26th of
+    February, 1868.]
+
+    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the
+    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]
+
+{lix}
+
+I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially
+analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here
+because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each
+reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being
+prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony
+between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the
+present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far
+as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch
+is Christian.
+
+"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was
+contemporary with primitive man--a fact present in all ages, ever
+paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same
+degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind
+man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent
+of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the
+Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and
+upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet
+raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,
+constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His
+creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty
+lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses
+more or less unanimous.
+
+{lx}
+
+"Heathen nations--their history proves it--have preserved
+something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected
+with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of
+Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions
+which they received from their grandsire, and which are the
+common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions
+are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of
+fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East
+and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the
+multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and
+its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily
+distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of
+Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original
+fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality
+of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all
+these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the
+depths of the conscience of the people.
+{lxi}
+Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify
+in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be
+condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but
+for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.
+
+"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful
+work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious
+wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too
+much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and
+Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained
+Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political
+charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,
+breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism
+remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.
+
+{lxii}
+
+"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many
+generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner
+and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred
+and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and
+in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations--this fact, what
+is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that
+it is purely natural--the spontaneous production of our habits,
+the simple result of our instincts--and, so to say, an
+irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is
+divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly
+created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as
+a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common
+sense which tells us this.
+
+"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,
+as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely
+the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its
+own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it
+and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with
+a force which renews itself every day.
+{lxiii}
+It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious
+effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and
+nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to
+its effects a supernatural character. ... Supernatural means were
+necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in
+relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the
+constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of
+the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no
+longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions
+should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,
+infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary
+a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His
+envoys by extraordinary facts--facts of a superhuman power,
+miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of
+the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,
+intervening with supernatural _éclat_ to enable the mission
+to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and
+more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and
+their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their
+religious and predestined course.
+
+{lxiv}
+
+"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the
+highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies
+of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a
+prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with
+signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive
+ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,
+and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His
+character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,
+the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;
+finally, the survival and the development of His work through
+centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the
+direct intervention of God--sole possible means of finding a
+satisfactory explanation of such grand results."
+
+{lxv}
+
+The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas
+recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited--a
+development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to
+assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always
+faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no
+discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of
+ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class
+of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of
+Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of
+man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity
+in particular; considered as a grand fact--a fact universal and
+permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst
+the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the
+scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst
+Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and
+Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,
+by the same title, if not in the same degree;
+{lxvi}
+a fact at once human and divine--human by its accordance with
+man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of
+God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power
+reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of
+events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the
+accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus
+associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle
+of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of
+Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without
+any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage
+rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at
+the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority
+of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not
+justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented
+under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most
+proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,
+on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and
+pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian
+Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so
+many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?
+
+{lxvii}
+
+The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more
+vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop
+of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he
+traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and
+requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and
+describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated
+and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in
+search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to
+be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,
+he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly
+and without compromise.
+
+"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in
+insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds
+in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its
+prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the
+preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.
+{lxviii}
+Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not
+live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,
+they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow
+its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its
+aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are
+of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate
+and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in
+many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In
+France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which
+have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as
+preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every
+symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To
+neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of
+addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who
+neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the
+objections which we attribute to them.
+
+{lxix}
+
+"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is
+easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others--it is that
+of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery
+or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally
+even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons
+more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of
+the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is
+noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our
+generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of
+its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of
+Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant
+now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,
+whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is
+impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a
+fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of
+Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of
+incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is
+definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface
+God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an
+obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.
+
+{lxx}
+
+"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in
+these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt
+or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having
+for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery
+from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are
+combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,
+Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a
+personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of
+the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a
+God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten
+civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,
+and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long
+as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. ... Let nothing
+henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the
+human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God
+than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all
+things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'
+
+{lxxi}
+
+"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their
+weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is
+not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its
+lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and
+its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated
+at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical
+which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it
+is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in
+France, Germany, and Italy.
+
+"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical
+Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to
+destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former
+never will go so far as these.
+{lxxii}
+But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing
+hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it
+we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,
+stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when
+merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious
+life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,
+without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of
+destruction.
+
+"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have
+we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most
+painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,
+with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph
+attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,
+how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the
+Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are
+the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by
+which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in
+discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of
+general interest?
+{lxxiii}
+The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful
+to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul
+from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after
+the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have
+to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to
+souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?
+
+"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we
+are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees
+everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to
+note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting
+the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous
+aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas
+of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social
+application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The
+age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;
+it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the
+union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material
+happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.
+{lxxiv}
+Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,
+men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more
+than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their
+rights as individuals, and of _self-government_, and
+consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here
+assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious _points
+d'appui_ for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread
+for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.
+Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel
+leads to Liberty.
+
+"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought
+we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who
+demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question
+overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his
+weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate
+himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from
+him the cry of the prophet--'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot
+speak, for I am a child!'
+
+{lxxv}
+
+"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,
+much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of
+Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.
+Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the
+origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and
+more scientific than all that in these days men seek to
+substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the
+supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of
+Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of
+Religion itself.
+
+"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to
+establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and
+Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace
+Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not
+more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.
+{lxxvi}
+Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the
+materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian
+Conscience.
+
+"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her
+spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the
+progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make
+herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let
+her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must
+be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to
+everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize
+all his arms.
+
+"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our
+special mission in the special position in which God has placed
+us?"
+
+{lxxvii}
+
+Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of
+his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,
+M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the
+preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and
+evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to
+the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the
+general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of
+general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and
+urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.
+
+"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend
+Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that
+comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that
+comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear
+to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its
+most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with
+anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is
+necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we
+must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect
+fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.
+{lxxviii}
+Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to
+confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the
+contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a
+_point d'appui_ for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us
+strive, we also, to find these _points d'appui_, those
+keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be
+made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country
+that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark
+applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the
+educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as
+it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let
+us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its
+liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and
+demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign
+reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by
+science.
+{lxxix}
+The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human
+activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained
+in the principles of the Gospel."
+
+I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of
+the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two
+documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main
+and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,
+but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at
+leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,
+to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the
+one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.
+The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,
+or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging
+to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by
+each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw
+to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and
+are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.
+
+{lxxx}
+
+I think that they are right both in their hope and their
+endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons
+pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of
+religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain
+and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of
+religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern
+Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,
+France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being
+informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as
+well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement
+between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The
+profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not
+part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater
+development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the
+events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding
+upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,
+to which such subjects are all very strange.
+{lxxxi}
+The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that
+France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with
+religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and
+fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable
+grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,
+at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well
+entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long
+life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part
+in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer
+anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been
+essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made
+no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the
+world, but nothing attaches me to it.
+{lxxxii}
+Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my
+eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and
+the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with
+thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that
+eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:--
+
+  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.
+
+    Guizot.
+    Paris, _April_, 1868.
+
+{lxxxiii}
+
+                Contents.
+
+
+                                         Page
+
+Preface                                    v
+
+I.   -- Christianity and Liberty            1
+
+II.  -- Christianity and Morality          52
+
+III. -- Christianity and Science           93
+
+IV.  -- Christian Ignorance               128
+
+V.   -- Christian Faith                   153
+
+VI.  -- Christian Life                    190
+
+Appendix. -- Observations upon the Work
+             called "Ecce Homo"           213
+
+
+{lxxxiv}
+
+{1}
+
+      Meditations On Christianity
+
+               in its
+
+     Relation To The Actual State
+       Of Society And Opinion.
+
+
+
+           First Meditation.
+
+       Christianity And Liberty.
+
+
+The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days
+for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant
+in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object
+Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both
+simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and
+respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and
+ill-regulated impulse.
+{2}
+Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it
+develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,
+and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions
+have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time
+men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are
+discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they
+vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to
+exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion
+may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered
+upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from
+it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is
+condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it
+is bound to perform.
+
+But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our
+epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less
+important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of
+the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard
+Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest
+enemy.
+{3}
+In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so
+treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a
+multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in
+activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one
+time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian
+sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?
+Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of
+Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather
+true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both
+require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate
+and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century
+remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that
+other question is not solved.
+
+I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these--"What
+shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
+his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
+[Footnote 5]
+
+    [Footnote 5: Mark viii. 36, 37.]
+
+{4}
+
+"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the
+soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and
+body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach
+the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]
+
+    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]
+
+    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]
+
+The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the
+human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to
+save souls, all souls without exception,--souls of the powerful
+and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
+happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is
+the foundation of the Christian Religion.
+
+The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere
+hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual
+being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,
+who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual
+condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an
+object of present solicitude.
+{5}
+To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a
+product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What
+have they to do with the words of the Gospel--with the immense
+value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them
+as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself
+forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who
+speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated
+tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because
+they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual
+man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What
+constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every
+human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that
+he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially
+in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation
+which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up
+to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use
+which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature
+of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,
+that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime
+a destiny.
+{6}
+Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great
+efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem
+of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel
+recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself
+about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely
+rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and
+responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which
+Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in
+every command that she gives to humanity.
+
+Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,
+and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of
+man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis
+and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most
+daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a
+point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity
+of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.
+
+{7}
+
+Christianity does not confine itself to this;--after having laid
+down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical
+sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of
+resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the
+synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to
+speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John
+answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the
+sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+[Footnote 8]
+
+    [Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]
+
+Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to
+them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach
+in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than
+men." [Footnote 9]
+
+    [Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]
+
+The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of
+the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his
+faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the
+principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]
+
+    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]
+
+{8}
+
+The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,
+who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for
+dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he
+resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,
+"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to
+continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by
+much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.
+[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle
+of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.
+
+    [Footnote 11: Acts xiv. 19, 22.]
+
+It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that
+it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the
+principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and
+transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and
+eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms
+the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it
+equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of
+Authority.
+{9}
+I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made
+that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was
+permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar
+the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are
+God's," he established in principle the distinction between the
+religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.
+Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,
+between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful
+worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties
+which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.
+[Footnote 12]
+
+    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,
+    p. 278. London: 1864.]
+
+It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest
+and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization
+commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted
+in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have
+strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded
+with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the
+seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,
+history has confirmed the Gospel.
+
+{10}
+
+Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,
+Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,
+and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been
+able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity
+of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies
+required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at
+another liberty.
+
+Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to
+refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I
+remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that
+Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she
+was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from
+her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she
+alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls
+in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.
+{11}
+If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious
+establishments--Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism--have
+held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the
+world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,
+attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman
+Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism
+did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the
+enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the
+immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.
+Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated
+only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the
+sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of
+Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the
+soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it
+she awakened it.
+
+Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of
+Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have
+occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the
+Christian faith.
+{12}
+No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the
+work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,
+which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the
+purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the
+surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy
+atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part
+and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine
+it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats
+uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the
+excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not
+destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor
+make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work
+of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a
+Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,
+behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those
+stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only
+enables him to see them.
+{13}
+When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal
+errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared
+under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit
+without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or
+ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore
+what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from
+her that which she has not promised.
+
+Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch
+and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to
+Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present
+day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting
+Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount
+them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What
+are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,
+the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an
+obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?
+
+{14}
+
+It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,
+men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre
+colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a
+prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as
+deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of
+amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at
+another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our
+vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not
+of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require
+to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness
+which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which
+cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the
+attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,
+is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent
+evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but
+that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we
+make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.
+{15}
+The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and
+evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic
+sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil
+which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first
+to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it
+appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages
+has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at
+least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if
+we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it
+matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would
+not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor
+should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.
+Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and
+different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we
+have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we
+have ever forgotten.
+
+{16}
+
+And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain
+my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached
+its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance
+more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without
+numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape
+in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the
+selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of
+the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices
+of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political
+liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,
+the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the
+actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its
+tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in
+this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789
+was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant
+travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or
+is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had
+then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all
+mankind. Did she deceive herself?
+{17}
+Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or
+in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we
+progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which
+eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every
+respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;
+for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but
+utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.
+
+I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked
+than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of
+opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never
+hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they
+deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to
+pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have
+originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront
+many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no
+sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.
+{18}
+But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have
+been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon
+the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,
+and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both
+of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the
+world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,
+and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra
+of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive
+motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas
+as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789
+contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,
+truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and
+which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the
+travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to
+France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,
+and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a
+cause of decline.
+{19}
+Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,
+the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past
+centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of
+French society in which it would have bettered its condition by
+halting, or to which it should wish to return.
+
+I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our
+social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment
+of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is
+Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us
+in such a work?
+
+All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,
+whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or
+Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in
+deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for
+physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and
+effeminacy which they generate.
+
+{20}
+
+They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we
+consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even
+those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,
+in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his
+habitual language:--"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten
+o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."
+[Footnote 13]
+
+    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se
+    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une
+    chemise blanche."]
+
+There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be
+vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should
+be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether
+individuals or nations, is that they should not have their
+attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely
+their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they
+have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and
+Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the
+Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort
+or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is
+permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.
+{21}
+Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and
+sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating
+and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of
+more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a
+state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and
+disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can
+supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.
+Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich
+and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;
+she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she
+inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer
+hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be
+powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can
+never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive
+motive to action, even in that principle of interest which
+politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to
+be a panacea.
+{22}
+Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,
+has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other
+sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an
+Epicurean nor an Egotist.
+
+This is the first and the greatest of the services which
+Christianity can and does render in our days to every society
+which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.
+
+There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are
+dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without
+incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the
+other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever
+be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or
+measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it
+is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free
+country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of
+society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments
+and nations, to enable them to support that license which they
+cannot suppress.
+{23}
+Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the
+most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license
+for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity
+maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without
+humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the
+rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in
+fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which
+authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the
+most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority
+suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely
+to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,
+that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves
+with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,
+turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as
+such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and
+Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great
+mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to
+order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom
+licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,
+and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims
+and the arms of Liberty.
+{24}
+History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The
+nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has
+not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,--the
+only nations which, although they have on different occasions and
+by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and
+of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and
+politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of
+the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;
+these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;
+but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once
+come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their
+subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less
+rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.
+
+{25}
+
+It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it
+that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as
+individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it
+generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already
+more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and
+sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,
+as well as strength to recover lost ground.
+
+It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the
+friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary
+admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than
+any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no
+longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the
+encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and
+transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the
+normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and
+with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.
+{26}
+Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,
+has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the
+conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong
+enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously
+the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the
+Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and
+independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when
+Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power
+and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no
+distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a
+similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the
+Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail
+wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and
+indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the
+permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more
+or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which
+fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly
+modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the
+exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these
+days free institutions can be founded.
+
+{27}
+
+That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses
+and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with
+the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,
+that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of
+the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all
+other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which
+are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.
+Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every
+human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error
+press so very closely upon each other in this system, that
+Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is
+entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,
+nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to
+another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes
+to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to
+abrogate as it was to create.
+{28}
+The law paramount is the moral law,--the law laid down by God, to
+which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to
+submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is
+always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights
+of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of
+government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily
+forgets God--easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort
+of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,
+material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is
+incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with
+which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that
+the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only
+principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic
+of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two
+principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour
+and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.
+{29}
+A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning
+with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent
+admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and
+it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by
+Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a
+history, which does not come from man, but which, without
+offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,
+no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same
+time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic
+a society is, the more it is important that this double effect
+shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.
+
+I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The
+Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally
+against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how
+little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine
+to be good and salutary.
+{30}
+How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other
+respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have
+Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of
+the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty
+unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest
+nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state
+of opinions at the present day.
+
+As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst
+Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best
+results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,
+whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as
+the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly
+cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general
+religious community--between the spiritual and the lay members of
+the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by
+authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations
+which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving
+to the laity a share in the government of the Church.
+{31}
+The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time
+the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from
+their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but
+the relations between the two classes ceased to present the
+appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire
+subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and
+influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although
+remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to
+be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social
+institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one
+time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious
+society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of
+independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State
+and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their
+mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the
+two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have
+mutually recovered their independence;
+{32}
+elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all
+ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been
+abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his
+individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.
+But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental
+characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from
+the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves
+constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and
+man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is
+particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction
+between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious
+and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its
+right and become an active influence in religious society itself.
+
+{33}
+
+But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a
+persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much
+calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman
+Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and
+passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed
+with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their
+religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted
+therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to
+their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These
+are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof
+of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the
+holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.
+Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that
+this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will
+towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects
+for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that
+such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present
+constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to
+State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be
+injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to
+individuals.
+{34}
+From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most
+sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as
+Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst
+of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed
+and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in
+order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of
+humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to
+its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in
+all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;
+they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and
+tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;
+they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they
+rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the
+conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the
+guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and
+ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy
+effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate
+result of which has been so glorious.
+
+{35}
+
+The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and
+useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which
+characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its
+Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,
+that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and
+religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and
+all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome
+and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?
+For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the
+aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and
+political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,
+onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced
+situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more
+menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than
+our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power
+in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in
+principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable
+with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to
+condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of
+modern civilization.
+{36}
+In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall
+here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as
+the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction
+that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and
+dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as
+well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without
+abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally
+essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the
+moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions
+also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,
+that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not
+have accepted and accomplished this work of
+conciliation--conciliation real and profound--the friends of
+Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and
+in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,
+those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.
+{37}
+But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance
+than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which
+utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,
+nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of
+events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and
+not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many
+probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the
+case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,
+many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward
+impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the
+conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less
+a certainty.
+
+This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.
+There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of
+different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle
+between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often
+committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly
+profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own
+defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.
+{38}
+The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,
+the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,
+the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the
+great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by
+the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time
+consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal
+regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and
+signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its
+consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the
+question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation
+between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the
+attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a
+decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of
+1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh
+vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.
+{39}
+When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism
+treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from
+the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church
+of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all
+that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,
+and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience
+and resignation. She is right.
+
+One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this
+stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,
+Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of
+fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody
+persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,
+bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,
+once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their
+cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.
+{40}
+The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person
+of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive
+but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor
+the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.
+And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what
+activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,
+Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,
+upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society
+had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of
+Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced
+on its road and towards its object.
+
+But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of
+Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and
+compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without
+doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she
+lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of
+reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is
+more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it
+and oppose it.
+{41}
+This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman
+Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that
+group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which
+continues to play so active a part in struggling for the
+Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:
+these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its
+intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their
+views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux
+Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the
+greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the
+more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the
+disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and
+humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our
+provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have
+not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one
+might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving
+the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the
+people;
+{42}
+they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the
+conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an
+influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its
+sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost
+without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of
+their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal
+tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman
+Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular
+militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of
+enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case
+by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the
+Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make
+their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its
+laws, and of its liberties.
+
+I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I
+observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to
+French institutions,--for I speak only of France,--the essential
+consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the
+relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.
+
+{43}
+
+I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in
+France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past
+are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof
+from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights
+of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil
+society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts
+and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to
+the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from
+civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this
+respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these
+are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for
+religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to
+stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman
+Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of
+modern society, who most dispute about the general question of
+liberty.
+
+{44}
+
+The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this
+question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in
+one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,
+on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from
+religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty
+in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy
+in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other
+solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and
+their mutual independence.
+
+That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State
+to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I
+well understand.
+
+She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of
+strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her
+stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves
+religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a
+fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially
+democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under
+the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the
+influence of the religious authorities.
+{45}
+This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental
+principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is
+impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded
+by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.
+But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance
+of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church
+would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious
+and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large
+measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the
+religious society and of the civil society which the Church and
+the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those
+who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective
+principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on
+in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the
+good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself
+is soon compromised.
+{46}
+The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of
+Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of
+Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because
+there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental
+institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon
+some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant
+guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and
+were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from
+which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed
+on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices
+for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,
+of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in
+Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is
+occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy
+and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church
+with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.
+{47}
+In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,
+when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for
+any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever
+indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be
+serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting
+parties should recognise and accept in each other, without
+equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each
+really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an
+alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of
+the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring
+ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,
+obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret
+warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending
+any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust
+in it.
+{48}
+As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without
+endangering her habits, at least without endangering her
+essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace
+with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual
+civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how
+to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give
+way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a
+source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she
+would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of
+separation and complete independence.
+
+As for the State, the system which separates the two societies
+would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it
+would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of
+many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle
+of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance
+which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such
+principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce
+Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous
+bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from
+every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy
+themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their
+thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and
+its affairs.
+{49}
+Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at
+the present day, a moral influence of great value from an
+alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one
+condition which is not only especially important in our days, but
+of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of
+manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the
+alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference
+in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the
+church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious
+discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving
+their indirect support to the state government, and which can
+purge their support of all impure motives.
+{50}
+The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain
+degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their
+respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part
+of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at
+the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the
+master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor
+priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and
+their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone
+give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,
+if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.
+
+Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the
+facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,
+Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be
+free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.
+Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave
+feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and
+distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles
+essential to civil society and religious society, of any
+compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the
+faults which the two institutions have committed towards each
+other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.
+{51}
+Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have
+become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,
+something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty
+neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their
+legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations
+to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,
+whether allied with or independent of the Church.
+
+{52}
+
+           Second Meditation.
+
+       Christianity And Morality.
+
+
+Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different
+characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously
+minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves
+Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from
+Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea
+of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.
+Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour
+to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the
+abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its
+authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we
+find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the
+other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either
+natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days
+proclaimed and propagated with ardour.
+
+{53}
+
+I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and
+upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.
+In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest
+intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.
+Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced
+that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested
+or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;
+they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth
+alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and
+which some now strive to accredit.
+
+The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the
+scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians
+are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of
+its efficacy.
+{54}
+A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate
+the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to
+it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate
+it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is
+here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent
+Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and
+to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being
+wrecked.
+
+The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who
+flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality
+standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,--and they who
+believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from
+religion,--err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential
+facts of human nature and of human society.
+
+Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete
+observation of these facts. I have already stated in these
+Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality
+from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.
+{55}
+At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,
+and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I
+affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary
+union between morality and religion.
+
+A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the
+theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there
+is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested
+motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and
+treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.
+
+I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they
+forget that it _has_ been, and still _is_, strongly
+contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.
+Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the
+satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate
+aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,
+not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common
+welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could
+perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy
+of human sentiments.
+{56}
+The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the
+recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the
+most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,
+with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to
+other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding
+fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than
+in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive
+themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of
+religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,
+and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive
+themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a
+prey to the disputes of man.
+
+I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders
+of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it
+is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it
+contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential
+elements.
+
+{57}
+
+These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral
+good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;
+the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and
+philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the
+natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human
+morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man
+is a moral being.
+
+I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I
+do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard
+or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any
+one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent
+morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and
+myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the
+true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its
+signification, and accept its results.
+
+{58}
+
+It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not
+satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to
+himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their
+origin and object, their import and bearing.
+
+In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from
+which science sets out; it is only after having well observed
+facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the
+questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which
+the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of
+human morality, such as I have just described it in its three
+constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot
+fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral
+law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the
+ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or
+violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes
+of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or
+elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man
+as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of
+man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three
+constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine
+rightly its source and bearing.
+
+{59}
+
+Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring
+from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that
+he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.
+Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they
+depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,
+or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the
+feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them
+accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.
+
+But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral
+law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes
+its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their
+own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in
+refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may
+attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically
+possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another
+law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever
+they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,
+they bow before it as before something which does not emanate
+from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.
+
+{60}
+
+The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the
+world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the
+characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the
+results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the
+forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations
+or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it
+addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of
+whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to
+crush him, still man would be more noble than that which
+destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the
+advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows
+nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,
+sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily--that he chooses
+to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.
+
+{61}
+
+What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called
+Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command
+man's Liberty to respect it?
+
+Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority
+solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is
+said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his
+right that no human being shall attack his independence or his
+dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and
+therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual
+right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but
+the right which it is recognised that another possesses."
+[Footnote 14]
+
+    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,
+    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]
+
+{62}
+
+There is here a profound mistake, and a strange forgetfulness.
+
+Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,
+does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises
+himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and
+admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which
+arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have
+done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest
+apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence
+and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to
+attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for
+himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental
+principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there
+is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the
+right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to
+it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has
+another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on
+the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the
+paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the
+moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.
+
+{63}
+
+Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of
+the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to
+attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral
+law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and
+imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love
+them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love
+those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to
+you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."
+"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing
+again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
+children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and
+to the evil." [Footnote 15]
+
+    [Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]
+
+"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of
+the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If
+we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other
+respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point
+with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.
+
+{64}
+
+It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion
+of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of
+those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is
+the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on
+the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law
+to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet
+melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a
+person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a
+modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light
+as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea
+of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a
+moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not
+a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the
+moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power
+attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the
+relations of men with one another.
+{65}
+Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there
+would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does
+not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to
+govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice
+cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,
+as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed
+to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as
+essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the
+social bond;--the means of peace and of Union amongst
+mankind;--the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and
+defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every
+man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep
+others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him
+to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and
+respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the
+man who has a right has absolutely nothing.
+{66}
+Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of
+physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ
+the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which
+triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify
+the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made
+his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis
+of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of
+right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the
+stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of
+duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of
+defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which
+serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society
+upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away
+the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]
+
+    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir
+    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in
+    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur
+    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,
+    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"
+    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]
+
+{67}
+
+This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in
+considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the
+independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the
+theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral
+elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,
+the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,
+sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the
+independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely
+strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of
+man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their
+duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for
+and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,
+and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to
+honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's
+existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which
+the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense
+which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:
+their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.
+
+{68}
+
+I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the
+principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from
+man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man
+only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and
+mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free
+and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he
+is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his
+own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not
+make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even
+whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot
+withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his
+future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is
+essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its
+subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.
+
+{69}
+
+Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working
+its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without
+further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When
+the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and
+acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his
+act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,
+for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not
+merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they
+find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced
+to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the
+laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal
+punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of
+remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the
+proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is
+that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the
+hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove
+that it may be always reawakened.
+{70}
+Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.
+Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that
+to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which
+feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.
+
+As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an
+idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made
+of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,
+ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of
+merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common
+sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the
+accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.
+It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and
+most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the
+political organisation of society, and in the problems which
+concern the eternal future.
+{71}
+However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or
+delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of
+a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the
+responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its
+complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and
+equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.
+
+Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have
+scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's
+nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have
+considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely
+apart from every other element and every other consideration.
+Those moral facts are briefly as follows:--
+
+  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.
+
+  The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.
+
+  Moral Liberty.
+
+  Moral Responsibility.
+
+  Moral merit and demerit.
+
+{72}
+
+These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the
+proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these
+truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are
+they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,
+or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they
+self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which
+form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot
+elude this question.
+
+I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;
+that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not
+one of those laws of fate by which the material world is
+governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free
+world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as
+law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.
+Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man--upon man
+of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without
+enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life
+is passed?
+{73}
+Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law
+emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense
+which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,
+Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order
+reigning in it:--
+
+  "Je ne puis songer
+  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."
+
+  I cannot think
+  This clock exists and never had a maker.
+
+In the moral world we have to do with something far different
+from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine
+constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is
+to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free
+agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to
+accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the
+supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the
+expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both
+contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant
+found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is
+nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human
+Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most
+clearly, most undeniably.
+
+{74}
+
+Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose
+it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river
+without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free
+agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete
+and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and
+loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law
+reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility
+reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human
+invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral
+responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and
+just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is
+contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral
+responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that
+is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and
+impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in
+a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to
+establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.
+
+{75}
+
+Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human
+nature--that is, the distinction between moral good and moral
+evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and
+demerit,--are necessarily and intimately connected with the
+truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God
+moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and
+essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a
+thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of
+man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble
+to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that
+ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is
+reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its
+authority.
+
+Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and
+described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable
+from Religion.
+
+{76}
+
+What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the
+heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are
+distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to
+each other in the unity of the human being?
+
+The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the
+study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms
+Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most
+remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant
+struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle
+what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent
+an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and
+what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected
+in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by
+the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to
+all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the
+moral law, the moral judgment comes.
+{77}
+"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero
+prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up
+unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just
+providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of
+the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was
+the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman
+Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very
+Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after
+having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice
+of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on
+the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on
+account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had
+governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by
+those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is
+incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in
+this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and
+Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,
+sometimes manifests itself there with _éclat_, and sometimes
+remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre
+mysteries.
+{78}
+Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall
+truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now
+occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore
+order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;
+in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still
+mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is
+intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as
+little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in
+that of the individual man.
+
+In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far
+from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they
+progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days
+exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to
+events of the most contradictory character: everything in the
+world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts
+has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.
+{79}
+Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more
+than feeble convictions--dim hopes? On the other side, in the
+midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power
+over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and
+confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the
+material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and
+paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have
+plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human
+conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in
+our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;
+intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's
+soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
+
+{80}
+
+Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and
+indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have
+limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the
+advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I
+have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,
+natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of
+man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the
+threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general
+that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which
+it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his
+unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity
+alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and
+security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is
+not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic
+value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human
+soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect
+harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already
+tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful
+expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the
+moral being.
+
+{81}
+
+The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is
+the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral
+ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been
+contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour
+it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure
+their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,
+Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is
+singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most
+illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,
+understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and
+incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear
+light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to
+their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for
+conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they
+taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they
+founded schools or sects.
+{82}
+The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a
+philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and
+instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around
+him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain
+special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of
+mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of
+discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to
+the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the
+moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his
+disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,
+and then to all men:--"Save your soul, for what would it profit a
+man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and
+preach to all nations."
+
+What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so
+ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so
+universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?
+
+{83}
+
+And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has
+been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward
+movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly
+arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,
+it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of
+Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and
+the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen
+centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and
+evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that
+Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to
+fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same
+task, and promises herself fresh success.
+
+Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me
+at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the
+Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which
+she entertains in the midst of her trials.
+
+{84}
+
+Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,
+cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them
+proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are
+solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,
+regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human
+actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a
+careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them
+to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both
+amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the
+regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how
+serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that
+sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the
+nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same
+time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the
+same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man
+the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his
+soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates
+it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it
+with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared
+for every sacrifice.
+{85}
+Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine
+of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin
+without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the
+sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so
+well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely
+and so austerely?
+
+Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with
+man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its
+rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment
+of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and
+thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he
+opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a
+hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness
+inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy
+the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to
+be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a
+recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the
+equitable benevolence of God.
+{86}
+The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man
+during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store
+for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom
+of God" and "the promises of eternal life."
+
+Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he
+keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,
+his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to
+fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the
+world, without any _dénouement_. He has a prospect, and a
+futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and
+superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain
+this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and
+respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality
+with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole
+view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny
+of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which
+weigh upon the thought and life of man!
+
+{87}
+
+I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the
+peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However
+high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely
+less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is
+purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours
+produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical
+work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of
+its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,
+the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from
+which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to
+induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine
+law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it
+is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its
+sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,
+we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon
+which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it
+undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to
+procure the salvation of man by his reformation.
+
+{88}
+
+When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these
+Meditations--the subject of which is the actual state of the
+Christian Religion--I essayed to characterise therein the
+fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which
+combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my
+companion in life, and my _confrère_ at the Institute, M.
+Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I
+maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,
+he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:--
+
+  "My dear Friend,
+
+  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I
+  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The
+  little difference between our opinions, which you have not
+  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the
+  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which
+  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the
+  nature of religion.
+{89}
+  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still
+  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an
+  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more
+  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself
+  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other
+  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from
+  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets
+  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by
+  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of
+  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,
+  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them
+  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the
+  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in
+  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of
+  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy
+  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must
+  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,
+  grandeur, and peace.
+
+{90}
+
+  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,
+  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our
+  old and sincere friendship."
+
+I replied to him on the 13th of June:--
+
+  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our
+  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere
+  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,
+  because, independently of our particular and petty
+  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a
+  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that
+  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor
+  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their
+  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their
+  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.
+{91}
+  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,
+  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.
+  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin
+  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of
+  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which
+  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God
+  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to
+  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of
+  his free will.
+
+  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions
+  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."
+
+I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at
+Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other
+afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed
+upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence
+we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole
+question.
+{92}
+It is this--What are the points of resemblance, and what of
+difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity
+and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the
+reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,
+we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their
+nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,
+and the character of their mission.
+
+{93}
+
+           Third Meditation.
+
+        Christianity And Science.
+
+
+It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which
+Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account
+of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely
+inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that
+divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,
+and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man
+without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which
+Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make
+these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are
+possessed. ... They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."
+[Footnote 18]
+
+    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]
+
+    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,
+    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.
+    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]
+
+{94}
+
+The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a
+different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine
+inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work
+directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this
+themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly
+implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter
+and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it
+positively. [Footnote 19]
+
+    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the
+    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"
+    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and
+    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only
+    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to
+    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his
+    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]
+
+This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of
+the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an
+acceptation as in later times.
+{95}
+In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the
+school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration
+of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,
+strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of
+inspiration, and to explain one by the other--"It is not by any
+effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,
+"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so
+divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the
+saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;
+pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the
+divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself
+from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the
+musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us
+the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,
+"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the
+other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of
+individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed
+aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing
+them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute
+the breath which makes it discourse its music."
+
+{96}
+
+Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of
+the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as
+to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence
+proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the
+formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But
+even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,
+great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and
+St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it
+was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they
+distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of
+God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms
+in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking
+of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken
+of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to
+speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.
+{97}
+Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. ... When we meet
+with such diversity of expressions--although not in themselves
+contradictory--used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the
+words of each, only the intent with which the words are
+pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of
+truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the
+very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else
+which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."
+
+It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this
+explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine
+inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the
+fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.
+
+I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of
+darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of
+uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the
+invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;
+that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle
+Age.
+
+{98}
+
+I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch
+of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned
+upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;
+for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been
+fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet
+destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the
+world.
+
+Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and
+events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of
+the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of
+Christian societies, I find that this question had received two
+solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its
+representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the
+Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The
+Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of
+the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;
+surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious
+reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these
+books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and
+canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they
+are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the
+ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]
+
+    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the
+    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10--13. Paris, 1686.]
+
+{99}
+
+The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they
+began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts
+and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and
+complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,
+narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the
+old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's
+dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.
+
+{100}
+
+The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church
+of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the
+sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly
+respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic
+sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the
+complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute
+infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make
+this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters
+of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of
+God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which
+they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we
+repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the
+two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]
+
+    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.
+    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]
+
+"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and
+hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of
+humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their
+action and their force, you err. ... God does everything by
+command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air
+with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to
+will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]
+
+    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.
+    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres
+    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]
+
+{101}
+
+The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the
+nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of
+these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of
+Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the
+Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the
+Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible
+authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,
+found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the
+movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the
+infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the
+present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new
+dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their
+ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,
+have pushed the two doctrines,--the former of ecclesiastical
+authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,--to their
+extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right
+and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.
+{102}
+I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines
+referred to,--they severally infringe, the one the rights of
+religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both
+cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they
+have, in these respects, severally ill understood.
+
+I have already expressed my views upon this subject. [Footnote
+23]
+
+    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.
+    145-146. London, 1864.]
+
+Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in
+the Scriptures is divinely inspired--the words as well as the
+ideas, all the words used upon all subjects--the material of
+language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this
+assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound
+misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred
+books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in
+grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give
+instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.
+{103}
+It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men
+towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of
+conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.
+It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,
+that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."
+
+I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over
+again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole
+object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.
+The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the
+Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine
+truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in
+intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and
+with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,
+in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the
+midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the
+unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,
+Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and
+of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of
+curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and
+perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.
+{104}
+What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their
+points of connection and their contests,--God watching over and
+acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,
+God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the
+expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each
+acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man
+after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,
+nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating
+man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he
+enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from
+heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious
+and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a
+free agent.
+{105}
+At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous
+action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his
+passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as
+he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the
+good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.
+This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the
+relations of Man with God.
+
+What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful
+connection exists, in this history, between those whom--how shall
+I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not
+appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so
+untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the
+plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,
+invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to
+us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no
+historical narrative or document, does man show himself more
+violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to
+ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst
+the Hebrews.
+{106}
+Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between
+the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and
+the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from
+God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,
+and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly
+violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in
+his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much
+from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not
+change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a
+witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his
+errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily
+before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to
+interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is
+ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and
+labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts
+and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the
+only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.
+
+{107}
+
+In what do those relations consist? By what results does this
+continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this
+incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and
+commands, religious and moral--God proposes these to man; he
+enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands
+nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he
+commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's
+speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his
+prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.
+Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of
+possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human
+sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people
+whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance
+and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,
+in the midst of which they are living.
+{108}
+When they are made the medium for the religious and moral
+precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer
+mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of
+divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it
+to all around them.
+
+I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I
+regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,--the
+simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human
+element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its
+imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his
+religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere
+the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points
+of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his
+barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider
+some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,
+which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.
+
+{109}
+
+I open the book of Genesis and read:--
+
+  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
+  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here
+  I am.
+
+  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
+  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
+  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
+  will tell thee of.
+
+  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,
+  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and
+  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went
+  unto the place of which God had told him.
+
+  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the
+  place afar off.
+
+  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the
+  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come
+  again to you.
+
+  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it
+  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a
+  knife: and they went both of them together.
+
+  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
+  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire
+  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?
+
+  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a
+  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.
+{110}
+  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and
+  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and
+  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
+
+  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
+  slay his son.
+
+  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and
+  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.
+
+  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
+  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,
+  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
+
+  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind
+  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went
+  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in
+  the stead of his son."
+
+A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his
+mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is
+an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean
+of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the
+Biblical truths to which I am referring.
+
+{111}
+
+"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of
+religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong
+tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest
+feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes
+suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and
+with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to
+propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by
+surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the
+source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct
+that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,
+or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.
+On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these
+two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of
+evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness
+in the life of Abraham. ...
+{112}
+The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the
+son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.
+The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than
+sacrifice,--that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest
+offering that God can receive. ... We have a proverb which tells
+us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]
+
+    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.
+    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,
+    1867.]
+
+Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in
+the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been
+forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and
+the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the
+hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from
+the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law
+and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.
+
+The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full
+concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is
+in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more
+than he points out.
+{113}
+This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which
+he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the
+Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but
+Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such
+sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and
+manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even
+of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he
+pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is
+beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine
+command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac
+is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of
+course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition
+of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he
+believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.
+
+    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;
+    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively
+    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.
+    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]
+
+{114}
+
+It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,
+in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental
+characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,
+although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the
+divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and
+word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my
+conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in
+the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,
+which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement
+of progress.
+
+I say progress,--progress immense, infinitely grander than man's
+imagination could ever have conceived,--and at the same time the
+character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is
+no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the
+continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world
+and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the
+New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to
+recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer
+directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.
+{115}
+It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,
+and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under
+a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,
+intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of
+suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the
+victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,
+God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.
+Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He
+manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by
+natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!
+what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of
+His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself
+upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,
+separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw
+it from the contagion of idolatry;--but now it is for the whole
+world, for all nations, for future as well as for living
+generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the
+barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the
+God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over
+the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His
+servants to extend His empire.
+
+{116}
+
+He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to
+spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate
+from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.
+Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,
+although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human
+errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the
+law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors
+with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature
+of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,
+and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.
+He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and
+brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and
+perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will
+not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very
+texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their
+most essential precepts.
+
+{117}
+
+I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
+foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for
+stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this _lex talionis_.
+"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
+neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
+enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
+you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute
+you." [Footnote 27]
+
+    [Footnote 26: Exodus xxi. 24, 25.]
+
+    [Footnote 27: Matthew v. 43, 44.]
+
+It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a
+wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour
+in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then
+let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,
+and send her out of his house." [Footnote 28]
+
+    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]
+
+{118}
+
+I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and
+asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? ... And
+he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And
+they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to
+put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the
+hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the
+beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this
+cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his
+wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more
+twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,
+let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]
+
+    [Footnote 29: Mark x. 2-9;  Matthew xix. 3-9.]
+
+The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be
+found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall
+both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the
+woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]
+
+    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]
+
+{119}
+
+Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the
+scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;
+and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,
+Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now
+Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but
+what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might
+have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger
+wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they
+continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,
+He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at
+her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they
+which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
+one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
+Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When
+Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said
+unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man
+condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
+Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]
+
+    [Footnote 31: John viii. 3-11.]
+
+{120}
+
+The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of
+rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain
+external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration
+and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and
+Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the
+acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a
+lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;
+and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of
+Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and
+ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
+... Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, ... the hour cometh,
+and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in
+spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
+God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in
+spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]
+
+    [Footnote 32: John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.]
+
+{121}
+
+Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and
+to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is
+about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man
+had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;
+he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity
+and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious
+and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the
+religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and
+extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself
+with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;
+political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all
+in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either
+social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make
+neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions
+advanced, he sets them aside;
+{122}
+"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the
+things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and
+earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and
+prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]
+
+    [Footnote 33: Matthew xxii. 21; xi. 25.]
+
+Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human
+being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every
+man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every
+human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole
+idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that
+when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary
+consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
+righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
+[Footnote 34]
+
+    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]
+
+{123}
+
+I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its
+different and special objects,--whether astronomy, geology,
+geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,--is as
+foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred
+Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man
+left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,
+assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious
+exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,
+then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts
+declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to
+facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no
+disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine
+torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the
+language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak
+according to the measure of their knowledge or of their
+ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order
+to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that
+men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.
+{124}
+In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,
+and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,
+aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to
+employ a similar language,--a language comprehended and received
+by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their
+inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters
+purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the
+mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of
+science, but according to their appearances, and so men
+comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear
+them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of
+ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.
+What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the
+person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his
+missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which
+turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that
+it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its
+circumference?
+{125}
+What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the
+language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific
+imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that
+language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or
+moral law of humanity?
+
+No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater
+admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and
+it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of
+man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no
+sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,
+to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of
+publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely
+human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is
+essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in
+need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of
+God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the
+religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his
+life, and to decide his lot in eternity.
+{126}
+It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of
+all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated
+philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the
+most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,
+thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from
+being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. ...
+After death the reason,--just ideas survive; all the rest
+perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even
+from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in
+God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them
+only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble
+souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made
+up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish
+almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple
+accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul
+of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely
+troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the
+consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really
+are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of
+soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]
+
+    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation
+    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]
+
+{127}
+
+I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought
+showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the
+favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour
+at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not
+believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is
+declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good
+their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.
+
+{128}
+
+           Fourth Meditation.
+
+          Christian Ignorance.
+
+
+When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have
+either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the
+intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that
+it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,
+to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any
+kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind
+limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there
+a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the
+objects are different to which it is applied? These are
+questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words
+"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to
+offer what appears to me to be the right solution.
+
+{129}
+
+I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or
+systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to
+make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these
+sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,
+Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.
+I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these
+systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to
+undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all
+philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special
+questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between
+Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus
+only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to
+the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,
+their bearing and their limitation.
+
+{130}
+
+I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the
+first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,
+Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the
+distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,
+Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology
+is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great
+philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which
+Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more
+eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak
+more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of
+Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible
+to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or
+non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for
+which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]
+
+    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.
+    By M. Littré, p. 519.]
+
+That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,
+Ontology, and Theology are not--cannot be--sciences.
+{131}
+As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,
+and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of
+Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three
+schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them
+the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term
+"Christian Ignorance."
+
+It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and
+with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this
+question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which
+they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as
+Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of
+the four sciences--Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and
+Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there
+to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there
+discovered.
+
+When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is
+indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more
+so, than Spiritualism itself.
+{132}
+It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all
+Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal
+in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other
+questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and
+Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between
+Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between
+Rationalistic science and Christian science.
+
+Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of
+Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it
+admits that these different sciences owe their birth and
+development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men
+and of things, and have for their object the solution of the
+questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once
+admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology
+alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of
+Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which
+the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to
+say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for
+human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source
+other than human reason.
+{133}
+Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and
+other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts
+supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it
+recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are
+bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand
+that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human
+mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the
+history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth
+of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have
+testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as
+well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact
+proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,
+the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical
+Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which
+Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data
+and the legitimate bases of science.
+
+{134}
+
+I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and
+to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to
+the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human
+experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no
+intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great
+question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with
+respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall
+return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has
+not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it
+demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas--facts,
+rather--absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic
+opponents of the supernatural.
+
+    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,
+    1864.]
+
+Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal
+causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and
+distinctive characteristic of man.
+{135}
+It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself
+above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things
+determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it
+in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any
+general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such
+facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a
+machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to
+drive man back to the condition of that nature which is
+substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish
+at one blow human morality and human liberty.
+
+The blow strikes still higher--it would abolish God. God, who
+created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his
+creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the
+daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that
+human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies
+to the source from which it emanates.
+{136}
+By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the
+condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble
+of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;
+that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of
+Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical
+reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,
+nothing more than Atheism.
+
+The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this
+consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being
+disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the
+most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from
+entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be
+finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not
+assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical
+consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident
+in the moral and social condition of humanity.
+
+{137}
+
+There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of
+the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that
+the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and
+permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential
+laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings
+whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject
+absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of
+necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in
+harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly
+perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If
+the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will
+venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even
+there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that
+the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small
+Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every
+place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in
+the midst of space and of time?
+
+{138}
+
+Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it
+admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe--an unknown
+incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and
+admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.
+de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime
+flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing
+in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows
+how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the
+fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches
+us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the
+discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in
+the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest
+and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in
+the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to
+these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality
+of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely
+minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the
+reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects
+than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it
+discovers.
+{139}
+What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the
+worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no
+more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that
+all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those
+inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same
+conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our
+science becomes very modest when set side by side with our
+ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,
+however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may
+be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is
+either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing
+this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,
+Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which
+outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.
+
+{140}
+
+Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity
+has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the
+reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one
+side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life
+of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life
+of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,
+a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the
+other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and
+with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of
+the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible
+laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places
+itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the
+spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the
+extent.
+
+{141}
+
+It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another
+adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by
+asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts
+and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,
+let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I
+address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by
+the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before
+speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,
+I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is
+here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion
+in the great struggle in which it is engaged.
+
+The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an
+uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.
+Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these
+documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the
+facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the
+less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a
+poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion
+of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of
+the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius
+were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral
+precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes
+and subjects.
+{142}
+I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human
+imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books
+which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time
+incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential
+characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its
+latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the
+Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing
+centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil
+society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another
+and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a
+religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have
+been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of
+God upon the destinies of Mankind.
+
+{143}
+
+In proportion to the vigour with which these events have
+developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed
+to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its
+peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.
+
+What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the
+means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays
+to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he
+believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his
+thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to
+attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the
+Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,
+he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,
+cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does
+Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,
+to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very
+presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of
+God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow
+the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him
+imperfectly,--where he attempts to carry the torch of human
+science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?
+
+{144}
+
+I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two
+examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.
+
+The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and
+Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly
+repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive
+documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that
+"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the
+Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all
+theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the
+divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian
+religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never
+have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation
+was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author."
+
+    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of
+    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]
+
+{145}
+
+But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this
+sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought
+to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the
+human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such
+union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's
+personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,
+which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the
+divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the
+councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and
+agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.
+
+Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of
+divine History.
+
+The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as
+unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the
+Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of
+Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.
+{146}
+The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its
+place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very
+beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves
+to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to
+determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the
+religions truth; in other words, to transform history into
+science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the
+authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,
+rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of
+the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,
+and Holy Ghost.
+
+I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the
+doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either
+originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their
+essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to
+human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less
+legitimate, of Religion.
+
+{147}
+
+When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of
+Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do
+not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The
+scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,
+always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of
+the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves
+to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and
+thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause
+of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral
+influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and
+authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have
+been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than
+efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their
+mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The
+Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this
+was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;
+forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they
+have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by
+explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an
+intermixture of man's work.
+{148}
+Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same
+time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can
+recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man
+to make of them a science.
+
+Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his
+explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:
+"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,
+or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add
+to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity
+and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this
+is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."
+[Footnote 39]
+
+    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.
+    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]
+
+Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian
+ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to
+take refuge.
+
+{149}
+
+It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are
+unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a
+serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and
+what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to
+believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of
+man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in
+religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only
+their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own
+work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most
+logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this
+respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly
+be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian
+ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to
+moderation and charity than Theological science.
+
+But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and
+efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human
+science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the
+same error and the same peril.
+{150}
+The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God
+to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and
+inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and
+mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon
+certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations
+of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the
+hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and
+the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter
+themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the
+solution of such questions is hidden.
+
+I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious
+impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets
+of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling
+curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?
+Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself
+under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be
+possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and
+powerless?
+{151}
+There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and
+under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost
+recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding
+from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to
+them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who
+of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of
+a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,
+conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,
+in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of
+human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event
+brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to
+which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine
+Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt
+the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve
+problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to
+rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine
+author.
+{152}
+But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No
+doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by
+his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to
+our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and
+his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their
+effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general
+problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions
+touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of
+Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into
+ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at
+limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific
+vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to
+overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon
+man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,
+"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his
+charity, and his liberty.
+
+{153}
+
+           Fifth Meditation.
+
+           Christian Faith.
+
+
+Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé
+Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the
+Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue
+Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is
+called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it
+expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.
+Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in
+its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to
+my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages
+which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the
+imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to
+regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a
+starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I
+now give to the press.
+
+{154}
+
+By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in
+facts or dogmas of a special nature--in facts or dogmas of
+religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in
+speaking of _the faith_ the term is used alone and
+absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its
+fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from
+which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the
+following are met with:--"I have full _faith_ in your words;
+this man has _faith_ in himself--in his strength--in his
+fortune, &c." This employment of the word _faith_ in secular
+matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it
+is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never
+been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had
+also other significations attached to it.
+
+{155}
+
+It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular
+opinion, 1st, that the word _faith_ designates a certain
+internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a
+certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of
+the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,
+nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied
+to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its
+special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the
+variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are
+taking place every day?
+
+Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a
+religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy
+of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing
+in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction
+of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called
+_Faith_; a name which neither masters and disciples will
+repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.
+{156}
+Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the
+truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the
+conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been
+generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;
+that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name
+of _Faith_, is its energy, is the empire which that energy
+gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith
+of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth
+century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of
+Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.
+
+The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it
+was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by
+an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of
+persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened
+reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral
+affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to
+feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave
+the name of _Faith_ to the result of their action, just as
+they had done so to the result of the process essentially
+intellectual of which I was before speaking.
+{157}
+Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by
+reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is
+the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.
+
+Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always
+sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has
+been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to
+practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach
+ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a
+meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind
+was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to
+certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it
+had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission
+of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to
+govern man's life and to regulate his thought.
+
+{158}
+
+Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated
+in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the
+intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation
+of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that
+it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by
+any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention
+and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became
+thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive
+character.
+
+The word _faith_ has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,
+a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human
+intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the
+sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often
+even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's
+long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to
+command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural
+means,--by divine grace.
+
+{159}
+
+What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may
+emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What
+is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider
+it independently of its origin and of its object?
+
+Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it
+innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,
+but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and
+establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being
+aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or
+volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and
+the influence of that external world in the midst of which his
+life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of
+laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary
+study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all
+his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering
+it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there
+taking place--to render an account thereof to himself, and thus
+to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge
+which he did not before possess, although the facts which form
+its object nevertheless existed as facts external--and which he
+might see by his eyes,--or as facts which were taking place
+within him.
+
+{160}
+
+Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of
+_faith_?
+
+It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to
+that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:
+such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man
+in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he
+dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,
+unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it
+the characteristics of _faith?_
+
+Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time
+others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost
+unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and
+spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without
+which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct
+without having given it any intimate and personal assent.
+{161}
+It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,
+admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to
+say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him
+to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful
+principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the
+profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which
+reigns over him. _Faith_, on the contrary, has this power;
+faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which
+faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account
+to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will
+do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind
+it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of
+human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of
+gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth
+which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,
+of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much
+more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does
+much more than direct him, it enlightens him.
+{162}
+How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and
+instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without
+our being able to affirm that they have _faith_ in them.
+Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,
+nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without
+seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,
+however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,
+should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction
+between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their
+nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their
+legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by
+comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying
+it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a
+sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and
+establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;
+this is no longer simple natural belief, it is _faith_.
+
+{163}
+
+Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two
+kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them
+the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous
+belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and
+science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is
+individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,
+dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison
+with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,
+faith is the full security of man in the possession of his
+belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path
+which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and
+a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent
+harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man
+whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition
+present no longer any problems for solution as to the things
+which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full
+possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and
+in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.
+{164}
+As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,
+it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external
+conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from
+other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its
+object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined
+and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature
+itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may
+be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the
+intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in
+the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory
+of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so
+forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of
+every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally
+oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of
+the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the
+exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long
+obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the
+three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,
+and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously
+satisfied.
+{165}
+Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a
+situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of
+its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need
+be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his
+faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral
+nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.
+
+The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith
+would seem _à priori_ to be intellectual beauty, and
+practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the
+mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent
+or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but
+the name of _faith_ would not be suitably applied to it.
+{166}
+Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an
+idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also
+attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the
+pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple
+belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may
+become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure
+to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to
+awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin
+and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall
+be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and
+the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the
+other, and to unite them.
+
+It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost
+exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief
+possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote
+40] which provoke the development of faith.
+
+    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]
+
+{167}
+
+Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful
+applications; political theories may strike the mind by the
+elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of
+their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more
+surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor
+have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in
+the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression
+at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their
+practical importance, a certain measure of science and of
+sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as
+the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does
+not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on
+the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in
+itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;
+having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and
+undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however
+rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once
+sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an
+habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him
+access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual
+life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;
+it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over
+him the empire of the most powerful interest.
+{168}
+Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition
+to a state of _faith_ should be so rapid and so general? But
+it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to
+transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary
+energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free
+and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to
+impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith
+which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which
+addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the
+loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,
+can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral
+nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to
+the mission prescribed to him by his thought.
+{169}
+But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of
+the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience
+proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the
+different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more
+its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by
+his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections
+or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the
+abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring
+from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once
+there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to
+diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law
+of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,
+it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its
+designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost
+always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this
+mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any
+other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and
+of society falling under oppression.
+
+{170}
+
+For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in
+belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his
+will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,
+has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith
+fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty
+does not exist, faith first usurps,--then becomes
+bewildered--finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to
+the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its
+efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it
+abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we
+have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the
+tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.
+In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces
+consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]
+
+    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et
+    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of
+    1861).]
+
+{171}
+
+If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I
+rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it
+Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as
+characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon
+which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold
+merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which
+has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other
+side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in
+sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in
+sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.
+
+What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the
+principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man
+incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each
+man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and
+more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the
+present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;
+in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.
+
+{172}
+
+The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less
+evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical
+importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor
+de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of
+Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit
+of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and
+adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the
+sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally
+certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or
+Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere
+believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and
+imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of
+fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and
+strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.
+As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has
+presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever
+seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to
+make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has
+nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of
+the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very
+efficacious influence to the principle of authority.
+
+{173}
+
+Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and
+assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,
+let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is
+engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What
+is the principle of this contest, and what its character?
+
+Here we are met by that all-important question, the question
+which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which
+all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the
+Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm
+that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of
+these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,
+and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:
+whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such
+contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as
+they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.
+
+{174}
+
+In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that
+which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is
+profound; but I do not think that the question between the two
+has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition
+has been rightly defined.
+
+To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,
+first, to the philosophers.
+
+We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to
+what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:
+"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with
+respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,
+than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then
+either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the
+old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the
+standard of reason."
+{175}
+Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him
+in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,--"My
+first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,
+unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to
+avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to
+follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but
+what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as
+to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]
+
+    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,
+    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]
+
+More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace
+to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the
+history of its progressive development, did far more than
+obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his
+labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its
+proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of
+a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and
+then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,
+all his knowledge,--in fact, the entire man himself.
+
+{176}
+
+Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have
+their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.
+Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to
+know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by
+the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a
+_tabula rasa_, and to fill up the void which he has so made,
+he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so
+clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to
+doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses
+not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without
+reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a
+statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this
+statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the
+man--the entire man--with all the developments of his nature and
+of his thought.
+
+{177}
+
+I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting
+point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very
+commencement of philosophy,--in short, a mere hypothesis.
+Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and
+of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress
+of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and
+scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the
+material world; but from their very commencement both these
+philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight
+road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a
+mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete
+appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss
+either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two
+hypotheses, the _tabula rasa_ of Descartes, and the statue
+of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they
+are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to
+inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle
+which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,
+and Christian faith.
+
+{178}
+
+The true point of departure of this history and the first of the
+facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and
+the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the
+other, the "_moi_" and the "_non moi_," the subject and
+the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I
+repudiate absolutely the different systems,--Pantheism, whether
+materialistic or idealistic,--Scepticism, whether idealistic or
+absolute,--which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the
+reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge
+of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the
+relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe
+together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a
+pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these
+different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have
+to deal with something very different from the question to which
+I am applying myself at this moment.
+{179}
+Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form
+of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it
+admits the reality and the distinction of the "_moi_" and of
+the "_non moi_" of the subject and the object, of the
+spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the
+universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for
+Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and
+under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's
+life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all
+simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the
+spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being
+from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself
+and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the
+diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives
+from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has
+a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and
+also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows
+not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive
+and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,
+yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.
+{180}
+Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,
+by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and
+which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that
+external world. He observes and notes both what takes place
+without him and within him. The results of this observation he
+terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations
+merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him
+of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands
+in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is
+highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,
+but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of
+science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein
+involved.
+
+{181}
+
+Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,
+I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,
+or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;
+first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which
+mankind professes, although under very different forms and in
+very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of
+philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in
+order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,
+and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side
+is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other
+is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of
+disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is
+called religious philosophy.
+
+Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no
+other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these
+systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,
+and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the
+religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of
+religion?
+
+{182}
+
+To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,
+Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.
+
+In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the
+instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of
+human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and
+proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active
+presence of God in the life of man and in the history of
+humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and
+active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of
+Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active
+presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the
+mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and
+of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,
+are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological
+and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which
+it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.
+
+{183}
+
+Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and
+disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which
+all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always
+confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,
+greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is
+looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is
+immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,
+diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is
+situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence
+reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision
+more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He
+observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts
+which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion
+amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in
+appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their
+character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the
+question antecedent to and which governs all the others.
+
+{184}
+
+The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not
+a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and
+a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith
+as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at
+the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,
+as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they
+themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only
+the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the
+life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these
+psychological and historic facts which reason and science are
+bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians
+justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence
+alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and
+permanent laws assigned to all other existences?
+
+{185}
+
+As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are
+concerned, this is the real question at issue.
+
+Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which
+we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.
+
+Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and
+those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to
+demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of
+God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all
+their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these
+days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.
+Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made
+earnest--I would willingly say pious--efforts to elucidate the
+proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid
+that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the
+religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive
+themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain
+to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of
+the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.
+{186}
+In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which
+Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and
+unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of
+each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic
+Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to
+prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of
+the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the
+place of the real action of God.
+
+In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"
+another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and
+with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different
+systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to
+polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear
+enunciation of his own thought.
+{187}
+"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend
+against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law
+of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would
+not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a
+commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and
+product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,
+to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in
+opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a
+supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be
+perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he
+is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of
+spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in
+ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,
+he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind
+supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an
+unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,
+inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that
+emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he
+would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a
+divine Reason.
+
+{188}
+
+Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living
+God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves ... A God
+that loved not would not be worthy of being adored ... We do not
+adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in
+consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however
+potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure
+it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being
+who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its
+highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a
+contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if
+the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.
+
+This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious
+conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."
+[Footnote 43]
+
+    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.
+    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]
+
+{189}
+
+It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions
+still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from
+philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.
+
+Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the
+philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle
+of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon
+the soul of man.
+
+Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,
+continually present, and active in the government of the
+Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the
+human race.
+
+Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short
+there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts
+which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these
+facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that
+Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.
+
+{190}
+
+           Sixth Meditation.
+
+            Christian Life.
+
+
+Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit
+to a test--the great test--the practical application. The idea
+has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.
+
+Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,
+upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their
+ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are
+right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is
+in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its
+object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man
+pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever
+the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it
+believes that it has attained to the truth.
+
+{191}
+
+This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only
+ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under
+its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those
+who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the
+principle that we should be indifferent whether we are
+essentially in the right, and that practically there is no
+difference between truth and error.
+
+But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than
+the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human
+mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,
+that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves
+itself?
+
+To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a
+denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every
+doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a
+test,--the practical application.
+{192}
+The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;
+these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically
+true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which
+it is bound to give.
+
+There is a radical difference between the material world and the
+intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in
+the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought
+and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is
+ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has
+no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot
+influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite
+of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if
+Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,
+and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's
+principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to
+the general system of the world. _There_ man's error is
+absolutely without effect or influence.
+
+{193}
+
+In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is
+not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act--
+to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to
+the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant
+of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside
+here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and
+independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here
+without real and serious consequences; they have the power of
+sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual
+and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to
+the disputes of men.
+
+Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,
+separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from
+its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific
+investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and
+admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of
+society or the results of their own labours.
+{194}
+Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave
+inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world
+are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;
+man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the
+profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,
+procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative
+description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no
+general disturbance results in that material world upon which
+naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will
+not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their
+ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,
+on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its
+teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and
+make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape
+the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in
+its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world
+to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,
+incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not
+here the object of science, it is still its necessary and
+appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the
+truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.
+
+{195}
+
+Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen
+centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue
+ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace
+here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and
+surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of
+Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single
+small part of this history, the most modest part, the least
+pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what
+Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian
+Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different
+situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day
+accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the
+furtherance of his ultimate destiny.
+
+{196}
+
+Three words, "_Rights of Man_" inscribed upon the banners of
+the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man
+as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his
+humanity. Three other words, _Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity_, have served as a commentary upon the three
+former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French
+Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources
+of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the
+ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.
+
+Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is
+Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have
+of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by
+Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does
+Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and
+condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity
+alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral
+force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the
+good also to perish.
+
+{197}
+
+It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride
+that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,
+the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his
+rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential
+objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the
+rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the
+individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,
+where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human
+creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a
+single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,
+Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not
+only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The
+right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of
+the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,
+constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant
+precept of the Christian religion.
+{198}
+It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian
+Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put
+into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as
+the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the
+chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that
+Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was
+amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as
+brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although
+sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a
+stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less
+potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it
+maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over
+distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil
+society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are
+most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the
+iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices
+have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the
+Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the
+earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church
+itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and
+acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.
+{199}
+Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never
+afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any
+human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of
+earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to
+be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all
+the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only
+in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear
+themselves greeted as _brethren_.
+
+The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence
+in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand
+to the political authorities, or in which the different classes
+stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the
+constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,
+called family.
+{200}
+There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the
+despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of
+wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If
+we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as
+religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of
+antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman
+family,--we shall not need to examine long before we discern
+clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just
+appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and
+liberty.
+
+I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and
+puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular
+maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and
+fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of
+false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the
+history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not
+merely in the records of a few years, but through three
+centuries.
+{201}
+Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying
+claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the
+same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show
+of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim
+to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner
+of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did
+they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon
+authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,
+and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.
+Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of
+Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to
+the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of
+this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its
+cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its
+liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either
+in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,
+and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which
+the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.
+{202}
+They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor
+humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and
+disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage
+to its right at the same time that they maintained their own
+right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished
+at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not
+as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]
+
+    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]
+
+Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,
+and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen
+me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
+and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."
+[Footnote 45]
+
+    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]
+
+And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and
+struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the
+doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every
+soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but
+of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ... Wherefore ye
+must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for
+conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]
+
+    [Footnote 46: Romans xiii. 1, 5. ]
+
+{203}
+
+Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself
+addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which
+are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote
+47]
+
+    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]
+
+The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of
+power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of
+religious life from civil life,--all these were not, for the
+primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their
+situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles
+of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the
+name of justice and of truth.
+
+{204}
+
+Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,
+greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the
+history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to
+the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once
+became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by
+earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the
+arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil
+inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and
+combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity
+had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,
+nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary
+doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted
+and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape
+and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they
+never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they
+survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the
+broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,
+Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled
+against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite
+of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of
+violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,
+the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.
+{205}
+Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious
+and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of
+human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and
+these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,
+traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable
+them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and
+corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.
+Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which
+agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely
+healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant
+subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of
+sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated
+herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she
+has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against
+which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which
+she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over
+the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of
+promise. This she owes to her origin--she was born in the manger
+of Jesus.
+
+{206}
+
+There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened
+men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has
+rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality
+of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of
+Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,
+the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality
+is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be
+separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but
+its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not
+disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and
+empire of morality, I have established in this volume of
+Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,
+and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart
+from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,
+and powerless--a branch without root and without fruit.
+{207}
+I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is
+Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as
+the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,
+but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have
+taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still
+higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did
+not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of
+doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a
+truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and
+superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as
+such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,
+and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and
+vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and
+learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the
+fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.
+{208}
+At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw
+in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a
+sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by
+Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his
+appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;
+but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who
+detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council
+and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and
+the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to
+have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,
+a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in
+reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the
+apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of
+Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching
+these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself
+to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,
+joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,
+were scattered and brought to nought.
+{209}
+After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the
+taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;
+and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I
+say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if
+this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But
+if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found
+even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]
+
+    [Footnote 48: Acts v. 21, 33--39.]
+
+The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity
+at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already
+made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the
+living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
+of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]
+
+    [Footnote 49: Matthew xxvi. 63, 64.]
+
+{210}
+
+The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A
+short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as
+their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide
+the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in
+repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof
+was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries
+of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of
+Christianity,--the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,
+the Inspiration of the Scriptures,--became the grand dogmas of
+Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its
+turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed
+from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to
+undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly
+interests and human errors and passions had a great part;
+Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes
+converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so
+constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was
+theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of
+practical application in every form and every shape.
+{211}
+The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all
+these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows
+of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and
+is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the
+same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,
+with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and
+the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.
+The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its
+Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The
+authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of
+the next and last series of my "Meditations."
+
+{212}
+
+{213}
+
+               Appendix.
+
+
+Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at
+London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance
+a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:
+all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or
+simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or
+attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,
+perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,
+has just made it the subject of three articles, which are
+remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They
+appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his
+country. [Footnote 50]
+
+    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by
+    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen
+    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of
+    January, February, and March, 1868.]
+
+  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'
+  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be
+  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified
+  authorship--that has appeared within the same interval, has
+  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism
+  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled
+  'Ecce Homo.'"
+
+{214}
+
+The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his
+intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental
+ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current
+conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a
+definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons
+not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They
+may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the
+beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time
+when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as
+St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with
+those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to
+trace his biography from point to point, and accept those
+conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles
+have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,
+critically weighed, appear to warrant.
+
+"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+there was no historical character whose motives, objects and
+feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+
+"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern
+Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;
+which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an
+answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the
+Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to
+attain that object?'"
+
+{215}
+
+On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief
+words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not
+to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,
+I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in
+the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very
+outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study
+the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering
+him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer
+all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire
+to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating
+him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when
+living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the
+ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,
+in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a
+person unknown to us--a fossil man, so to say, of which the
+features might be traceable in some contemporary document,
+showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to
+supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he
+performed;--this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,
+one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true
+comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus
+mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer
+limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent
+thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and
+its nature verified in its positive and vast development.
+
+{216}
+
+This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of
+history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like
+anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and
+comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their
+different elements and in all the development of their life. They
+form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we
+are deciphering.
+
+I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce
+Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it
+within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also
+understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed
+and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these
+days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?--a
+man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine
+nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he
+really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such
+things as miracles? What are we to understand by the
+supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and
+accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style
+Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably
+suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and
+violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce
+Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to
+study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it
+because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no
+positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a
+certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of
+some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of
+him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact
+not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to
+the sole and proper force of mankind?
+
+{217}
+
+Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous
+author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:
+what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book
+"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed
+to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has
+proposed to explain Christianity.
+
+I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of
+the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a
+strange one,--it is condemnatory and destructive of the
+fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and
+honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the
+facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human
+nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural
+operations of humanity.
+
+The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether
+twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of
+Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing
+with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,
+the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the
+authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,
+the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the
+systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its
+fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and
+sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn
+the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.
+Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and
+striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,
+however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,
+and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.
+
+{218}
+
+All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the
+vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the
+perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the
+solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not
+enter.
+
+I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an
+account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's
+opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my
+aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show
+plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There
+precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with
+the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of
+Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of
+Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he
+departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he
+appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought
+seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly
+contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts
+or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is
+more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he
+believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity
+find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they
+encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or
+the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.
+
+{219}
+
+There are several passages of this remarkable work which are
+particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I
+feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of
+the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,
+entitled _Christ's Credentials_, and chapter ninth,
+[Footnote 51] entitled _Reflections on the Nature of Christ's
+Society;_ in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled
+_Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems_,
+and chapter the eleventh, _The Christian Republic_ [Footnote
+52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,
+fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and
+satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the
+author's inconsistency with respect to religion.
+
+    [Footnote 51: Ecce Homo, ed. 1866, pp. 41-51, 81--102.]
+
+    [Footnote 52: _Ibid_, pp. 108--119, 120--126.]
+
+Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply
+remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and
+particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and
+call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a
+singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a
+subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with
+philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of
+human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and
+religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and
+painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a
+grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,
+however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no
+idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable
+work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to
+which I have already referred, and indeed it appears
+incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the
+human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as
+of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his
+book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another
+volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the
+Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."
+{220}
+He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking
+inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ
+much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however
+superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary
+humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and
+is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not
+have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.
+
+
+                 The End.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  Bradbury, Evans, And Co., Printers, Whitefriars.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The
+Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot
+
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+<title>
+Christianity Viewed In Relation To
+The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
+By M. Guizot.
+</title>
+
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The
+Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: Christianity Viewed In Relation To The Present State Of Society And Opinion.
+
+Author: François Guizot
+
+Release Date: November 30, 2019 [EBook #60815]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHRISTIANITY VIEWED IN RELATION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Don Kostuch
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<p>
+[Transcriber's note: This production is based on
+https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_i">{i}</a></span>
+
+         <h1>Christianity Viewed In Relation To
+<br><br>
+     The Present State Of Society And Opinion.</h1>
+<br>
+                  <h2>By M. Guizot.
+</h2>
+
+  <h3>Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.
+<br><br><br>
+
+                    London:
+<br><br>
+         John Murray, Albemarle Street.
+<br><br>
+                     1871.</h3>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ii">{ii}</a></span>
+
+             <h2>By The Same Author.</h2>
+
+       <h3>The Essence Of Christianity.<br>
+             Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.</h3>
+<p>
+  "No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances
+  which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable
+  contribution to the literature of the present controversy."<br>
+    &mdash;<i>Edinburgh Review</i>.
+</p>
+<br>
+
+      <h3>The Present State Of Christianity.<br>
+          Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.</h3>
+<p>
+  "A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a
+  sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity,
+  published two years ago, and an introduction to a further
+  series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great
+  questions of the history of Christianity, and the future
+  destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great
+  interest."&mdash;<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iii">{iii}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_iv">{iv}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_v">{v}</a></span>
+<br>
+                   <h2>Preface.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the
+facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and
+the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I
+retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during
+the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and
+Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated
+amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent
+trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in
+these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism,
+Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the
+fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those
+systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the
+office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and
+destiny.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vi">{vi}</a></span>
+That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why
+is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has
+had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been
+made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely
+better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of
+humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which
+vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in
+review? because it fills up the void that those systems either
+create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts
+man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity.
+    Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this
+question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas
+and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them
+more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_vii">{vii}</a></span>
+Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity
+can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that
+morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious
+Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the
+very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those
+who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe
+Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each
+other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as
+naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that
+Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices,
+that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I
+establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I
+then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and
+determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical
+Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the
+bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_viii">{viii}</a></span>
+I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the
+law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I
+interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show
+that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously.
+"Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the
+Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the
+present series concludes.
+</p>
+<p>
+But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the
+historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of
+retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its
+course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor
+wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts
+which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine
+origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and
+destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a
+summary:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  1. The authority of the sacred books.
+<br><br>
+  2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.
+<br><br>
+  3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_ix">{ix}</a></span>
+<br>
+  4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.
+<br><br>
+  5. Romanism and Protestantism.
+<br><br>
+  6. The different Antichristian crises, their
+     character and their issue.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they
+suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised
+itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe
+and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one
+of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my
+Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real
+value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical
+Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of
+Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed
+to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious
+study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many
+quicksands.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_x">{x}</a></span>
+<p>
+But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I
+been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work
+into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are
+agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding
+their instant solution? What good result can I expect from
+studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my
+country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the
+actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that
+which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many
+troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I
+scrutinize generations&mdash;the honour and the destiny of which I
+have so much at heart, for my children form part of them&mdash;the
+more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the
+general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself
+in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the
+grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xi">{xi}</a></span>
+I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations,
+France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems
+and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their
+gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not
+having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from
+not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when
+she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary
+forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.
+</p>
+<p>
+Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some
+question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in
+events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and
+the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than
+the era of modern history&mdash;in the sixteenth century the question
+of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth
+century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad
+and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the
+operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in
+France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the
+different objects which each social movement had specially in
+view.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xii">{xii}</a></span>
+The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the
+struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on
+high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite
+complications of a labyrinth.
+</p>
+<p>
+And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of
+essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent,
+contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is
+plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I
+propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.
+</p>
+<p>
+First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of
+the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which
+concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of
+populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly
+these questions were all reducible to one&mdash;the aggrandizement or
+the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or
+the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the
+balance of power in Europe.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiii">{xiii}</a></span>
+War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled
+this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and
+Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation
+so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and
+ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and
+entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the
+question of nationalities, the question of little states and of
+great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and
+of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their
+midst,&mdash;all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a
+routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the
+maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking
+themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial
+organizations and the external relations of States.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xiv">{xiv}</a></span>
+<p>
+Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle
+itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new
+ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual
+theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of
+men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good
+their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any
+respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a
+principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which
+the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name
+of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from
+participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or
+eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria.
+Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently
+against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick
+does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of
+which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of
+language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some
+general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased
+to play a great part in the events which are passing before us,
+and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more
+legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his
+successors.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xv">{xv}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men
+follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part
+of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain
+share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the
+possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a
+moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of
+this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But
+policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to
+these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and
+right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common
+sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable,
+maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations,
+and which, up to the present time, have presided over the
+relations of States.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvi">{xvi}</a></span>
+The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial
+agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be
+independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect
+for ancient treaties,&mdash;all these elements of European order have
+not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory
+of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political
+unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with
+justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western
+Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both
+in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow
+countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal
+of National Unity requires their incorporation with France?
+Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere
+Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations
+of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which
+draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories
+all foreign domination.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xvii">{xvii}</a></span>
+But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of
+union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and
+the <i>régime</i> of a confederation of States might have been
+established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the
+foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have
+been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the
+interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the
+preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at
+the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that
+any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of
+that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized
+world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally
+compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the
+preservation of peace between the different States.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xviii">{xviii}</a></span>
+<p>
+What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the
+sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up,
+the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a
+population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected,
+and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute
+themselves into new and independent States? What would become of
+the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also
+were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating
+wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its
+members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations
+or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding
+or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does
+he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in
+the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle.
+The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being
+rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to
+the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his
+country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to
+strive to lay the foundation of a new country.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xix">{xix}</a></span>
+We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen
+some of the States which form the nation of the United States of
+America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an
+independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in
+their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the
+right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to
+change its government at discretion. The States which remained
+faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the
+principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in
+maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am
+one of those who think that they had both right and reason on
+their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the
+most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character
+as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the
+interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for
+negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to
+me all that he had written and said upon the subject.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xx">{xx}</a></span>
+I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he
+expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the
+efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and
+by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He
+would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living
+reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle
+Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much
+sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced
+that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of
+which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the
+danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of
+slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the
+great American State which was their country. Motive detestable
+for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects,
+has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a
+Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern
+times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising
+resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an
+unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of
+States.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxi">{xxi}</a></span>
+<p>
+So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the
+external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the
+future has in store for those which involve domestic order and
+the organization of government. I meet here with the same
+confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between
+ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at
+the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in
+collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments
+in opinions.
+</p>
+<p>
+The proposition is now universally received that society has the
+right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own
+government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a
+manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxii">{xxii}</a></span>
+The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to
+attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the
+monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the
+other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the
+great representatives of public power. But neither the
+constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded
+amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of
+events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in
+spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of
+liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on
+its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was
+affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and
+sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional
+monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of
+government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of
+personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the
+essay have greater success? Events will decide.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxiii">{xxiii}</a></span>
+In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so
+many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the
+disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its
+governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our
+ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense,
+have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of
+impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very
+well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed
+and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no
+fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield
+ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our
+very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but
+soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less
+exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our
+most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as
+precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are
+again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in
+the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have
+taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet
+these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found
+any free government.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxiv">{xxiv}</a></span>
+<p>
+I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the
+state of our political institutions to that of the relations
+existent between the different parts of society. I say the
+<i>different parts</i> to avoid saying <i>different classes</i>,
+for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking
+that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges
+and exclusions, of that entire <i>régime</i> with its narrow
+compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were
+formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their
+name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental
+qualification they might possess. In effect, this <i>régime</i>
+has fallen&mdash;fallen completely and definitively; all legal
+barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free:
+by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to
+everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxv">{xxv}</a></span>
+This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate
+it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it
+ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of
+jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they
+have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they
+persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in
+defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration
+was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils
+that the <i>bourgeoisie</i> had to endure, and the risks which it
+had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of
+July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were
+the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle
+classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such
+assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the
+intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been
+already often produced on the stage of the world,&mdash;theories which
+have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxvi">{xxvi}</a></span>
+Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial
+distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have
+served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination,
+sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon
+things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises
+were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to
+give.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good
+observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that
+even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as
+to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial
+settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the
+distribution of the material means of existence, are in
+discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people,
+although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume
+the form of Socialism.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxvii">{xxvii}</a></span>
+I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find
+their field in facts affecting the sphere of material
+subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most
+recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier
+to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the
+ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess,
+that errors such as those which presented themselves under the
+names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much
+noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that
+they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof
+of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it
+leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst
+us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst
+of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in
+order to surmount this danger.
+</p>
+<p>
+Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester,
+who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the
+following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between
+the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in
+their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for
+books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly
+workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as
+is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?"
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxviii">{xxviii}</a></span>
+After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are
+two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I
+added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you
+great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be
+the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the
+honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I
+congratulated him this time still more.
+</p>
+<p>
+In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which
+afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their
+disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which
+the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace
+social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of
+distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a
+little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by
+all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations
+from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which
+they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous
+and full of hazard.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxix">{xxix}</a></span>
+The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation,
+when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true
+to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of
+the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond
+doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously
+excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of
+hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as
+the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it
+devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it
+before them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxx">{xxx}</a></span>
+Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well
+living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with
+efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and
+resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the
+spectacle of the world which surrounds them,&mdash;a world now at
+length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise,
+the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to
+the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our
+villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people
+from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight,
+unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral
+discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which
+religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives
+subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely
+religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and
+Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and
+this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant
+regions of society!
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxi">{xxxi}</a></span>
+<p>
+These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of
+unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism,
+of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct,
+open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a
+tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity
+counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name
+of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it
+with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical
+deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and,
+in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their
+force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the
+incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's
+opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which
+are only simply political and social; many they are who would be
+inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they
+are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all
+these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring
+to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which
+receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ
+which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt
+and exposed to peril.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxii">{xxxii}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating
+the human mind and human societies: questions of public right,
+questions of political organization, questions of social
+institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I
+encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great
+complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his
+efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every
+kind&mdash;doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and
+oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied,
+immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to
+travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to
+feel their way through a labyrinth.
+</p>
+<p>
+Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and
+impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope
+for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we
+have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign
+power called by some Providence, by others Fate?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxiii">{xxxiii}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am far from thinking so.
+</p>
+<p>
+Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of
+convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion
+Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day
+detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal
+or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few,"
+said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to
+disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence
+and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I
+am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military
+sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always
+applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in
+order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need,
+to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its
+apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most
+efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the
+number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others
+possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same
+spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action,
+single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon
+attract to themselves as associates many others who would never,
+without such impulse, begin to move in the same path.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxiv">{xxxiv}</a></span>
+We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of
+influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if
+we adopt it.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which
+torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the
+rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its
+economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an
+evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of
+French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the
+moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them
+attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its
+removal.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxv">{xxxv}</a></span>
+But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril,
+a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and
+developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a
+good current which is impelling us forwards;&mdash;at the same time
+that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the
+principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to
+control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the
+maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at
+least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions
+of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of
+political economy have defenders no less zealous than the
+presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism
+raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is
+advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress
+also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical
+applications.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxvi">{xxxvi}</a></span>
+Following respectively their different objects, there are on both
+sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and
+influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several
+causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is
+solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent,
+contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our
+history is made up of this great struggle and of its
+vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats
+sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of
+our country.
+</p>
+<p>
+They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and
+keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human
+sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated
+by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the
+disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought
+back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the
+modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of
+their situation than with the rights of thought, but always
+remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty
+even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only
+defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than
+shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in
+spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent
+indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in
+spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble
+desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxvii">{xxxvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius
+of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed
+with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of
+individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it,
+and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as
+well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and
+the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who
+are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxviii">{xxxviii}</a></span>
+<p>
+What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the
+conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have
+it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil
+current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions
+and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good
+sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and
+to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation
+which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?
+</p>
+<p>
+Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society
+in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free
+Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we
+should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease
+of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our
+conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our
+understanding.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xxxix">{xxxix}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the
+abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to
+guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to
+individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and
+material. The right of France to these liberties, and their
+opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in
+their clearest light, and established in all their force on their
+highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2]
+It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch,
+the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion,
+that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the
+two great remedies against this ill.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, <i>Sur les libertés
+    nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse</i>, in the séances of
+    the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January,
+    7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xl">{xl}</a></span>
+<p>
+When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are
+perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is
+that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in
+conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of
+so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas,
+does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the
+confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too,
+provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its
+effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the
+understandings: the different facts, and problems which these
+facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only
+for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow
+accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise
+conceptions of them.
+</p>
+<p>
+Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions
+define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation
+of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular
+form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so
+salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a
+liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it
+would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle
+opinions still more.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xli">{xli}</a></span>
+<p>
+Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more
+important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of
+practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the
+thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted,
+and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the
+effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs
+riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to
+liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,&mdash;when,
+instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be
+virtually solved,&mdash;when men are charged as real actors to
+transform into facts their own opinions or those of the
+spectators who are looking on,&mdash;then it is that the human mind,
+making its own strength the object of its reflection and
+examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose
+at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy
+itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good
+sense, by justice, and by possibility,&mdash;then it is that it learns
+to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts.
+Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by
+liberty alone.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlii">{xlii}</a></span>
+<p>
+Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the
+salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an
+escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving
+questions the most different&mdash;I might say the most contrary&mdash;in
+their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary
+histories of England, of the United States of America, and of
+France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as
+precedents.
+</p>
+<p>
+From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against
+the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M.
+Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With
+what forces and with what arms did England support these two
+formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political
+liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xliii">{xliii}</a></span>
+It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued
+in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties,
+&mdash;it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,&mdash;it was by
+setting in action all the springs of a free and representative
+government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most
+potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated
+Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years,
+during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office
+by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a
+different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals,
+sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place
+of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path
+that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations,
+sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps,
+improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of
+the country, all the strength of its government. Political
+Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause
+and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance,
+at another of that of progress.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xliv">{xliv}</a></span>
+<p>
+The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder
+trial. Their government has had to struggle against the
+insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a
+civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular
+independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted
+an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to
+maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the
+national existence of the State against the attempts which were
+made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same
+motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the
+course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices,
+and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed
+by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the
+abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the
+right of insurrection.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlv">{xlv}</a></span>
+It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the
+institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this
+victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once
+over, the civil <i>régime</i> of American society resumed its
+action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical
+usurpation or military tyranny.
+</p>
+<p>
+Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so
+well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts
+remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848
+France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been
+preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty.
+Neither of the <i>régimes</i> in operation immediately previous
+to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly
+changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks
+to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which
+owed their existence to the previous <i>régime</i>, a regular
+government was promptly established, and a new constitutional
+monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlvi">{xlvi}</a></span>
+On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary
+movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect
+for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and
+feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical
+fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the
+victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was
+more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the
+funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois,
+celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been
+assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be
+tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the
+archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church,
+which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being
+closed for many months.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlvii">{xlvii}</a></span>
+In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set
+men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more
+profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor
+the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities
+were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of
+the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free
+even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four
+years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments
+which were then in force without leaving their traces; their
+traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary
+influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction
+which put an end to it.
+</p>
+<p>
+That this influence may still surmount the great trials through
+which governments and people may have both to pass, two things
+are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real
+citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to
+make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by
+their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at
+the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty,
+should accept its inconveniences and its perils.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlviii">{xlviii}</a></span>
+A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it
+does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with
+resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of
+every human situation.
+</p>
+<p>
+Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room
+to nations for&mdash;what do I say? they demand from them&mdash;great
+activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude
+their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of
+action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer
+anything but a picture-frame without the picture&mdash;a drama
+written, not represented&mdash;in which the actors fail to assume
+their parts or to co-operate to produce the <i>dénouement</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public
+in the life of free government which gives so capital an
+importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_xlix">{xlix}</a></span>
+When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a
+sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may
+have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am
+not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily
+hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of
+private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What
+is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled
+moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and
+religious&mdash;beliefs which recognize and attest that man is
+naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something
+essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the
+midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by
+such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free
+<i>régime</i> a large share both of its responsibility and of its
+active duties: it is only when so animated that they give
+consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it
+stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe
+in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than
+once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty
+when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a
+tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral
+combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of
+the material forces which assail them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_l">{l}</a></span>
+Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free
+country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who
+profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all
+which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in
+favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete
+misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human
+society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove
+incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in
+tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man
+isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a
+falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the
+supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this
+is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated
+individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his
+silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon
+the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the
+falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of
+respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their
+opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of
+humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in
+such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_li">{li}</a></span>
+To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to
+refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,
+moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,
+is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very
+impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society
+calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the
+intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and
+practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether
+moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to
+be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the
+people.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lii">{lii}</a></span>
+<p>
+I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in
+all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,
+it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on
+the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil
+Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable
+with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I
+have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I
+am now publishing.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task
+to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day
+to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of
+which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,
+stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only
+here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two
+contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as
+well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups
+profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals
+and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and
+Disbelievers.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_liii">{liii}</a></span>
+No one of these groups really represents a dominant party
+in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and
+hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,
+vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,
+wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing
+clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of
+truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's
+thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused
+and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of
+thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to
+appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in
+reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a
+vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a
+field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and
+incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to
+bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French
+society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and
+under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here
+described it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_liv">{liv}</a></span>
+Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful
+and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find
+everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes
+devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the
+most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in
+search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most
+different directions. Upon this population it is that we must
+act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive
+conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious
+instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are
+by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to
+transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must
+accommodate ourselves to the general character of this
+population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an
+adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence
+must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious
+to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should
+give in return its soul.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lv">{lv}</a></span>
+It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is
+not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of
+Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should
+know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the
+society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they
+should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under
+their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under
+their blows.
+</p>
+<p>
+Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it
+prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such
+success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different
+epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did
+Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their
+times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so
+extraordinary an influence?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lvi">{lvi}</a></span>
+First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked
+was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also
+because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they
+were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different
+processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with
+the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that
+they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political
+transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it
+on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They
+more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,
+the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;
+still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one
+by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern
+literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having
+re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this
+is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against
+them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France
+felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their
+glory, because it believed in their sympathy.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lvii">{lvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are
+rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of
+their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with
+them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion
+and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church
+of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more
+liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father
+Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice
+of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already
+more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different
+origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same
+cause and to the same work.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lviii">{lviii}</a></span>
+At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,
+two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I
+have the honour to know, men very different in position and in
+ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a
+great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;
+both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,
+the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent
+in the present state of French society; both having the
+resolution and the ability required in order to present
+Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most
+proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur
+Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor
+at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his
+diocese, (Lent, 1868,) <i>A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of
+Christianity</i>. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th
+of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical
+Conference assembled at Nérac, <i>A Report as to the Actual
+Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches</i>.
+[Footnote 4]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length
+    in the <i>Gazette de France</i>, on the 25th and 26th of
+    February, 1868.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the
+    Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lix">{lix}</a></span>
+<p>
+I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially
+analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here
+because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each
+reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being
+prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony
+between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the
+present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far
+as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch
+is Christian.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was
+contemporary with primitive man&mdash;a fact present in all ages, ever
+paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same
+degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind
+man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent
+of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the
+Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and
+upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet
+raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,
+constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His
+creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty
+lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses
+more or less unanimous.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lx">{lx}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Heathen nations&mdash;their history proves it&mdash;have preserved
+something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected
+with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of
+Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions
+which they received from their grandsire, and which are the
+common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions
+are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of
+fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East
+and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the
+multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and
+its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily
+distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of
+Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original
+fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality
+of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all
+these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the
+depths of the conscience of the people.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxi">{lxi}</a></span>
+Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify
+in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be
+condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but
+for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.
+</p>
+<p>
+"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful
+work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious
+wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too
+much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and
+Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained
+Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political
+charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,
+breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism
+remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxii">{lxii}</a></span>
+<p>
+"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many
+generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner
+and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred
+and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and
+in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations&mdash;this fact, what
+is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that
+it is purely natural&mdash;the spontaneous production of our habits,
+the simple result of our instincts&mdash;and, so to say, an
+irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is
+divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly
+created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as
+a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common
+sense which tells us this.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,
+as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely
+the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its
+own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it
+and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with
+a force which renews itself every day.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxiii">{lxiii}</a></span>
+It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious
+effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and
+nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to
+its effects a supernatural character. &hellip; Supernatural means were
+necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in
+relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the
+constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of
+the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no
+longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions
+should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,
+infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary
+a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His
+envoys by extraordinary facts&mdash;facts of a superhuman power,
+miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of
+the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,
+intervening with supernatural <i>éclat</i> to enable the mission
+to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and
+more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and
+their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their
+religious and predestined course.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxiv">{lxiv}</a></span>
+<p>
+"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the
+highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies
+of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a
+prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with
+signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive
+ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,
+and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His
+character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,
+the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;
+finally, the survival and the development of His work through
+centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the
+direct intervention of God&mdash;sole possible means of finding a
+satisfactory explanation of such grand results."
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxv">{lxv}</a></span>
+<p>
+The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas
+recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited&mdash;a
+development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to
+assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always
+faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no
+discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of
+ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class
+of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of
+Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of
+man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity
+in particular; considered as a grand fact&mdash;a fact universal and
+permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst
+the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the
+scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst
+Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and
+Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,
+by the same title, if not in the same degree;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxvi">{lxvi}</a></span>
+a fact at once human and divine&mdash;human by its accordance with
+man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of
+God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power
+reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of
+events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the
+accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus
+associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle
+of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of
+Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without
+any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage
+rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at
+the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority
+of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not
+justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented
+under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most
+proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,
+on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and
+pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian
+Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so
+many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxvii">{lxvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more
+vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop
+of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he
+traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and
+requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and
+describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated
+and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in
+search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to
+be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,
+he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly
+and without compromise.
+</p>
+<p>
+"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in
+insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds
+in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its
+prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the
+preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxviii">{lxviii}</a></span>
+Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not
+live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,
+they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow
+its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its
+aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are
+of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate
+and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in
+many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In
+France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which
+have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as
+preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every
+symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To
+neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of
+addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who
+neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the
+objections which we attribute to them.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxix">{lxix}</a></span>
+<p>
+"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is
+easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others&mdash;it is that
+of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery
+or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally
+even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons
+more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of
+the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is
+noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our
+generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of
+its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of
+Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant
+now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,
+whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is
+impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a
+fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of
+Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of
+incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is
+definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface
+God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an
+obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxx">{lxx}</a></span>
+<p>
+"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in
+these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt
+or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having
+for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery
+from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are
+combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,
+Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a
+personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of
+the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a
+God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten
+civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,
+and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long
+as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. &hellip; Let nothing
+henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the
+human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God
+than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all
+things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxi">{lxxi}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their
+weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is
+not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its
+lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and
+its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated
+at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical
+which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it
+is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in
+France, Germany, and Italy.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical
+Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to
+destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former
+never will go so far as these.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxii">{lxxii}</a></span>
+But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing
+hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it
+we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,
+stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when
+merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious
+life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,
+without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of
+destruction.
+</p>
+<p>
+"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have
+we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most
+painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed,
+with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph
+attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold,
+how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the
+Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are
+the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by
+which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in
+discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of
+general interest?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxiii">{lxxiii}</a></span>
+The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful
+to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul
+from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after
+the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have
+to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to
+souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?
+</p>
+<p>
+"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we
+are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees
+everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to
+note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting
+the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous
+aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas
+of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social
+application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The
+age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace;
+it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the
+union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material
+happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxiv">{lxxiv}</a></span>
+Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character,
+men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more
+than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their
+rights as individuals, and of <i>self-government</i>, and
+consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here
+assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious <i>points
+d'appui</i> for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread
+for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations.
+Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel
+leads to Liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought
+we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who
+demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question
+overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his
+weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate
+himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from
+him the cry of the prophet&mdash;'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot
+speak, for I am a child!'
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxv">{lxxv}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly,
+much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of
+Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation.
+Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the
+origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and
+more scientific than all that in these days men seek to
+substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the
+supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of
+Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of
+Religion itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to
+establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and
+Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace
+Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not
+more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxvi">{lxxvi}</a></span>
+Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the
+materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian
+Conscience.
+</p>
+<p>
+"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her
+spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the
+progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make
+herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let
+her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must
+be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to
+everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize
+all his arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our
+special mission in the special position in which God has placed
+us?"
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxvii">{lxxvii}</a></span>
+<p>
+Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of
+his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac,
+M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the
+preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and
+evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to
+the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the
+general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of
+general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and
+urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend
+Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that
+comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that
+comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear
+to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its
+most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with
+anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is
+necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we
+must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect
+fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxviii">{lxxviii}</a></span>
+Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to
+confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the
+contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a
+<i>point d'appui</i> for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us
+strive, we also, to find these <i>points d'appui</i>, those
+keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be
+made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country
+that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark
+applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the
+educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as
+it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let
+us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its
+liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and
+demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign
+reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by
+science.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxix">{lxxix}</a></span>
+The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human
+activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained
+in the principles of the Gospel."
+</p>
+<p>
+I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of
+the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two
+documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main
+and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian,
+but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at
+leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other,
+to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the
+one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both.
+The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion,
+or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging
+to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by
+each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw
+to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and
+are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxx">{lxxx}</a></span>
+<p>
+I think that they are right both in their hope and their
+endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons
+pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of
+religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain
+and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of
+religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern
+Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect,
+France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being
+informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as
+well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement
+between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The
+profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not
+part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater
+development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the
+events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding
+upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests,
+to which such subjects are all very strange.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxi">{lxxxi}</a></span>
+The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that
+France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with
+religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and
+fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable
+grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is,
+at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well
+entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long
+life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part
+in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer
+anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been
+essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made
+no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the
+world, but nothing attaches me to it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxii">{lxxxii}</a></span>
+Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my
+eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and
+the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with
+thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that
+eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:&mdash;
+<p class="cite">
+  Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.
+<br><br>
+    Guizot.<br>
+    Paris, <i>April</i>, 1868.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxiii">{lxxxiii}</a></span>
+<br><br>
+                <h2>Contents.</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+	<td></td>
+	<td></td>
+	<td>Page</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>Preface</td>
+	<td></td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_v">v</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>I.</td>
+	<td>Christianity and Liberty</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_1">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>II.</td>
+	<td>Christianity and Morality</td>
+	<td> <a href="#Page_52">52</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>III.</td>
+	<td>Christianity and Science</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>IV.</td>
+	<td>Christian Ignorance</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_128">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>V.</td>
+	<td>Christian Faith</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_153">153</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>VI.</td>
+	<td>Christian Life</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_190">190</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+	<td>Appendix</td>
+	<td>Observations upon the Work
+             called "Ecce Homo"</td>
+	<td><a href="#Page_213">213</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_lxxxiv">{lxxxiv}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_1">{1}</a></span>
+<br>
+      <h1>Meditations On Christianity
+<br><br>
+               in its
+<br><br>
+     Relation To The Actual State<br>
+       Of Society And Opinion.</h1>
+<br>
+
+
+           <h2>First Meditation.
+<br><br>
+       Christianity And Liberty.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days
+for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant
+in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object
+Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both
+simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and
+respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and
+ill-regulated impulse.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_2">{2}</a></span>
+Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it
+develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away,
+and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions
+have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time
+men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are
+discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they
+vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to
+exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion
+may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered
+upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from
+it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is
+condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it
+is bound to perform.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our
+epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less
+important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of
+the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard
+Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest
+enemy.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3">{3}</a></span>
+In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so
+treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a
+multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in
+activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one
+time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian
+sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded?
+Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of
+Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather
+true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both
+require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate
+and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century
+remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that
+other question is not solved.
+</p>
+<p>
+I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these&mdash;"What
+shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose
+his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"
+[Footnote 5]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 5: Mark viii. 36, 37.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_4">{4}</a></span>
+<p>
+"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the
+soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and
+body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach
+the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the
+human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to
+save souls, all souls without exception,&mdash;souls of the powerful
+and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant,
+happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is
+the foundation of the Christian Religion.
+</p>
+<p>
+The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere
+hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual
+being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts,
+who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual
+condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an
+object of present solicitude.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_5">{5}</a></span>
+To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a
+product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What
+have they to do with the words of the Gospel&mdash;with the immense
+value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them
+as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself
+forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who
+speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated
+tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because
+they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual
+man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What
+constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every
+human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that
+he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially
+in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation
+which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up
+to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use
+which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature
+of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not,
+that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime
+a destiny.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_6">{6}</a></span>
+Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great
+efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem
+of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel
+recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself
+about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely
+rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and
+responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which
+Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in
+every command that she gives to humanity.
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men,
+and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of
+man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis
+and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most
+daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a
+point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity
+of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_7">{7}</a></span>
+<p>
+Christianity does not confine itself to this;&mdash;after having laid
+down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical
+sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of
+resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the
+synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to
+speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John
+answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the
+sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye."
+[Footnote 8]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to
+them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach
+in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than
+men." [Footnote 9]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of
+the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his
+faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the
+principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_8">{8}</a></span>
+<p>
+The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus,
+who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for
+dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he
+resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium,
+"confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to
+continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by
+much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God.
+[Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle
+of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 11: Acts xiv. 19, 22.]
+</p>
+<p>
+It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that
+it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the
+principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and
+transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and
+eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms
+the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it
+equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of
+Authority.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_9">{9}</a></span>
+I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made
+that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was
+permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar
+the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are
+God's," he established in principle the distinction between the
+religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State.
+Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force,
+between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful
+worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties
+which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes.
+[Footnote 12]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity,
+    p. 278. London: 1864.]
+</p>
+<p>
+It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest
+and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization
+commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted
+in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have
+strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded
+with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the
+seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole,
+history has confirmed the Gospel.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_10">{10}</a></span>
+<p>
+Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world,
+Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty,
+and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been
+able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity
+of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies
+required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at
+another liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to
+refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I
+remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that
+Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she
+was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from
+her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she
+alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls
+in the name of truth and by the arms of truth.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_11">{11}</a></span>
+If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious
+establishments&mdash;Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism&mdash;have
+held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the
+world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress,
+attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman
+Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism
+did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the
+enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the
+immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power.
+Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated
+only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the
+sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of
+Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the
+soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it
+she awakened it.
+</p>
+<p>
+Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of
+Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have
+occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the
+Christian faith.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_12">{12}</a></span>
+No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the
+work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity,
+which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the
+purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the
+surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy
+atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part
+and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine
+it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats
+uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the
+excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not
+destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor
+make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work
+of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a
+Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true,
+behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those
+stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only
+enables him to see them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_13">{13}</a></span>
+When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal
+errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared
+under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit
+without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or
+ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore
+what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from
+her that which she has not promised.
+</p>
+<p>
+Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch
+and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to
+Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present
+day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting
+Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount
+them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What
+are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate,
+the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an
+obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_14">{14}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men,
+men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre
+colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a
+prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as
+deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of
+amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at
+another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our
+vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not
+of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require
+to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness
+which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which
+cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the
+attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,
+is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent
+evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but
+that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we
+make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_15">{15}</a></span>
+The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and
+evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic
+sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil
+which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first
+to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it
+appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages
+has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at
+least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if
+we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it
+matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would
+not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor
+should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.
+Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and
+different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we
+have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we
+have ever forgotten.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_16">{16}</a></span>
+<p>
+And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain
+my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached
+its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance
+more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without
+numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape
+in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the
+selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of
+the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices
+of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political
+liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,
+the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the
+actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its
+tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in
+this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789
+was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant
+travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or
+is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had
+then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all
+mankind. Did she deceive herself?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_17">{17}</a></span>
+Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or
+in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we
+progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which
+eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every
+respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;
+for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but
+utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked
+than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of
+opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never
+hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they
+deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to
+pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have
+originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront
+many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no
+sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_18">{18}</a></span>
+But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have
+been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon
+the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,
+and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both
+of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the
+world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,
+and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra
+of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive
+motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas
+as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789
+contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,
+truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and
+which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the
+travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to
+France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,
+and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a
+cause of decline.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_19">{19}</a></span>
+Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,
+the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past
+centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of
+French society in which it would have bettered its condition by
+halting, or to which it should wish to return.
+</p>
+<p>
+I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our
+social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment
+of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is
+Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us
+in such a work?
+</p>
+<p>
+All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,
+whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or
+Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in
+deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for
+physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and
+effeminacy which they generate.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_20">{20}</a></span>
+<p>
+They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we
+consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even
+those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,
+in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his
+habitual language:&mdash;"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten
+o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."
+[Footnote 13]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se
+    lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une
+    chemise blanche."]
+</p>
+<p>
+There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be
+vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should
+be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether
+individuals or nations, is that they should not have their
+attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely
+their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they
+have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and
+Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the
+Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort
+or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is
+permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_21">{21}</a></span>
+Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and
+sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating
+and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of
+more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a
+state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and
+disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can
+supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.
+Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich
+and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;
+she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she
+inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer
+hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be
+powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can
+never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive
+motive to action, even in that principle of interest which
+politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to
+be a panacea.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_22">{22}</a></span>
+Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,
+has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other
+sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an
+Epicurean nor an Egotist.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is the first and the greatest of the services which
+Christianity can and does render in our days to every society
+which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are
+dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without
+incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the
+other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever
+be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or
+measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it
+is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free
+country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of
+society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments
+and nations, to enable them to support that license which they
+cannot suppress.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_23">{23}</a></span>
+Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the
+most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license
+for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity
+maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without
+humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the
+rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in
+fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which
+authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the
+most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority
+suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely
+to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,
+that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves
+with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,
+turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as
+such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and
+Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great
+mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to
+order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom
+licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,
+and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims
+and the arms of Liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_24">{24}</a></span>
+History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The
+nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has
+not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,&mdash;the
+only nations which, although they have on different occasions and
+by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and
+of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and
+politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of
+the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;
+these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;
+but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once
+come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their
+subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less
+rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_25">{25}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it
+that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as
+individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it
+generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already
+more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and
+sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,
+as well as strength to recover lost ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the
+friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary
+admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than
+any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no
+longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the
+encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and
+transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the
+normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and
+with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_26">{26}</a></span>
+Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,
+has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the
+conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong
+enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously
+the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the
+Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and
+independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when
+Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power
+and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no
+distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a
+similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the
+Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail
+wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and
+indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the
+permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more
+or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which
+fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly
+modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the
+exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these
+days free institutions can be founded.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_27">{27}</a></span>
+<p>
+That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses
+and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with
+the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,
+that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of
+the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all
+other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which
+are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.
+Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every
+human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error
+press so very closely upon each other in this system, that
+Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is
+entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,
+nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to
+another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes
+to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to
+abrogate as it was to create.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_28">{28}</a></span>
+The law paramount is the moral law,&mdash;the law laid down by God, to
+which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to
+submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is
+always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights
+of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of
+government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily
+forgets God&mdash;easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort
+of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,
+material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is
+incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with
+which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that
+the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only
+principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic
+of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two
+principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour
+and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_29">{29}</a></span>
+A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning
+with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent
+admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and
+it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by
+Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a
+history, which does not come from man, but which, without
+offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,
+no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same
+time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic
+a society is, the more it is important that this double effect
+shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.
+</p>
+<p>
+I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The
+Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally
+against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how
+little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine
+to be good and salutary.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_30">{30}</a></span>
+How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other
+respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have
+Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of
+the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty
+unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest
+nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state
+of opinions at the present day.
+</p>
+<p>
+As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst
+Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best
+results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,
+whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as
+the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly
+cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general
+religious community&mdash;between the spiritual and the lay members of
+the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by
+authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations
+which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving
+to the laity a share in the government of the Church.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_31">{31}</a></span>
+The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time
+the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from
+their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but
+the relations between the two classes ceased to present the
+appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire
+subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and
+influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although
+remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to
+be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social
+institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one
+time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious
+society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of
+independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State
+and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their
+mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the
+two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have
+mutually recovered their independence;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_32">{32}</a></span>
+elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all
+ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been
+abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his
+individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.
+But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental
+characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from
+the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves
+constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and
+man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is
+particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction
+between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious
+and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its
+right and become an active influence in religious society itself.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_33">{33}</a></span>
+<p>
+But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a
+persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much
+calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman
+Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and
+passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed
+with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their
+religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted
+therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to
+their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These
+are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof
+of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the
+holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.
+Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that
+this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will
+towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects
+for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that
+such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present
+constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to
+State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be
+injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to
+individuals.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_34">{34}</a></span>
+From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most
+sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as
+Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst
+of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed
+and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in
+order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of
+humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to
+its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in
+all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;
+they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and
+tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;
+they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they
+rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the
+conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the
+guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and
+ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy
+effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate
+result of which has been so glorious.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_35">{35}</a></span>
+<p>
+The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and
+useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which
+characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its
+Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,
+that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and
+religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and
+all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome
+and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?
+For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the
+aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and
+political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,
+onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced
+situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more
+menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than
+our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power
+in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in
+principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable
+with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to
+condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of
+modern civilization.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_36">{36}</a></span>
+In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall
+here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as
+the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction
+that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and
+dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as
+well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without
+abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally
+essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the
+moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions
+also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,
+that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not
+have accepted and accomplished this work of
+conciliation&mdash;conciliation real and profound&mdash;the friends of
+Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and
+in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,
+those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_37">{37}</a></span>
+But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance
+than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which
+utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,
+nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of
+events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and
+not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many
+probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the
+case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,
+many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward
+impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the
+conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less
+a certainty.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history.
+There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of
+different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle
+between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often
+committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly
+profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own
+defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_38">{38}</a></span>
+The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy,
+the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured,
+the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the
+great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by
+the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time
+consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal
+regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and
+signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its
+consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the
+question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation
+between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the
+attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a
+decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of
+1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh
+vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_39">{39}</a></span>
+When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism
+treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from
+the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church
+of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all
+that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed,
+and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience
+and resignation. She is right.
+</p>
+<p>
+One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this
+stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions,
+Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of
+fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody
+persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs,
+bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France,
+once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their
+cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_40">{40}</a></span>
+The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person
+of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive
+but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor
+the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount.
+And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what
+activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy,
+Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy,
+upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society
+had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of
+Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced
+on its road and towards its object.
+</p>
+<p>
+But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of
+Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and
+compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without
+doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she
+lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of
+reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is
+more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it
+and oppose it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_41">{41}</a></span>
+This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman
+Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that
+group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which
+continues to play so active a part in struggling for the
+Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief:
+these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its
+intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their
+views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux
+Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the
+greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the
+more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the
+disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and
+humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our
+provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have
+not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one
+might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving
+the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the
+people;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_42">{42}</a></span>
+they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the
+conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an
+influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its
+sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost
+without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of
+their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal
+tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman
+Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular
+militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of
+enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case
+by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the
+Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make
+their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its
+laws, and of its liberties.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I
+observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to
+French institutions,&mdash;for I speak only of France,&mdash;the essential
+consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the
+relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_43">{43}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in
+France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past
+are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof
+from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights
+of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil
+society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts
+and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to
+the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from
+civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this
+respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these
+are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for
+religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to
+stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman
+Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of
+modern society, who most dispute about the general question of
+liberty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_44">{44}</a></span>
+<p>
+The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this
+question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in
+one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State,
+on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from
+religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty
+in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy
+in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other
+solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and
+their mutual independence.
+</p>
+<p>
+That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State
+to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I
+well understand.
+</p>
+<p>
+She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of
+strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her
+stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves
+religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a
+fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially
+democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under
+the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the
+influence of the religious authorities.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_45">{45}</a></span>
+This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental
+principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is
+impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded
+by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty.
+But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance
+of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church
+would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious
+and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large
+measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the
+religious society and of the civil society which the Church and
+the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those
+who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective
+principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on
+in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the
+good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself
+is soon compromised.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_46">{46}</a></span>
+The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of
+Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of
+Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because
+there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental
+institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon
+some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant
+guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and
+were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from
+which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed
+on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices
+for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France,
+of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in
+Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is
+occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy
+and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church
+with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_47">{47}</a></span>
+In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion,
+when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for
+any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever
+indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be
+serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting
+parties should recognise and accept in each other, without
+equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each
+really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an
+alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of
+the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring
+ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination,
+obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret
+warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending
+any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust
+in it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_48">{48}</a></span>
+As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without
+endangering her habits, at least without endangering her
+essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace
+with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual
+civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how
+to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give
+way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a
+source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she
+would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of
+separation and complete independence.
+</p>
+<p>
+As for the State, the system which separates the two societies
+would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it
+would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of
+many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle
+of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance
+which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such
+principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce
+Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous
+bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from
+every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy
+themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their
+thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and
+its affairs.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_49">{49}</a></span>
+Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at
+the present day, a moral influence of great value from an
+alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one
+condition which is not only especially important in our days, but
+of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of
+manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the
+alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference
+in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the
+church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious
+discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving
+their indirect support to the state government, and which can
+purge their support of all impure motives.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_50">{50}</a></span>
+The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain
+degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their
+respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part
+of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at
+the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the
+master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor
+priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and
+their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone
+give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires,
+if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.
+</p>
+<p>
+Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the
+facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity,
+Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be
+free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally.
+Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave
+feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and
+distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles
+essential to civil society and religious society, of any
+compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the
+faults which the two institutions have committed towards each
+other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_51">{51}</a></span>
+Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have
+become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely,
+something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty
+neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their
+legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations
+to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State,
+whether allied with or independent of the Church.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_52">{52}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Second Meditation.
+<br><br>
+       Christianity And Morality.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different
+characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously
+minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves
+Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from
+Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea
+of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity.
+Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour
+to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the
+abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its
+authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we
+find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the
+other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either
+natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days
+proclaimed and propagated with ardour.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_53">{53}</a></span>
+<p>
+I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and
+upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone.
+In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest
+intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design.
+Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced
+that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested
+or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion;
+they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth
+alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and
+which some now strive to accredit.
+</p>
+<p>
+The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the
+scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians
+are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of
+its efficacy.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_54">{54}</a></span>
+A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate
+the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to
+it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate
+it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is
+here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent
+Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and
+to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being
+wrecked.
+</p>
+<p>
+The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who
+flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality
+standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,&mdash;and they who
+believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from
+religion,&mdash;err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential
+facts of human nature and of human society.
+</p>
+<p>
+Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete
+observation of these facts. I have already stated in these
+Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality
+from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_55">{55}</a></span>
+At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality,
+and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I
+affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary
+union between morality and religion.
+</p>
+<p>
+A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the
+theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there
+is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested
+motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and
+treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.
+</p>
+<p>
+I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they
+forget that it <i>has</i> been, and still <i>is</i>, strongly
+contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers.
+Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the
+satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate
+aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct,
+not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common
+welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could
+perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy
+of human sentiments.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_56">{56}</a></span>
+The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the
+recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the
+most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves,
+with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to
+other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding
+fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than
+in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive
+themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of
+religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all,
+and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive
+themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a
+prey to the disputes of man.
+</p>
+<p>
+I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders
+of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it
+is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it
+contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential
+elements.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_57">{57}</a></span>
+<p>
+These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral
+good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil;
+the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and
+philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the
+natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human
+morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man
+is a moral being.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I
+do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard
+or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any
+one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent
+morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and
+myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the
+true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its
+signification, and accept its results.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_58">{58}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not
+satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to
+himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their
+origin and object, their import and bearing.
+</p>
+<p>
+In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from
+which science sets out; it is only after having well observed
+facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the
+questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which
+the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of
+human morality, such as I have just described it in its three
+constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot
+fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral
+law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the
+ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or
+violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes
+of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or
+elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man
+as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of
+man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three
+constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine
+rightly its source and bearing.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_59">{59}</a></span>
+<p>
+Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring
+from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that
+he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it.
+Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they
+depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances,
+or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the
+feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them
+accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.
+</p>
+<p>
+But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral
+law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes
+its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their
+own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in
+refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may
+attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically
+possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another
+law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever
+they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law,
+they bow before it as before something which does not emanate
+from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_60">{60}</a></span>
+<p>
+The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the
+world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the
+characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the
+results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the
+forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations
+or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it
+addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of
+whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to
+crush him, still man would be more noble than that which
+destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the
+advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows
+nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens,
+sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily&mdash;that he chooses
+to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_61">{61}</a></span>
+<p>
+What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called
+Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command
+man's Liberty to respect it?
+</p>
+<p>
+Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority
+solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is
+said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his
+right that no human being shall attack his independence or his
+dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and
+therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual
+right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but
+the right which it is recognised that another possesses."
+[Footnote 14]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 14: La Morale Independante,
+    a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_62">{62}</a></span>
+<p>
+There is here a profound mistake, and a strange forgetfulness.
+</p>
+<p>
+Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men,
+does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises
+himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and
+admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which
+arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have
+done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest
+apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence
+and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to
+attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for
+himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental
+principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there
+is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the
+right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to
+it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has
+another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on
+the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the
+paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the
+moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_63">{63}</a></span>
+<p>
+Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of
+the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to
+attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral
+law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and
+imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love
+them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love
+those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to
+you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same."
+"Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing
+again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the
+children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and
+to the evil." [Footnote 15]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]
+</p>
+<p>
+"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of
+the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If
+we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other
+respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point
+with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_64">{64}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion
+of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of
+those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is
+the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on
+the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law
+to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet
+melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a
+person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a
+modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light
+as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea
+of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a
+moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not
+a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the
+moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power
+attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the
+relations of men with one another.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_65">{65}</a></span>
+Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there
+would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does
+not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to
+govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice
+cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust,
+as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed
+to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as
+essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the
+social bond;&mdash;the means of peace and of Union amongst
+mankind;&mdash;the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and
+defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every
+man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep
+others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him
+to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and
+respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the
+man who has a right has absolutely nothing.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_66">{66}</a></span>
+Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of
+physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ
+the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which
+triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify
+the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made
+his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis
+of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of
+right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the
+stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of
+duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of
+defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which
+serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society
+upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away
+the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir
+    considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in
+    the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur
+    l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes,
+    l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan,"
+    (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_67">{67}</a></span>
+<p>
+This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in
+considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the
+independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the
+theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral
+elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean,
+the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law,
+sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the
+independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely
+strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of
+man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their
+duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for
+and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle,
+and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to
+honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's
+existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which
+the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense
+which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it:
+their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_68">{68}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the
+principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from
+man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man
+only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and
+mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free
+and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he
+is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his
+own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not
+make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even
+whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot
+withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his
+future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is
+essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its
+subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_69">{69}</a></span>
+<p>
+Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working
+its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without
+further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When
+the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and
+acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his
+act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms,
+for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not
+merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they
+find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced
+to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the
+laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal
+punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of
+remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the
+proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is
+that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the
+hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove
+that it may be always reawakened.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_70">{70}</a></span>
+Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced.
+Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that
+to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which
+feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.
+</p>
+<p>
+As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an
+idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made
+of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion,
+ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of
+merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common
+sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the
+accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation.
+It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and
+most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the
+political organisation of society, and in the problems which
+concern the eternal future.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_71">{71}</a></span>
+However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or
+delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of
+a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the
+responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its
+complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and
+equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have
+scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's
+nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have
+considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely
+apart from every other element and every other consideration.
+Those moral facts are briefly as follows:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  The distinction between moral good and moral evil.
+<br><br>
+  The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.
+<br><br>
+  Moral Liberty.
+<br><br>
+  Moral Responsibility.
+<br><br>
+  Moral merit and demerit.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_72">{72}</a></span>
+<p>
+These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the
+proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these
+truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are
+they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology,
+or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they
+self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which
+form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot
+elude this question.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have established that the moral law is not of human invention;
+that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not
+one of those laws of fate by which the material world is
+governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free
+world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as
+law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject.
+Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man&mdash;upon man
+of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without
+enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life
+is passed?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_73">{73}</a></span>
+Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law
+emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense
+which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget,
+Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order
+reigning in it:&mdash;
+<p class="cite">
+  "Je ne puis songer<br>
+  Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."
+<br><br>
+  I cannot think<br>
+  This clock exists and never had a maker.
+</p>
+<p>
+In the moral world we have to do with something far different
+from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine
+constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is
+to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free
+agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to
+accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the
+supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the
+expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both
+contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant
+found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is
+nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human
+Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most
+clearly, most undeniably.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_74">{74}</a></span>
+<p>
+Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose
+it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river
+without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free
+agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete
+and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and
+loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law
+reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility
+reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human
+invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral
+responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and
+just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is
+contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral
+responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that
+is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and
+impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in
+a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to
+establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_75">{75}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human
+nature&mdash;that is, the distinction between moral good and moral
+evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and
+demerit,&mdash;are necessarily and intimately connected with the
+truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God
+moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and
+essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a
+thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of
+man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble
+to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that
+ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is
+reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its
+authority.
+</p>
+<p>
+Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and
+described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable
+from Religion.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_76">{76}</a></span>
+<p>
+What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the
+heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are
+distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to
+each other in the unity of the human being?
+</p>
+<p>
+The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the
+study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms
+Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most
+remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant
+struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle
+what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent
+an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and
+what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected
+in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by
+the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to
+all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the
+moral law, the moral judgment comes.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_77">{77}</a></span>
+"In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero
+prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up
+unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just
+providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of
+the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was
+the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman
+Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very
+Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after
+having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice
+of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on
+the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on
+account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had
+governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by
+those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is
+incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in
+this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and
+Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice,
+sometimes manifests itself there with <i>éclat</i>, and sometimes
+remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre
+mysteries.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_78">{78}</a></span>
+Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall
+truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now
+occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore
+order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task;
+in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still
+mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is
+intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as
+little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in
+that of the individual man.
+</p>
+<p>
+In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far
+from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they
+progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days
+exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to
+events of the most contradictory character: everything in the
+world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts
+has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_79">{79}</a></span>
+Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more
+than feeble convictions&mdash;dim hopes? On the other side, in the
+midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power
+over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and
+confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the
+material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and
+paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have
+plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the
+fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human
+conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in
+our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt;
+intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's
+soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_80">{80}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and
+indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have
+limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the
+advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I
+have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate,
+natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of
+man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the
+threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general
+that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which
+it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his
+unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity
+alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and
+security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is
+not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic
+value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human
+soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect
+harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already
+tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful
+expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the
+moral being.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_81">{81}</a></span>
+<p>
+The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is
+the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral
+ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been
+contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour
+it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure
+their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius,
+Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is
+singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most
+illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful,
+understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and
+incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear
+light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to
+their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for
+conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they
+taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they
+founded schools or sects.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_82">{82}</a></span>
+The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a
+philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and
+instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around
+him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain
+special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of
+mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of
+discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to
+the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the
+moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his
+disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves,
+and then to all men:&mdash;"Save your soul, for what would it profit a
+man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and
+preach to all nations."
+</p>
+<p>
+What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so
+ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so
+universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_83">{83}</a></span>
+<p>
+And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has
+been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward
+movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly
+arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity,
+it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of
+Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and
+the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen
+centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and
+evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that
+Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to
+fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same
+task, and promises herself fresh success.
+</p>
+<p>
+Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me
+at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the
+Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which
+she entertains in the midst of her trials.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_84">{84}</a></span>
+<p>
+Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors,
+cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them
+proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are
+solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again,
+regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human
+actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a
+careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them
+to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both
+amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the
+regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how
+serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that
+sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the
+nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same
+time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the
+same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man
+the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his
+soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates
+it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it
+with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared
+for every sacrifice.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_85">{85}</a></span>
+Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine
+of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin
+without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the
+sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so
+well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely
+and so austerely?
+</p>
+<p>
+Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with
+man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its
+rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment
+of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and
+thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he
+opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a
+hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness
+inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy
+the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to
+be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a
+recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the
+equitable benevolence of God.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_86">{86}</a></span>
+The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man
+during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store
+for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom
+of God" and "the promises of eternal life."
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he
+keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities,
+his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to
+fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the
+world, without any <i>dénouement</i>. He has a prospect, and a
+futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and
+superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain
+this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and
+respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality
+with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole
+view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny
+of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which
+weigh upon the thought and life of man!
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_87">{87}</a></span>
+<p>
+I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the
+peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However
+high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely
+less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is
+purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours
+produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical
+work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of
+its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion,
+the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from
+which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to
+induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine
+law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it
+is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its
+sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy,
+we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon
+which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it
+undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to
+procure the salvation of man by his reformation.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_88">{88}</a></span>
+<p>
+When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these
+Meditations&mdash;the subject of which is the actual state of the
+Christian Religion&mdash;I essayed to characterise therein the
+fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which
+combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my
+companion in life, and my <i>confrère</i> at the Institute, M.
+Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I
+maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866,
+he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:&mdash;
+<p class="cite">
+  "My dear Friend,
+<br><br>
+  "As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I
+  tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The
+  little difference between our opinions, which you have not
+  pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the
+  consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which
+  we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the
+  nature of religion.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_89">{89}</a></span>
+  These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still
+  they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an
+  elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more
+  restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself
+  to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other
+  only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from
+  mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets
+  out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by
+  Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of
+  my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also,
+  in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them
+  is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the
+  other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in
+  religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of
+  contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy
+  is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must
+  disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth,
+  grandeur, and peace.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_90">{90}</a></span>
+<p class="cite">
+  "Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion,
+  which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our
+  old and sincere friendship."
+</p>
+<p>
+I replied to him on the 13th of June:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  "I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our
+  dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere
+  friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting,
+  because, independently of our particular and petty
+  dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a
+  profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that
+  philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor
+  religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their
+  manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their
+  distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_91">{91}</a></span>
+  To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man,
+  limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself.
+  Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin
+  and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of
+  knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which
+  shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God
+  continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to
+  his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of
+  his free will.
+<br><br>
+  "I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions
+  are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."
+</p>
+<p>
+I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at
+Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other
+afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed
+upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence
+we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole
+question.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_92">{92}</a></span>
+It is this&mdash;What are the points of resemblance, and what of
+difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity
+and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the
+reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action,
+we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their
+nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire,
+and the character of their mission.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_93">{93}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Third Meditation.
+<br><br>
+        Christianity And Science.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which
+Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account
+of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely
+inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that
+divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration,
+and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man
+without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which
+Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make
+these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are
+possessed. &hellip; They do not speak so by art, but by divine power."
+[Footnote 18]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally,
+    which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance.
+    (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_94">{94}</a></span>
+<p>
+The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a
+different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine
+inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work
+directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this
+themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly
+implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter
+and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it
+positively. [Footnote 19]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the
+    Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration,"
+    says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and
+    reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only
+    to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to
+    the different texts of the New Testament which prove his
+    assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]
+</p>
+<p>
+This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of
+the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an
+acceptation as in later times.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_95">{95}</a></span>
+In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the
+school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration
+of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets,
+strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of
+inspiration, and to explain one by the other&mdash;"It is not by any
+effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin,
+"that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so
+divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the
+saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them;
+pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the
+divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself
+from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the
+musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us
+the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras,
+"that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the
+other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of
+individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed
+aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing
+them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute
+the breath which makes it discourse its music."
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_96">{96}</a></span>
+<p>
+Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of
+the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as
+to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence
+proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the
+formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But
+even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired,
+great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and
+St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it
+was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they
+distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of
+God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms
+in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking
+of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken
+of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to
+speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_97">{97}</a></span>
+Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. &hellip; When we meet
+with such diversity of expressions&mdash;although not in themselves
+contradictory&mdash;used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the
+words of each, only the intent with which the words are
+pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of
+truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the
+very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else
+which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."
+</p>
+<p>
+It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this
+explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine
+inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the
+fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.
+</p>
+<p>
+I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of
+darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of
+uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the
+invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance;
+that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle
+Age.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_98">{98}</a></span>
+<p>
+I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch
+of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned
+upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions;
+for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been
+fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet
+destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the
+world.
+</p>
+<p>
+Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and
+events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of
+the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of
+Christian societies, I find that this question had received two
+solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its
+representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the
+Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The
+Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of
+the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each;
+surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious
+reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these
+books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and
+canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they
+are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the
+ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the
+    Abbé Chanut, pp. 10&mdash;13. Paris, 1686.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_99">{99}</a></span>
+<p>
+The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they
+began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts
+and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and
+complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense,
+narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the
+old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's
+dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_100">{100}</a></span>
+<p>
+The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church
+of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the
+sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly
+respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic
+sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the
+complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute
+infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make
+this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters
+of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of
+God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which
+they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we
+repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the
+two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen.
+    2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]
+</p>
+<p>
+"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and
+hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of
+humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their
+action and their force, you err. &hellip; God does everything by
+command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air
+with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to
+will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp.
+    66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres
+    de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_101">{101}</a></span>
+<p>
+The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the
+nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of
+these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of
+Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the
+Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the
+Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible
+authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn,
+found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the
+movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the
+infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the
+present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new
+dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their
+ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing,
+have pushed the two doctrines,&mdash;the former of ecclesiastical
+authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,&mdash;to their
+extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right
+and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_102">{102}</a></span>
+I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines
+referred to,&mdash;they severally infringe, the one the rights of
+religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both
+cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they
+have, in these respects, severally ill understood.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have already expressed my views upon this subject. [Footnote
+23]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp.
+    145-146. London, 1864.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in
+the Scriptures is divinely inspired&mdash;the words as well as the
+ideas, all the words used upon all subjects&mdash;the material of
+language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this
+assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound
+misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred
+books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in
+grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give
+instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_103">{103}</a></span>
+It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men
+towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of
+conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven.
+It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone,
+that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."
+</p>
+<p>
+I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over
+again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole
+object of familiarising myself with their character and sense.
+The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the
+Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine
+truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in
+intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and
+with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens,
+in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the
+midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the
+unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man,
+Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and
+of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of
+curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and
+perfectible in the midst of his imperfection.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_104">{104}</a></span>
+What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their
+points of connection and their contests,&mdash;God watching over and
+acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting,
+God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the
+expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each
+acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man
+after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being,
+nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating
+man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he
+enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from
+heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious
+and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a
+free agent.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_105">{105}</a></span>
+At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous
+action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his
+passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as
+he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the
+good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action.
+This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the
+relations of Man with God.
+</p>
+<p>
+What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful
+connection exists, in this history, between those whom&mdash;how shall
+I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not
+appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so
+untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the
+plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition,
+invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to
+us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no
+historical narrative or document, does man show himself more
+violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to
+ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst
+the Hebrews.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_106">{106}</a></span>
+Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between
+the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and
+the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from
+God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God,
+and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly
+violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in
+his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much
+from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not
+change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a
+witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his
+errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily
+before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to
+interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is
+ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and
+labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts
+and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the
+only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_107">{107}</a></span>
+<p>
+In what do those relations consist? By what results does this
+continuous action manifest itself, of God upon man; this
+incessant dialogue between God and man? By laws, precepts, and
+commands, religious and moral&mdash;God proposes these to man; he
+enjoins nothing more; he speaks to him of nothing else; demands
+nothing from him but obedience to his Law. God does not teach, he
+commands; God does not discuss, he warns. And the organs of God's
+speech, the men whom he takes for his interpreters and his
+prophets, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, do neither less nor more.
+Although superior to most of their contemporaries by reason of
+possessing certain attainments, they are no professors of human
+sciences: just as they speak the language of the common people
+whom they address, just so do they share most of their ignorance
+and errors respecting the objects and facts of the finite world,
+in the midst of which they are living.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_108">{108}</a></span>
+When they are made the medium for the religious and moral
+precepts and warnings of God, it is then that they are no longer
+mere men of their time; it is then, only then, that the light of
+divine inspiration descends upon them, and that they diffuse it
+to all around them.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not wish to limit myself to a general summary only of what I
+regard as the essential character of the Holy Scriptures,&mdash;the
+simultaneous presence of the divine element and of the human
+element; the one in all its sublimity, the other in all its
+imperfection; God revealing to man in a certain place his
+religious law and his moral law, but without conveying elsewhere
+the divine light; God taking man as he finds him, in the points
+of time and of space in which he is placed, with all his
+barbarism and imperfections. I proceed, therefore, to consider
+some of the particular examples presented by the Scriptures,
+which make this great truth so evident as to be incontestable.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_109">{109}</a></span>
+<p>
+I open the book of Genesis and read:&mdash;
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  "And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt
+  Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here
+  I am.
+<br><br>
+  And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou
+  lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him
+  there for a burnt-offering upon one of the mountains which I
+  will tell thee of.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass,
+  and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and
+  clave the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went
+  unto the place of which God had told him.
+<br><br>
+  Then on the third day Abraham lift up his eyes, and saw the
+  place afar off.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham said unto his young men, Abide ye here with the
+  ass; and I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come
+  again to you.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it
+  upon Isaac his son: and he took the fire in his hand, and a
+  knife: and they went both of them together.
+<br><br>
+  And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father:
+  and he said, here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire
+  and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a
+  burnt-offering: so they went both of them together.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_110">{110}</a></span>
+  And they came to the place which God had told him of; and
+  Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order; and
+  bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to
+  slay his son.
+<br><br>
+  And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven, and
+  said, Abraham, Abraham: and he said, here am I.
+<br><br>
+  And he said, Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou
+  any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God,
+  seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.
+<br><br>
+  And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold, behind
+  him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went
+  and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt-offering in
+  the stead of his son."
+</p>
+<p>
+A man who, by his enlightened views, and the elevation of his
+mind, as well as by his faithfulness as a follower of Christ, is
+an honour to the church which he serves, Dr. Arthur Stanley, Dean
+of Westminster, explains and characterises in these terms the
+Biblical truths to which I am referring.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_111">{111}</a></span>
+<p>
+"There have been," he says, "in almost all ancient forms of
+religion, and also in some of more modern date, two strong
+tendencies, each in itself springing from the best and purest
+feelings of humanity, yet each, if carried into the extremes
+suggested by passion or by logic, incompatible with the other and
+with its own highest purpose. One is the craving to please, or to
+propitiate, or to communicate with the powers above us, by
+surrendering some object near and dear to ourselves. This is the
+source of all sacrifice. The other is the profound moral instinct
+that the Creator of the world cannot be pleased, or propitiated,
+or approached by any other means than a pure life and good deeds.
+On the exaggeration, on the contact, on the collision of these
+two tendencies, have turned some of the chief difficulties of
+evangelical history. The earliest of them we are about to witness
+in the life of Abraham. &hellip;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_112">{112}</a></span>
+The sacrifice, the resignation of the will in the father and the
+son was accepted; the literal sacrifice of the act was repelled.
+The great principle was proclaimed that mercy was better than
+sacrifice,&mdash;that the sacrifice of self is the highest and holiest
+offering that God can receive. &hellip; We have a proverb which tells
+us that man's extremity is God's opportunity." [Footnote 24]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 24: Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church.
+    By Arthur P. Stanley, D.D. Vol. i. pp. 47, 48, 50. London,
+    1867.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Abraham was upon the point of accomplishing an act which, even in
+the presence of virtuous motives and a divine command, has been
+forbidden, and is held accursed by the subsequent Revelation and
+the sentiments of all whom it has enlightened. At this moment the
+hand of Abraham is stayed, and patriarchal religion is saved from
+the antagonism of a conflict between the rigour of the Hebrew law
+and the merciful dispensation of the Gospel.
+</p>
+<p>
+The sentiment which Dean Stanley expresses has my full
+concurrence; but I go still further, and maintain that there is
+in the pathetic narrative of Abraham's sacrifice something more
+than he points out.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_113">{113}</a></span>
+This interposition of God in order to arrest the very act which
+he has required is in accord with the general doctrine of the
+Bible, expressly condemning human sacrifices; [Footnote 25] but
+Abraham's as well as several other examples prove how such
+sacrifices continued to exist in the ferocious traditions and
+manners, not only of several nations of Semitic origin, but even
+of the Hebrews themselves. God's intent is to try Abraham, and he
+pauses as soon as Abraham's obedience to the divine order is
+beyond doubt. Abraham does not hesitate to execute the divine
+command; he expresses no surprise at it. The sacrifice of Isaac
+is prepared, and very nearly consummated, as an event almost of
+course. Here we have man in the grossest and blindest condition
+of barbarism, in the presence of God, in whom as sovereign he
+believes, and whose sovereignty it is not his purpose to dispute.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 25: Leviticus xviii. 21; Deuteronomy xii. 31;
+    Ezekiel xx. 26. This question is treated and conclusively
+    solved in the Theologische Encyclopedie of Herzog, art.
+    Sacrifice, vol. x. p. 621.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_114">{114}</a></span>
+<p>
+It would be easy for me to multiply these examples, and to show,
+in many other passages of the Bible, the following fundamental
+characteristic of Biblical History: the thought and word of man,
+although constantly in presence of the divine law and of the
+divine action, yet in contact and contrast with the thought and
+word of God. I prefer seeking for proofs in support of my
+conviction in a comparison of the Old and New Testaments, and in
+the light which Christianity sheds upon the Hebrew Revelation,
+which it does not contradict, but to which it applies a movement
+of progress.
+</p>
+<p>
+I say progress,&mdash;progress immense, infinitely grander than man's
+imagination could ever have conceived,&mdash;and at the same time the
+character of the divine work remaining absolutely the same. It is
+no longer, as in the Old Testament, the stormy combat, the
+continuous struggle of God and of man in the events of the world
+and in the life of the people. God no longer interposes in the
+New Testament to warn or direct, to raise up or humble, to
+recompense or to punish man in this world; he decides no longer
+directly the issue of battle or the destiny of states.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_115">{115}</a></span>
+It is still God, God in Jesus Christ, with all his sublimity: He,
+and He only, occupies and fills the place. He appears there under
+a different aspect. In his human form, He is weakness itself,
+intended and destined to become the very type of humility and of
+suffering; the voluntary victim, who expiates man's sin; the
+victim of man's fall. But in the midst of His miseries it is God,
+God as He was for Israel in all the splendour of His power.
+Christ's own knowledge of this appears throughout. He says it, He
+manifests it unceasingly by actions and by words; sometimes by
+natural effects, sometimes by miracles. And yet how different!
+what a range in the object and the bearing of His actions and of
+His words! In the Old Testament the scene concentrates itself
+upon a corner of the world, a single people, a petty nation,
+separated by God from the rest of the world, in order to withdraw
+it from the contagion of idolatry;&mdash;but now it is for the whole
+world, for all nations, for future as well as for living
+generations, for the Gentile as well as for the Jew, for the
+barbarians of Malta as well as for the Greeks of Athens, that the
+God of the New Testament manifests Himself and speaks; it is over
+the whole of humanity that He spreads His light and orders His
+servants to extend His empire.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_116">{116}</a></span>
+<p>
+He does more, much more. That divine light which Jesus comes to
+spread over the whole world, although it continues to emanate
+from the same fountain, becomes more complete and more pure.
+Jesus is the first to recognise the fact that the ancient law,
+although issuing from God, bears here and there traces of human
+errors and passions. "I am not come," says he, "to abolish the
+law, but to fulfil it." How fulfil it? By removing the errors
+with which it had become intermixed owing to the imperfect nature
+of the men, of the time, and of the place, at which it appeared,
+and by filling up the gaps which that imperfection had entailed.
+He disentangles the ancient law from every human element, and
+brings it back to its one divine element, its one pure and
+perfect source. I refrain from all argument or commentary. I will
+not cite anything in proof of this grand fact but those very
+texts of the Ancient and of the New Testament which embody their
+most essential precepts.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_117">{117}</a></span>
+<p>
+I read in Exodus, "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand,
+foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for
+stripe." [Footnote 26] Jesus effaces this <i>lex talionis</i>.
+"Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
+neighbour, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your
+enemies; bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate
+you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute
+you." [Footnote 27]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 26: Exodus xxi. 24, 25.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 27: Matthew v. 43, 44.]
+</p>
+<p>
+It is said in the book of Deuteronomy: "When a man hath taken a
+wife and married her, and it come to pass that she find no favour
+in his eyes, because he hath found some uncleanness in her: then
+let him write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in her hand,
+an</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 28: Deuteronomy xxiv. 1.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_118">{118}</a></span>
+<p>
+I read in the New Testament: "And the Pharisees came to him, and
+asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? &hellip; And
+he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? And
+they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to
+put her away. And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the
+hardness of your hearts he wrote you this precept. But from the
+beginning of the creation God made them male and female. For this
+cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his
+wife; and they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more
+twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together,
+let not man put asunder." [Footnote 29]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 29: Mark x. 2-9;  Matthew xix. 3-9.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The Mosaic law condemns to death every adulterer: "If a man be
+found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall
+both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the
+woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel." [Footnote 30]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 30: Deuteronomy xxii. 22.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_119">{119}</a></span>
+<p>
+Jesus is called upon to pronounce upon the very case: "And the
+scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery;
+and when they had set her in the midst, they say unto him,
+Master, this woman was taken in adultery; in the very act. Now
+Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but
+what sayest thou? This they said tempting him, that they might
+have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger
+wrote on the ground as though he heard them not. So when they
+continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them,
+He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at
+her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they
+which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out
+one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and
+Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When
+Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said
+unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man
+condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her,
+Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [Footnote 31]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 31: John viii. 3-11.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_120">{120}</a></span>
+<p>
+The Mosaic law is full of minute ceremonial regulations, and of
+rigorous conditions, which attach to the performance of certain
+external acts, in certain appointed places, the duty of adoration
+and of prayer. Not only does Jesus object to the Scribes and
+Pharisees that they place all their faith and their piety in the
+acts alone; he does more; he gives his disciples personally a
+lesson of striking simplicity by teaching them the Lord's Prayer;
+and when the Samaritan woman, whom he meets near the well of
+Jacob, says to him: "Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and
+ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.
+&hellip; Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, &hellip; the hour cometh,
+and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in
+spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him.
+God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in
+spirit and in truth." [Footnote 32]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 32: John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_121">{121}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus Jesus, not to abolish but to accomplish the ancient law, and
+to make it harmonise with the new and universal work which he is
+about, separates from the law that which the imperfection of man
+had introduced in it in other times, and for a more limited work;
+he leaves in it nothing but the divine element in all its purity
+and empire. He only leaves to the divine element its religious
+and moral empire, for it is in its name alone that he speaks; the
+religious and moral law is the only law revealed by Jesus, and
+extended over the entire world; no other thought mixes itself
+with his doctrine, no other motive influences his action;
+political science, human science, have absolutely no place at all
+in the New Testament; Jesus does not think of satisfying either
+social ambition or intellectual curiosity; he desires to make
+neither kings nor doctors; as soon as he finds such pretensions
+advanced, he sets them aside;
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_122">{122}</a></span>
+"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the
+things that are God's." "I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and
+earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and
+prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 33]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 33: Matthew xxii. 21; xi. 25.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Jesus occupies himself with man's soul alone, with the human
+being in his native simplicity; the relations of man, of every
+man, with God; the state and destiny of the human soul, of every
+human soul, in the present and in the future: this is the sole
+idea, the sole mission, of the New Testament. Jesus knows that
+when once accomplished this will bring with it its own salutary
+consequences: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his
+righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you."
+[Footnote 34]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 34:  Matthew vi. 33.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_123">{123}</a></span>
+<p>
+I do not hesitate, then, to affirm, that human science, in its
+different and special objects,&mdash;whether astronomy, geology,
+geography, chronology, physics, historical criticism,&mdash;is as
+foreign to the object as it is to the source of the sacred
+Volumes. In the sciences we have the domain of the mind of man
+left to itself, and to itself alone. They are the fruits,
+assiduously cultivated and slowly acquired by the laborious
+exertions of the human intellect during a succession of ages. If,
+then, you meet, in Scriptural texts, not treating of acts
+declared miraculous, terms and assertions apparently repugnant to
+facts recognised as truths in these different sciences, feel no
+disquietude. It is not there that God has set up His divine
+torch; it is not there that God has spoken. The language is the
+language of the men of the different epochs, men who speak
+according to the measure of their knowledge or of their
+ignorance, the language which they are obliged to speak in order
+to be understood by their contemporaries. I feel surprised that
+men should require to be told this, so simple, so clear is it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_124">{124}</a></span>
+In matters of religion and of morality there have always existed,
+and in every place there have existed, spontaneous instincts,
+aspirations, and ideas common to all men, which lead them to
+employ a similar language,&mdash;a language comprehended and received
+by all who hear it, whatever in other respects may be their
+inequality in attainments and civilization; whereas, in matters
+purely scientific we find nothing at all like this; men in the
+mass see and speak of these, not as they are to the eye of
+science, but according to their appearances, and so men
+comprehend or do not comprehend them, hear them or do not hear
+them, according to the degree of scientific knowledge or of
+ignorance prevalent at the time and place at which they live.
+What would the Hebrews in the Desert, or the Jews about the
+person of Christ, or the savages of the Pacific have said to his
+missionaries, if they had been told that it is the earth which
+turns round the sun, that its shape is that of a spheroid, that
+it is habitable and inhabited at opposite points of its
+circumference?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_125">{125}</a></span>
+What is more natural, what more inevitable, than that the
+language of the Scriptures should agree with the scientific
+imperfection of men upon all these matters, even where that
+language is full of divine inspiration as to the religious or
+moral law of humanity?
+</p>
+<p>
+No one honours science more than I do, no one feels a greater
+admiration for it. It is a mission that man has to perform, and
+it is one of his glories; but it has no place in the relation of
+man with God, and in the action of God upon man. God is no
+sublime, no mighty doctor, who reveals truths of science to man,
+to give him the noble pleasure of contemplating them, or of
+publishing them; he has left such researches to labours purely
+human. The work of God is more complex and grander: it is
+essentially practical. That of which man, every man, stands in
+need, that after which he thirsts, that which all mankind asks of
+God, simple as well as learned, is to be enlightened as to the
+religious and moral truths which are to regulate his soul and his
+life, and to decide his lot in eternity.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_126">{126}</a></span>
+It is to all mankind that God responds; it is to the salvation of
+all men that the Scripture applies itself. A celebrated
+philosopher, a man of a mind lofty and sincere, but one of the
+most lost of the great lost ones of the human intelligence,
+thought differently. According to Spinoza, "all men are far from
+being called to enjoy eternal life in the same plenitude. &hellip;
+After death the reason,&mdash;just ideas survive; all the rest
+perishes. Souls governed by reason, philosophical souls, who even
+from the moment when their life in this world ceases, live in
+God, are consequently exempt from death; for death deprives them
+only of that which is of no value. But those dim and feeble
+souls, upon which reason hardly gleams at all, those souls made
+up entirely, so to say, of empty imaginings and passions, perish
+almost entirely; and death, instead of coming to them as a simple
+accident, penetrates to the very bottom of their being. The soul
+of the sage, on the contrary, cannot be more than barely
+troubled; possessing, by a sort of eternal necessity, the
+consciousness of itself and of God, and of things as they really
+are, it never ceases to exist; and as for real tranquillity of
+soul, it possesses it for ever." [Footnote 35]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 35: Œuvres de Spinoza. According to the translation
+    of Emile Saisset. Introduction, vol. iii. p. 291.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_127">{127}</a></span>
+<p>
+I know not if human pride ever gave expression to a thought
+showing a stranger aberration of intellect; and in spite of the
+favour with which some men of distinguished abilities endeavour
+at the present day to encircle the name of Spinoza, I do not
+believe that there is any chance, at an epoch when war is
+declared against all privileges, for philosophers to make good
+their exclusive claim to the privilege of immortality.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_128">{128}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Fourth Meditation.
+<br><br>
+          Christian Ignorance.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+When I use the term "Christian Ignorance," I would not have
+either the sense which I attach to the expression, or the
+intention with which I use it, misunderstood. I do not think that
+it should be denied to man to make any use of his intelligence,
+to exercise any right to inquire freely after truth, or after any
+kind of truth. Is the field which is open to the human mind
+limited in extent? Is the mind itself of limited reach? Is there
+a difference of degree in human knowledge according as the
+objects are different to which it is applied? These are
+questions, all of them, fundamentally contained in the words
+"Christian Ignorance;" and of these questions it is my aim to
+offer what appears to me to be the right solution.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_129">{129}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am in the presence of four sciences, and of six schools or
+systems, which have made, are making, and will always continue to
+make, much noise in the world. The sciences are, Physiology,
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The systems to which these
+sciences have given birth are, Materialism, Positivism,
+Scepticism, Spiritualism, Scientific Theology, Mystical Theology.
+I am far from meaning to discuss here the principles of these
+systems, or to attempt to determine their value; it would be to
+undertake the task of examining all philosophy and all
+philosophies. I mean to touch only upon one of the special
+questions which furnish in our days matter of debate between
+Christianity and these different schools. It is thus, and thus
+only, that I can clearly establish the sense which I attach to
+the words "Christian Ignorance;" and determine, at the same time,
+their bearing and their limitation.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_130">{130}</a></span>
+<p>
+I have, and for very simple reasons, little to say respecting the
+first three systems to which I have just referred, i. e.,
+Materialism, Positivism, Scepticism. By its denial of the
+distinction of the soul and the body, of mind and matter,
+Materialism rejects Psychology, and arrives, as far as Ontology
+is concerned, only at Atheism or at Pantheism. Of the four great
+philosophical sciences, Physiology is the only one with which
+Materialism has any concern. Amongst Positivists, some, the more
+eminent, admit, it is true, the reality of Objects, or to speak
+more exactly, the reality of the domain of Psychology and of
+Ontology; but in admitting it they declare it to be inaccessible
+to the human mind: "Inaccessible," says M. Littré, "not null or
+non-existent; it is an ocean which washes our shore, and for
+which we have neither bark nor sail." [Footnote 36]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 36: A. Comte et la Philosophie Positive.
+    By M. Littré, p. 519.]
+</p>
+<p>
+That is to say, that, according to Positivists, Psychology,
+Ontology, and Theology are not&mdash;cannot be&mdash;sciences.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_131">{131}</a></span>
+As for sceptics, they contest to the human mind all certitude,
+and especially certitude with respect to the subject-matters of
+Psychology, Ontology, and Theology. The fundamental principle of
+Christian belief is then too absolutely strange to those three
+schools for it to be necessary that I should discuss with them
+the source, bearing, and legitimacy of that which I term
+"Christian Ignorance."
+</p>
+<p>
+It is only with Spiritualists, with scientific Theologians, and
+with mystic Theologians, that it is possible to discuss this
+question of Christian Ignorance, for the three schools to which
+they belong are the only ones which, in the same way as
+Christianity itself does, open to the human mind the domain of
+the four sciences&mdash;Physiology, Psychology, Ontology, and
+Theology, and which recognise the right of the human mind there
+to search after truth, and the possibility of its being there
+discovered.
+</p>
+<p>
+When I speak of Spiritualists, a preliminary remark is
+indispensable. Christianity is as spiritualistic, not to say more
+so, than Spiritualism itself.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_132">{132}</a></span>
+It is not, then, with Spiritualism in general, and with all
+Spiritualists without distinction, that Christians have to deal
+in the question of "Christian Ignorance," as it has in other
+questions; the discussion here lies between Christianity and
+Rationalistic Spiritualism alone; and not only between
+Rationalism and Christian ignorance, but also between
+Rationalistic science and Christian science.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Spiritualism admits the reality of Psychology, of
+Ontology, and of Theology, just as it does that of Physiology; it
+admits that these different sciences owe their birth and
+development necessarily to the spectacle of the universe, of men
+and of things, and have for their object the solution of the
+questions which this spectacle suggests. But this great fact once
+admitted, Rationalism places in Psychology, and in Psychology
+alone, the starting-point and the fulcrum of Ontology and of
+Theology; it only admits in these two sciences results to which
+the human mind attains by its own unaided efforts, that is to
+say, by way of observation and of reasoning; it recognises for
+human knowledge, with respect to Ontology and Theology, no source
+other than human reason.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_133">{133}</a></span>
+Christianity opens to Ontology and Theology a larger sphere and
+other sources of knowledge: besides the psychological facts
+supplied to these two sciences by observation and reasoning, it
+recognises historical facts as truths, not only which they are
+bound themselves to admit, but which they have a right to demand
+that others shall admit; Christianity does not make the human
+mind the sole object of its belief; it believes also in the
+history of Humanity, and finds in that History facts to the truth
+of which centuries, and the traditions of centuries, have
+testified, which it therefore holds, and is bound to hold, as
+well proved and as certain as any physical or psychological fact
+proved by the observations of contemporary science. The Creation,
+the primitive Revelation, the Mosaic Revelation, the Evangelical
+Revelation, are in Christian Doctrine historical facts which
+Ontology and Theology take, with reason, as the elementary data
+and the legitimate bases of science.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_134">{134}</a></span>
+<p>
+I am here met by a fundamental objection made to these facts and
+to their scientific authority; they are, it is said, opposed to
+the permanent laws of nature and of reason, as well as of human
+experience; science cannot admit supernatural facts. I have no
+intention in merely passing to re-enter here upon this great
+question; I have already expressed unreservedly my opinion with
+respect to it, [Footnote 37] and upon some other occasion I shall
+return to it; for, if I do not deceive myself, the question has
+not hitherto been properly sounded and to the depth which it
+demands. Here I confine myself to referring to two ideas&mdash;facts,
+rather&mdash;absolutely forgotten or ignored by the systematic
+opponents of the supernatural.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 37: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity.
+    Third Meditation: "The Supernatural," pp. 84-108. London,
+    1864.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Liberty, free agency, in presence of the external or internal
+causes which operate upon the will, is the peculiar and
+distinctive characteristic of man.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_135">{135}</a></span>
+It is by this that man separates himself from and raises himself
+above nature, understanding by the term the ensemble of things
+determined by laws general, anterior, permanent. Man alone has it
+in his power to commence a new series of facts foreign to any
+general law, and originating in his will alone. To deny such
+facts, is to deny that man is a free agent, and to make him a
+machine regulated by external and fatal laws; that is to say, to
+drive man back to the condition of that nature which is
+substantially governed by laws of this kind, and thus to abolish
+at one blow human morality and human liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+The blow strikes still higher&mdash;it would abolish God. God, who
+created man, is, and was previous to the existence of his
+creations, a being essentially free; for liberty cannot be the
+daughter of Fatality. It is in the free divine volition that
+human Liberty has its source, and man's Liberty itself testifies
+to the source from which it emanates.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_136">{136}</a></span>
+By denying human liberty, we throw not only man but God into the
+condition of physical nature, that is to say, into the ensemble
+of causes obedient to fate, and deprived of all moral essence;
+that is to say, we plunge into Pantheism, which, in spite of
+Spinoza and Goethe, in spite of all the efforts of logical
+reasoning or poetic imagination, is, in ultimate analysis,
+nothing more than Atheism.
+</p>
+<p>
+The systematic opponents of the supernatural must submit to this
+consequence. Most of them, I am certain, are far from being
+disposed to accept it, and would indeed repudiate it with the
+most honourable perseverance. Vain efforts! Driven from
+entrenchment to entrenchment, from fall to fall, they will be
+finally reduced to this extremity; and if divine wisdom had not
+assigned limits to the force of man's Logic, the practical
+consequences of such a system would soon make themselves evident
+in the moral and social condition of humanity.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_137">{137}</a></span>
+<p>
+There is a second necessity to which the systematic opponents of
+the supernatural must make up their minds. They must affirm that
+the laws proclaimed by them as general laws, laws immanent and
+permanent in what they call nature, are in effect the essential
+laws of all nature, of the entire universe, and of all the beings
+whose seeds are there sown. They would have no right to reject
+absolutely facts as supernatural if they were not supernatural of
+necessity and everywhere; if, in short, they were anywhere in
+harmony with laws of nature other than the laws of this hardly
+perceptible corner of nature which is the residence of man. If
+the laws of our world are not universal and absolute, who will
+venture to affirm that they cannot be changed or suspended, even
+there where they reign? Is human science ready to maintain that
+the laws which she discovers from her infinitely small
+Observatory are in effect universal and absolute laws in every
+place where matter exists, and where life manifests itself, in
+the midst of space and of time?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_138">{138}</a></span>
+<p>
+Here it is that Christian Ignorance begins to take its place; it
+admits the unknown and the diverse in the universe&mdash;an unknown
+incommensurable, a diverse infinitely possible. I respect and
+admire science profoundly; I am as moved, I feel as proud as M.
+de Laplace could ever have been at the aspect of this sublime
+flight of the human intelligence, which marches with sure footing
+in space and across worlds, measures their distances, and knows
+how many years are required for the light of the nearest of the
+fixed stars to reach us, whereas the light of our own sun reaches
+us in a few minutes. I am not less touched by the labours and the
+discoveries of the great modern Physiologists, who, walking in
+the footsteps of Bichat, observe and note, even in their minutest
+and most obscure details, the different phenomena which life in
+the midst of matter presents. But when I have rendered homage to
+these triumphs of human science, I compare them with the reality
+of things, with this universe infinitely great and infinitely
+minute, which man makes his study, and I cannot prevent the
+reflection, that the universe contains infinitely more objects
+than man's mind attains to, and infinitely more secrets than it
+discovers.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_139">{139}</a></span>
+What astronomer will dare to affirm that he has counted all the
+worlds, and that his eye has reached the point beyond which no
+more exist? What physiologist, what naturalist, will affirm that
+all those worlds have living inhabitants? and that, if so, those
+inhabitants must have the same form, and be subject to the same
+conditions and laws, as govern the inhabitants of this globe. Our
+science becomes very modest when set side by side with our
+ignorance, even in the matters appropriate to science; and,
+however extensive and various the conquests of the human mind may
+be, the universe is infinitely vaster and more varied than is
+either the genius or the strength of its vain conqueror. Knowing
+this, and without ceasing to admire the works of human science,
+Christian Ignorance bows humbly before that work of God, which
+outstrips and surpasses immeasurably every attainment of man.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_140">{140}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus on two sides, and by two different processes, Christianity
+has a higher point of view, and penetrates further into the
+reality of things than Rationalistic Spiritualism. On the one
+side, by allowing its place to historic facts which are the life
+of mankind, as well as to psychological facts which are the life
+of man's soul, Christianity gives to Christian science a deeper,
+a broader foundation than rationalistic science supplies. On the
+other side, Christianity admits, both with greater grandeur and
+with more modesty than Rationalism, the unfathomable immensity of
+the universe, as well as the infinite diversity of its possible
+laws; and by the avowal of a "Christian Ignorance," it places
+itself, at least, at the most elevated point to view the
+spectacle of which human science cannot traverse or measure the
+extent.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_141">{141}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is in the presence of another rival, I do not say of another
+adversary, that I have now to set Christian Ignorance. I begin by
+asking learned Theologians to forgive the freedom of my thoughts
+and of my speech; I feel for them a sincere sentiment of respect,
+let me say brotherly respect; for in the question to which I
+address myself I am now to deal with Christians. But actuated by
+the same feeling as that which influenced me when I was before
+speaking of the relation of the sacred writings to human science,
+I must declare my profound conviction that the subject which is
+here being treated is of pressing interest to Christian Religion
+in the great struggle in which it is engaged.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Christian Religion is founded upon facts, upon an
+uninterrupted series of facts recorded in documents which exist.
+Whether the authenticity or the authority of any part of these
+documents, the reality or even the possibility of any of the
+facts which they contain is admitted or contested, it is not the
+less true that Christianity is not, as Greek Paganism was, a
+poetical mythology attributed to fabulous times; as the religion
+of Zoroaster was, a personification of the great forces and of
+the great phenomena of nature; or as the writings of Confucius
+were, a collection of philosophical meditations, and of moral
+precepts and counsels, for the use of wise and simple, of princes
+and subjects.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_142">{142}</a></span>
+I am far from contesting that poetry and philosophy, human
+imagination and human meditation, have their share in the books
+which form the documents of Christianity; it is at the same time
+incontestable, however, that the peculiar and essential
+characteristic of Christianity, from its very origin down to its
+latest development, is that it is historical: we behold the
+Christian Religion starting to life, living, traversing
+centuries, growing great and independent, just as we behold civil
+society doing, in a series of facts which succeed to one another
+and are different from one another. Christianity is not merely a
+religious doctrine; it is the history of the events wherein have
+been manifested the relations of God to man, and the action of
+God upon the destinies of Mankind.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_143">{143}</a></span>
+<p>
+In proportion to the vigour with which these events have
+developed and spread themselves, the human mind has been exposed
+to two temptations, which constitute at once its honour and its
+peril, the temptation of explanation and that of controversy.
+</p>
+<p>
+What an undertaking! to explain God! his relation to man! the
+means and the process of his action upon man! Even when he essays
+to study, and to describe, the Nature of the God in whom he
+believes, Man's vision is troubled by the dazzling light; his
+thought exhausts itself, loses itself in the vain effort to
+attain, by means of comparisons and figures of all kinds, to the
+Divine Person: he conceives that person, he affirms that person,
+he contemplates that person, and yet that person he cannot know,
+cannot explain. The nearer he feels himself to God, the more does
+Man cast his eyes down, the more lowly does he incline himself,
+to adore, where he cannot pretend to observe. Even the very
+presence of God does not aid man in attaining to the science of
+God. What, then, the result where he would seek closely to follow
+the agency of God in the facts in which he only sees Him
+imperfectly,&mdash;where he attempts to carry the torch of human
+science into the depths of the secrets of Divine action?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_144">{144}</a></span>
+<p>
+I here enter into the domain which Christianity ignores. Two
+examples will fully suffice, I hope, to make my meaning clear.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Divinity of Jesus, God's incarnation in Jesus, Jesus God and
+Man, these are the truths admitted, proclaimed, incessantly
+repeated in different forms, by the Gospels and the primitive
+documents of Christianity. I have already said [Footnote 38] that
+"it is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the
+Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all
+theological controversies. To disregard this fact&mdash;to deny the
+divinity of Jesus Christ&mdash;is to deny, to overthrow the Christian
+religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never
+have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation
+was its principle, and Jesus Christ&mdash;God and Man&mdash;its author."
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 38: Meditations on the Essence of
+    Christianity. Second Meditation, pp. 75, 76.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_145">{145}</a></span>
+<p>
+But Christians have not confined themselves to the belief of this
+sublime truth; they have striven to explain it; they have sought
+to know and to define how, and when, the divine nature and the
+human nature became united in Jesus Christ, to what extent such
+union took place, and what effect it produced upon Christ's
+personality. Hence all the questions, all the controversies,
+which were raised as to the mode and the consequences of the
+divine incarnation, by Nestorius and Eutyches, and which in the
+councils of Constantinople, of Ephesus and Chalcedon, divided and
+agitated the Christian Church, especially in the East.
+</p>
+<p>
+Man had here essayed to construct a science of Religion and of
+divine History.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as
+unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the
+Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of
+Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy
+Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_146">{146}</a></span>
+The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its
+place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very
+beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves
+to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to
+determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the
+religions truth; in other words, to transform history into
+science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the
+authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature,
+rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of
+the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son,
+and Holy Ghost.
+</p>
+<p>
+I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the
+doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either
+originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their
+essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to
+human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less
+legitimate, of Religion.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_147">{147}</a></span>
+<p>
+When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of
+Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do
+not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The
+scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration,
+always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of
+the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves
+to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and
+thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause
+of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral
+influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and
+authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have
+been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than
+efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their
+mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The
+Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this
+was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum;
+forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they
+have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by
+explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an
+intermixture of man's work.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_148">{148}</a></span>
+Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same
+time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can
+recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man
+to make of them a science.
+</p>
+<p>
+Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his
+explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims:
+"I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly,
+or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add
+to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity
+and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this
+is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth."
+[Footnote 39]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères.
+    Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian
+ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to
+take refuge.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_149">{149}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are
+unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a
+serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and
+what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to
+believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of
+man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in
+religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only
+their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own
+work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most
+logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this
+respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly
+be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian
+ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to
+moderation and charity than Theological science.
+</p>
+<p>
+But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and
+efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human
+science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the
+same error and the same peril.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_150">{150}</a></span>
+The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God
+to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and
+inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and
+mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon
+certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations
+of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the
+hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and
+the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter
+themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the
+solution of such questions is hidden.
+</p>
+<p>
+I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious
+impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets
+of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling
+curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny?
+Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself
+under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be
+possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and
+powerless?
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_151">{151}</a></span>
+There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and
+under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost
+recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding
+from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to
+them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who
+of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of
+a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast,
+conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally,
+in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of
+human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event
+brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to
+which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine
+Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt
+the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve
+problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to
+rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine
+author.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_152">{152}</a></span>
+But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No
+doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by
+his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to
+our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and
+his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their
+effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general
+problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions
+touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of
+Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into
+ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at
+limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific
+vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to
+overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon
+man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words,
+"Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his
+charity, and his liberty.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_153">{153}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Fifth Meditation.
+<br><br>
+           Christian Faith.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé
+Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the
+Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue
+Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is
+called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it
+expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it.
+Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in
+its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to
+my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages
+which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the
+imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to
+regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a
+starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I
+now give to the press.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_154">{154}</a></span>
+<p>
+By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in
+facts or dogmas of a special nature&mdash;in facts or dogmas of
+religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in
+speaking of <i>the faith</i> the term is used alone and
+absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its
+fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from
+which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the
+following are met with:&mdash;"I have full <i>faith</i> in your words;
+this man has <i>faith</i> in himself&mdash;in his strength&mdash;in his
+fortune, &amp;c." This employment of the word <i>faith</i> in secular
+matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it
+is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never
+been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had
+also other significations attached to it.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_155">{155}</a></span>
+<p>
+It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular
+opinion, 1st, that the word <i>faith</i> designates a certain
+internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a
+certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of
+the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was,
+nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied
+to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its
+special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the
+variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are
+taking place every day?
+</p>
+<p>
+Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a
+religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy
+of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing
+in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction
+of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called
+<i>Faith</i>; a name which neither masters and disciples will
+repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_156">{156}</a></span>
+Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the
+truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the
+conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been
+generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination;
+that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name
+of <i>Faith</i>, is its energy, is the empire which that energy
+gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith
+of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth
+century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of
+Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.
+</p>
+<p>
+The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it
+was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by
+an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of
+persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened
+reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral
+affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to
+feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave
+the name of <i>Faith</i> to the result of their action, just as
+they had done so to the result of the process essentially
+intellectual of which I was before speaking.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_157">{157}</a></span>
+Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by
+reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is
+the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.
+</p>
+<p>
+Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always
+sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has
+been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to
+practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach
+ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a
+meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind
+was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to
+certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it
+had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission
+of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to
+govern man's life and to regulate his thought.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_158">{158}</a></span>
+<p>
+Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated
+in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the
+intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation
+of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that
+it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by
+any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention
+and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became
+thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive
+character.
+</p>
+<p>
+The word <i>faith</i> has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st,
+a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human
+intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the
+sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often
+even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's
+long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to
+command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural
+means,&mdash;by divine grace.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_159">{159}</a></span>
+<p>
+What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may
+emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What
+is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider
+it independently of its origin and of its object?
+</p>
+<p>
+Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it
+innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression,
+but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and
+establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being
+aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or
+volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and
+the influence of that external world in the midst of which his
+life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of
+laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary
+study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all
+his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering
+it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there
+taking place&mdash;to render an account thereof to himself, and thus
+to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge
+which he did not before possess, although the facts which form
+its object nevertheless existed as facts external&mdash;and which he
+might see by his eyes,&mdash;or as facts which were taking place
+within him.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_160">{160}</a></span>
+<p>
+Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of
+<i>faith</i>?
+</p>
+<p>
+It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to
+that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous:
+such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man
+in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he
+dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous,
+unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it
+the characteristics of <i>faith?</i>
+</p>
+<p>
+Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time
+others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost
+unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and
+spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without
+which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct
+without having given it any intimate and personal assent.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_161">{161}</a></span>
+It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him,
+admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to
+say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him
+to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful
+principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the
+profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which
+reigns over him. <i>Faith</i>, on the contrary, has this power;
+faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which
+faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account
+to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will
+do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind
+it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of
+human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of
+gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth
+which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation,
+of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much
+more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does
+much more than direct him, it enlightens him.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_162">{162}</a></span>
+How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and
+instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without
+our being able to affirm that they have <i>faith</i> in them.
+Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom,
+nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without
+seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause,
+however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself,
+should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction
+between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their
+nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their
+legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by
+comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying
+it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a
+sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and
+establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light;
+this is no longer simple natural belief, it is <i>faith</i>.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_163">{163}</a></span>
+<p>
+Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two
+kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them
+the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous
+belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and
+science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is
+individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active,
+dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison
+with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect,
+faith is the full security of man in the possession of his
+belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path
+which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and
+a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent
+harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man
+whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition
+present no longer any problems for solution as to the things
+which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full
+possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and
+in full possession of himself to act according to the truth.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_164">{164}</a></span>
+As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it,
+it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external
+conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from
+other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its
+object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined
+and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature
+itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may
+be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the
+intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in
+the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory
+of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so
+forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of
+every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally
+oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of
+the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the
+exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long
+obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the
+three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence,
+and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously
+satisfied.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_165">{165}</a></span>
+Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a
+situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of
+its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need
+be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his
+faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral
+nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.
+</p>
+<p>
+The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith
+would seem <i>à priori</i> to be intellectual beauty, and
+practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the
+mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent
+or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but
+the name of <i>faith</i> would not be suitably applied to it.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_166">{166}</a></span>
+Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an
+idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also
+attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the
+pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple
+belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may
+become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure
+to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to
+awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin
+and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall
+be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and
+the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the
+other, and to unite them.
+</p>
+<p>
+It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost
+exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief
+possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote
+40] which provoke the development of faith.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_167">{167}</a></span>
+<p>
+Many principles of science are beautiful and fruitful in useful
+applications; political theories may strike the mind by the
+elevation of the ideas which they embody, and by the grandeur of
+their results; the doctrines of a pure morality are still more
+surely and more commonly invested with this double power. Nor
+have these kinds of belief failed sometimes to generate faith in
+the human soul. Still, to receive a clear and profound impression
+at one time of their intellectual beauty, at another of their
+practical importance, a certain measure of science and of
+sagacity, or a certain turn for public life, or for politics, as
+the case may require, is almost always necessary, and this does
+not belong to all men, nor to every epoch. Religious belief, on
+the contrary, has no need of such resources: it carries in
+itself, and in its very nature, infallible means of effect;
+having once penetrated into the heart of man, however limited and
+undeveloped in other respects his intelligence may be, or however
+rude and low his condition, it seems to him a truth at once
+sublime and usual, a truth which addresses itself to him as an
+habitant of this earth, and at the same time which opens to him
+access to those lofty regions, to those treasures of intellectual
+life, which without the light of faith he would have never known;
+it has for him the charm of the purest truth, and exercises over
+him the empire of the most powerful interest.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_168">{168}</a></span>
+Can it astonish us, that the belief once existent, its transition
+to a state of <i>faith</i> should be so rapid and so general? But
+it is precisely on account of its instinctive tendency to
+transform itself into faith, and into a faith of extraordinary
+energy, that religious belief has need to continue always free
+and always subject to the tests which Liberty has the right to
+impose. Legitimate faith, that is, as we understand it, the faith
+which does not deceive itself as to its objects, and which
+addresses itself really to the truth, is beyond contradiction the
+loftiest condition to which the human mind, in its present state,
+can attain, for it is that state in which man feels his moral
+nature fully satisfied, in which he gives himself up entirely to
+the mission prescribed to him by his thought.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_169">{169}</a></span>
+But a faith may be illegitimate; it is possible for this state of
+the soul to be produced by error; the chance of error (experience
+proves this at every step) is even here greater, the more the
+different routes which lead to faith are multiplied and the more
+its effects are energetic; man may be led astray in his faith by
+his sentiments, by his habits, by the empire of moral affections
+or of external circumstances, as well as by the defect or the
+abuse of his intellectual faculties; for his faith may spring
+from any of these various sources. Nevertheless, faith once
+there, it is daring and ambitious; it passionately aspires to
+diffuse itself, to usurp, to reign, and constitute itself the law
+of opinions and facts. Not only is faith ambitious, it is strong,
+it possesses, it displays, in support of its pretensions and its
+designs, an energy, an address, a perseverance, which are almost
+always wanting to opinions simply scientific. So that for this
+mode and degree of conviction and belief, far more than for any
+other, there is chance of the individual falling into error, and
+of society falling under oppression.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_170">{170}</a></span>
+<p>
+For these perils there is but one remedy, Liberty. Whether in
+belief or in action, the nature of man is the same: not only his
+will but his thought, if it is not to become absurd or culpable,
+has incessantly need of contradiction and of control. Where faith
+fails, moral energy and moral dignity fail equally; where liberty
+does not exist, faith first usurps,&mdash;then becomes
+bewildered&mdash;finally destroys itself. If human belief passes to
+the state of faith, it is its progress and its glory; if, in its
+efforts toward this result, and after having attained it, it
+abides constantly under the control of the free intelligence; we
+have, in this fact, at once a guarantee for society against the
+tyranny of that faith and a pledge that the faith is legitimate.
+In the co-existence and mutual respect of these two forces
+consist the excellency and security of society. [Footnote 41]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 41: Revue Française (January, 1828), Méditations et
+    Études Morales, par M. Guizot, pp. 143, 173-175 (edition of
+    1861).]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_171">{171}</a></span>
+<p>
+If I consider this essay, or psychological portrait, shall I
+rather call it, of faith in general, and compare with it
+Christian faith, I am immediately struck by two features as
+characterising it. On the one side, the ideas and the facts upon
+which Christian faith is founded, have evidently that twofold
+merit of intellectual beauty and of practical importance which
+has both the right and the power to compel faith. On the other
+side, Christian faith may originate, in fact does originate, in
+sources the most diverse, in study and rational meditation, in
+sentiment, in authority, in an appeal to the divine grace.
+</p>
+<p>
+What grander and more impressive to the mind of man than the
+principles of Christian faith, regarded as a whole? God and Man
+incessantly present the one to the other, in the life of each
+man, as in the history of the human race! What more grave and
+more momentous, regarded from a practical point of view? In the
+present hour, it is peace to the soul of man, peace to his life;
+in the future, it is his destiny throughout eternity.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_172">{172}</a></span>
+<p>
+The diversity of the sources of Christian faith is not less
+evident than its intellectual beauty and its practical
+importance. Beyond a doubt, the Christian faith of the Chancellor
+de l'Hospital, of Pascal, of Bossuet, of Fénelon, of Luther, of
+Calvin, of Newton, of Euler, of Chalmers, was as much the fruit
+of reflection and of learning, was as freely meditated and
+adopted as the scepticism of Montaigne and of Bayle, as the
+sensualism of Hobbes, and the pantheism of Spinoza. It is equally
+certain that all Christian communities, Roman Catholic or
+Protestant, have had their mystics, their eminent and sincere
+believers, whose faith was illumed and fed by sensibility and
+imagination; in the former case in the emotions and practices of
+fervent piety; in the latter, in empassioned transports and
+strivings after a direct communication with God and with Christ.
+As for the faith founded upon authority, the Church of Rome has
+presented the most extraordinary example which the world has ever
+seen, and if Protestantism has caused the faith of individuals to
+make great strides in the direction of liberty, it has
+nevertheless taken for its fixed basis the divine inspiration of
+the Sacred Book, and has thus ensured a great importance and very
+efficacious influence to the principle of authority.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_173">{173}</a></span>
+<p>
+Having thus placed Christian Faith in its true point of view, and
+assigned to it its just rank in the history of the human soul,
+let us see whence arises the contest in which that Faith is
+engaged with natural Religion and with religious philosophy? What
+is the principle of this contest, and what its character?
+</p>
+<p>
+Here we are met by that all-important question, the question
+which has been agitated during nineteen centuries, and to which
+all the intellect of modern times has applied itself. Is the
+Christian Faith in contradiction to human reason? Some affirm
+that a contest between the two is natural and inevitable; of
+these there are who tell us that reason should give way to faith,
+and again others who say that faith should yield to reason:
+whereas, on the contrary, there are those also who deny that such
+contest is inevitable, and who maintain that faith and reason, as
+they ought to do, may both live in peace with each other.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_174">{174}</a></span>
+<p>
+In my opinion, the difference between Christian Faith and that
+which is styled natural Religion, or religious philosophy, is
+profound; but I do not think that the question between the two
+has been rightly put, or that the character of their opposition
+has been rightly defined.
+</p>
+<p>
+To discover what, in effect, this character is, I address myself,
+first, to the philosophers.
+</p>
+<p>
+We know how Descartes began his great philosophical inquiries, to
+what state he brought his mind in order to enter upon his task:
+"I persuaded myself," says he, "that I could not do better with
+respect to the opinions which up to that time I had entertained,
+than to begin by ridding myself of them entirely, in order then
+either to replace them by better opinions, or to return to the
+old ones if I should find them, on examination, to conform to the
+standard of reason."
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_175">{175}</a></span>
+Then proceeding to determine the precepts to be followed by him
+in this recasting of all his opinions by such standard,&mdash;"My
+first principle," said he, "was never to accept anything as true,
+unless I could evidently recognise its truth; in other words, to
+avoid carefully any precipitate judgment, to allow my mind to
+follow no bias, and not to comprise anything in its judgments but
+what presented itself so clearly and so distinctly to my mind as
+to leave me no room for doubt." [Footnote 42]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 42: Discours de la Méthode. Works of Descartes,
+    vol. i., pp. 135, 141; edition of M. Cousin.]
+</p>
+<p>
+More than a century after Descartes, Condillac, wishing to trace
+to its source the origin of human knowledge, and to write the
+history of its progressive development, did far more than
+obliterate from his mind its primitive ideas. He began his
+labours by curtailing the human mind of a great part of its
+proper proportions; he reduced man to the primitive condition of
+a statue, leaving to it no other faculty than the sensation: and
+then he fancied he could derive from sensations all man's ideas,
+all his knowledge,&mdash;in fact, the entire man himself.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_176">{176}</a></span>
+<p>
+Thus these two great systems, Spiritualism and Sensualism, have
+their very commencement, each in an arbitrary assumption.
+Descartes, effacing from the human mind all that it has learnt to
+know or to believe, solely by its spontaneous activity, and by
+the natural course of human life, has treated the mind as a
+<i>tabula rasa</i>, and to fill up the void which he has so made,
+he does not admit anything there unless it presents itself "so
+clearly and so distinctly to his mind, as to leave him no room to
+doubt respecting it." Condillac, on the other hand, suppresses
+not only all that which man has learnt spontaneously and without
+reflection, but the man himself; leaving in the place of man a
+statue, sentient, it is true, but only sentient, and with this
+statue and his sensations alone, he undertakes to reconstruct the
+man&mdash;the entire man&mdash;with all the developments of his nature and
+of his thought.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_177">{177}</a></span>
+<p>
+I see nothing in either of these processes more than a starting
+point entirely fictitious, a false step made at the very
+commencement of philosophy,&mdash;in short, a mere hypothesis.
+Descartes rendered admirable services to the cause of liberty and
+of intellectual sincerity; Condillac contributed to the progress
+of the method which I shall call, the method of anatomy and
+scientific dissection applied both to the human mind and to the
+material world; but from their very commencement both these
+philosophers threw themselves out of the high road, the straight
+road of philosophy; each from the very commencement substituted a
+mere hypothesis in the place of an exact and complete
+appreciation of facts. It is far from my intention to discuss
+either of these two systems; I am content to put aside the two
+hypotheses, the <i>tabula rasa</i> of Descartes, and the statue
+of Condillac, and I proceed, my way lighted by the facts, as they
+are, naturally produced in the history of the mind of man, to
+inquire what is the cause, and what the import, of the struggle
+which is taking place between rationalistic religious philosophy,
+and Christian faith.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_178">{178}</a></span>
+<p>
+The true point of departure of this history and the first of the
+facts which show themselves there, is the co-existence of man and
+the universe, spectator and spectacle, the one confronting the
+other, the "<i>moi</i>" and the "<i>non moi</i>," the subject and
+the object, in the language of philosophy. I hasten to say that I
+repudiate absolutely the different systems,&mdash;Pantheism, whether
+materialistic or idealistic,&mdash;Scepticism, whether idealistic or
+absolute,&mdash;which refuse to admit this primary fact, deny the
+reality of the external world, or the legitimacy of the knowledge
+of it which the understanding acquires, see only illusions in the
+relations of man to the universe, or absorb man and the universe
+together, in the confusion and the obscure darkness of a
+pretended identity. I do not dream of here discussing these
+different systems; if I engaged in such discussion, I should have
+to deal with something very different from the question to which
+I am applying myself at this moment.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_179">{179}</a></span>
+Here I have only to do with Rationalistic Spiritualism. This form
+of Spiritualism has so much in common with Christianity, that it
+admits the reality and the distinction of the "<i>moi</i>" and of
+the "<i>non moi</i>" of the subject and the object, of the
+spectator and the spectacle, of spirit and matter, of man and the
+universe. For Rationalistic Spiritualists as well as for
+Christians, this is the great fact in the midst of which, and
+under the empire of which, man's intelligence is developed, man's
+life passed. Man is there passive, active, and witness, all
+simultaneously. As spectator he receives impressions from the
+spectacle, which both prompt him to act, and which stir his being
+from within; he is witness both to what is passing within himself
+and to what is passing without himself. Notwithstanding the
+diversity and the mobility of the impressions which he receives
+from without, and of the acts which he originates himself, he has
+a consciousness of his own personal and permanent existence, and
+also the consciousness of existences other than his own; he knows
+not, by the way of reasoning or hypothesis, but by instinctive
+and immediate intuition, that which, although it is not himself,
+yet acts upon himself as something coming from himself.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_180">{180}</a></span>
+Man discovers the external world as he becomes aware of himself,
+by the intercommunication which takes place between them, and
+which, nevertheless, shows him how distinct from himself is that
+external world. He observes and notes both what takes place
+without him and within him. The results of this observation he
+terms facts, nor are they for him vain appearances, creations
+merely of his thought or volition; they are manifestations to him
+of realities independent of himself, and yet to which he stands
+in relation; they are bonds of union in which he feels that he is
+highly interested, not merely as any curious spectator might be,
+but as a real being; interested, not merely for the sake of
+science, but interested as one whose very destiny is therein
+involved.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_181">{181}</a></span>
+<p>
+Amongst these facts, in their nature so numerous and so diverse,
+I only select those which concern the religious instincts of man,
+or the questions which they suggest. I admit two kinds of these;
+first, the spontaneous and common religious beliefs, which
+mankind professes, although under very different forms and in
+very different degrees; secondly, the theories and systems of
+philosophy, emanating from and promulgated by philosophers in
+order to bring under discussion the popular religious opinions,
+and to resolve the questions which they involve. On the one side
+is the natural and instinctive religion of humanity; on the other
+is human science, which, when it addresses itself to the task of
+disengaging natural religion from every system of mythology, is
+called religious philosophy.
+</p>
+<p>
+Are there in the nature and in the religious history of men no
+other great facts besides these instincts of humanity, and these
+systems of human science? Natural Religion with its mythologies,
+and religious philosophy with its systems, are these all the
+religious aid accorded to man to enlighten him upon subjects of
+religion?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_182">{182}</a></span>
+<p>
+To the question thus formalised, Rationalistic Spiritualism says,
+Yes; whereas Christian Faith replies, No.
+</p>
+<p>
+In addition to the facts to which I have just referred, viz., the
+instinctive beliefs of mankind, and the systemised doctrines of
+human science concerning religion, the Christian faith admits and
+proclaims another great religious fact, the real and active
+presence of God in the life of man and in the history of
+humanity. What the Christian faith affirms is, that the real and
+active presence of God, in man's life, amidst the mysteries of
+Providence, of prayer, and of grace, and the real and active
+presence of God in the history of the human race, amidst the
+mysteries of Revelation, of Inspiration, of the Incarnation, and
+of the Redemption, do not constitute simply a poetical mythology,
+are not merely hypotheses of philosophy, but are psychological
+and historic facts which human science cannot explain, but which
+it nevertheless can, nay, is bound to recognise.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_183">{183}</a></span>
+<p>
+Not philosophers only, but the whole human race, believers and
+disbelievers, are placed in the same permanent position in which
+all originally stood; that is to say, Man stands always
+confronting the Universe, Man always at once spectator and actor,
+greedy to know and comprehend the spectacle on which he is
+looking, and of which he himself forms part. The spectacle is
+immense, infinite; the spectator petty, imperfect, ephemeral,
+diverse, and with limited powers of vision. Accordingly as he is
+situated, accordingly as he is disposed and his intelligence
+reaches, he sees to a greater or less distance, and with a vision
+more or less accurate, all that the spectacle presents. He
+observes more or less completely, more or less exactly, the facts
+which are occurring there. Hence the differences of opinion
+amongst mankind. Who are they amongst them who succeed best in
+appreciating and in describing these facts without altering their
+character or omitting any? This is the fundamental question, the
+question antecedent to and which governs all the others.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_184">{184}</a></span>
+<p>
+The contest, then, between Christians and non-Christians, is not
+a contest between Faith and Reason. Reason occupies a place, and
+a large place, in the Faith of Christians; they attain to faith
+as well by reason as by sentiment or authority; nor is there, at
+the same time, in the negations or the doubts of non-Christians,
+as much reflection and as much accurate observation as they
+themselves suppose. Are Christians right in affirming not only
+the existence of God, but his real and active presence in the
+life of man and in the history of the human race? Are these
+psychological and historic facts which reason and science are
+bound to admit? Or are the Deists who are not Christians
+justified in denying these facts and in limiting God to existence
+alone, and in treating him as subject to the general and
+permanent laws assigned to all other existences?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_185">{185}</a></span>
+<p>
+As far as Christianity and Rationalistic Spiritualism are
+concerned, this is the real question at issue.
+</p>
+<p>
+Having pointed out the source of the differences of opinion which
+we find amongst men, I will now indicate their consequences.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Spiritualism affirms the existence of God, and
+those who follow this system evince the strongest desire to
+demonstrate his existence. They are right; for the existence of
+God, and the rational consequences of his existence, form all
+their natural religion, all their religious philosophy. In these
+days, men of minds, as eminent as sincere, M. Émile Saisset, M.
+Jules Simon, M. Ernest Bersot, M. de Rémusat, have made
+earnest&mdash;I would willingly say pious&mdash;efforts to elucidate the
+proposition of God's existence, and to derive from it all the aid
+that reason can furnish to explain the instincts and satisfy the
+religious exigencies of humanity. But these Spiritualists deceive
+themselves. They do not attain to God himself, they only attain
+to the idea of God; what they establish is the admissibility of
+the intellectual idea, not the presence of a real being.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_186">{186}</a></span>
+In rejecting the psychological and historical facts upon which
+Christianity is founded, that is to say, the relations free and
+unintermitted of God with Man, whether in the individual life of
+each man or in the history of the mankind, Rationalistic
+Spiritualism deprives itself of direct and positive evidence to
+prove God's existence; it places a human argument in the place of
+the divine manifestation, and a scientific work of man in the
+place of the real action of God.
+</p>
+<p>
+In an excellent book, justly entitled by him "Idea of God,"
+another contemporary philosopher, M. Caro, has valiantly, and
+with brilliant success, defended this idea against the different
+systems which reject or distort it. And not limiting himself to
+polemics, he has concluded his work by a forcible and clear
+enunciation of his own thought.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_187">{187}</a></span>
+"It is the living God, the intelligent God, whom we defend
+against the God of Naturalism, who would not be more than a law
+of geometry or a blind force; against the God of Hegel, who would
+not be more than an indeterminate Being, an origin and a
+commencement of things, or an absolute mind, result at once and
+product of the world; against the God of the new Idealists, who,
+to save his divinity, strip him of his reality. We affirm, in
+opposition to all these subtle and hazardous conceptions, that a
+supposed perfect being, unless he had an existence, would not be
+perfect; that a mere ideal of the mind is not a God; that if he
+is not a substance he is but a conception, a pure category of
+spirit, a creation and dependence upon man's thought which, in
+ceasing to exist, annihilates its God; that, if he is not cause,
+he is the most useless of beings; and if he is cause, he is mind
+supreme, for were he not so he would be nothing but an
+unconscious and necessary agent, a blind spring of the world,
+inferior to what he produces, since in the organic matter that
+emanates from him, an intelligence displays itself, of which he
+would possess nothing, and since too in man is manifested a
+divine Reason.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_188">{188}</a></span>
+<p>
+Another remark, and we have done with our definition. This living
+God, this God intelligent, is also a God that loves &hellip; A God
+that loved not would not be worthy of being adored &hellip; We do not
+adore a law, however simple it may be, however fruitful in
+consequence; we do not adore a force if it be blind, however
+potent, however universal it may be; nor an ideal, however pure
+it may be, if it be only an abstraction. We only adore a being
+who is living perfection, the perfection of reality in its
+highest forms of mind and love. Every other adoration implies a
+contradiction if the object is a pure abstraction, idolatry if
+the object be the substance of the universe or humanity.
+</p>
+<p>
+This is God as he appears to reason, and as the religious
+conscience of humanity will have him. This is your God."
+[Footnote 43]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 43: L'Idée de Dieu et ses Nouveaux Critiques.
+    By E. Caro. p. 498. 8vo. Paris, 1864.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_189">{189}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is to be regretted M. Caro has not carried his conclusions
+still higher, and completed his work by proceeding on from
+philosophical spiritualism to Christian Spiritualism.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Deism is merely an idea of God, given as the
+philosophical solution of the grand problem, which the spectacle
+of the Universe and of Man in the Universe causes to weigh upon
+the soul of man.
+</p>
+<p>
+Christianity is faith in God, Being real, Sovereign real,
+continually present, and active in the government of the
+Universe, as he is in the soul of man and in the history of the
+human race.
+</p>
+<p>
+Rationalistic Deism arrives at the idea of God, and stops short
+there, because it ignores the psychological and historical facts
+which go beyond this idea. It is by holding account of these
+facts, and by doing to them the homage which is their due, that
+Christianity forwards and justifies her faith.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_190">{190}</a></span>
+<br>
+           <h2>Sixth Meditation.
+<br><br>
+            Christian Life.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit
+to a test&mdash;the great test&mdash;the practical application. The idea
+has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.
+</p>
+<p>
+Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth,
+upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their
+ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are
+right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is
+in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its
+object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man
+pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever
+the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it
+believes that it has attained to the truth.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_191">{191}</a></span>
+<p>
+This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only
+ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under
+its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those
+who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the
+principle that we should be indifferent whether we are
+essentially in the right, and that practically there is no
+difference between truth and error.
+</p>
+<p>
+But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than
+the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human
+mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion,
+that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves
+itself?
+</p>
+<p>
+To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a
+denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every
+doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a
+test,&mdash;the practical application.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_192">{192}</a></span>
+The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life;
+these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically
+true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which
+it is bound to give.
+</p>
+<p>
+There is a radical difference between the material world and the
+intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in
+the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought
+and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is
+ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has
+no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot
+influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite
+of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if
+Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact,
+and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's
+principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to
+the general system of the world. <i>There</i> man's error is
+absolutely without effect or influence.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_193">{193}</a></span>
+<p>
+In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is
+not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act&mdash;
+to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to
+the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant
+of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside
+here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and
+independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here
+without real and serious consequences; they have the power of
+sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual
+and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to
+the disputes of men.
+</p>
+<p>
+Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world,
+separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from
+its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific
+investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and
+admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of
+society or the results of their own labours.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_194">{194}</a></span>
+Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave
+inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world
+are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account;
+man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the
+profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect,
+procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative
+description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no
+general disturbance results in that material world upon which
+naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will
+not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their
+ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world,
+on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its
+teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and
+make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape
+the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in
+its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world
+to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order,
+incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not
+here the object of science, it is still its necessary and
+appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the
+truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_195">{195}</a></span>
+<p>
+Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen
+centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue
+ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace
+here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and
+surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of
+Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single
+small part of this history, the most modest part, the least
+pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what
+Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian
+Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different
+situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day
+accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the
+furtherance of his ultimate destiny.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_196">{196}</a></span>
+<p>
+Three words, "<i>Rights of Man</i>" inscribed upon the banners of
+the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man
+as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his
+humanity. Three other words, <i>Liberty, Equality,
+Fraternity</i>, have served as a commentary upon the three
+former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French
+Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources
+of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the
+ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.
+</p>
+<p>
+Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is
+Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have
+of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by
+Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does
+Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and
+condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity
+alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral
+force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the
+good also to perish.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_197">{197}</a></span>
+<p>
+It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride
+that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself,
+the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his
+rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential
+objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the
+rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the
+individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state,
+where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human
+creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a
+single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles,
+Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not
+only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The
+right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of
+the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life,
+constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant
+precept of the Christian religion.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_198">{198}</a></span>
+It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian
+Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put
+into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as
+the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the
+chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that
+Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was
+amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as
+brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although
+sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a
+stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less
+potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it
+maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over
+distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil
+society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are
+most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the
+iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices
+have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the
+Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the
+earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church
+itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and
+acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_199">{199}</a></span>
+Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never
+afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any
+human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of
+earthly power, the appellation, <i>brethren</i>, never ceased to
+be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all
+the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only
+in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear
+themselves greeted as <i>brethren</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence
+in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand
+to the political authorities, or in which the different classes
+stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the
+constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association,
+called family.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_200">{200}</a></span>
+There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the
+despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of
+wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If
+we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as
+religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of
+antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman
+family,&mdash;we shall not need to examine long before we discern
+clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just
+appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and
+liberty.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and
+puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular
+maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and
+fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of
+false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the
+history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not
+merely in the records of a few years, but through three
+centuries.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_201">{201}</a></span>
+Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying
+claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the
+same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show
+of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim
+to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner
+of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did
+they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon
+authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny,
+and never made appeals to insurrection against authority.
+Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of
+Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to
+the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of
+this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its
+cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its
+liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either
+in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected,
+and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which
+the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_202">{202}</a></span>
+They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor
+humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and
+disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage
+to its right at the same time that they maintained their own
+right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished
+at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not
+as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them,
+and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen
+me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go
+and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain."
+[Footnote 45]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]
+</p>
+<p>
+And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and
+struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the
+doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every
+soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but
+of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. &hellip; Wherefore ye
+must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for
+conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 46: Romans xiii. 1, 5. ]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_203">{203}</a></span>
+<p>
+Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself
+addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which
+are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote
+47]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of
+power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of
+religious life from civil life,&mdash;all these were not, for the
+primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their
+situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles
+of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the
+name of justice and of truth.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_204">{204}</a></span>
+<p>
+Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know,
+greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the
+history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to
+the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once
+became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by
+earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the
+arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil
+inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and
+combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity
+had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which,
+nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary
+doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted
+and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape
+and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they
+never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they
+survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the
+broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices,
+Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled
+against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite
+of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of
+violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill,
+the decline of man and of human society did not ensue.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_205">{205}</a></span>
+Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious
+and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of
+human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and
+these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas,
+traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable
+them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and
+corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success.
+Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which
+agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely
+healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant
+subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of
+sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated
+herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she
+has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against
+which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which
+she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over
+the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of
+promise. This she owes to her origin&mdash;she was born in the manger
+of Jesus.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_206">{206}</a></span>
+<p>
+There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened
+men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has
+rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality
+of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of
+Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore,
+the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality
+is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be
+separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but
+its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not
+disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and
+empire of morality, I have established in this volume of
+Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief,
+and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart
+from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical,
+and powerless&mdash;a branch without root and without fruit.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_207">{207}</a></span>
+I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is
+Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as
+the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas,
+but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have
+taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still
+higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did
+not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of
+doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a
+truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and
+superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as
+such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once,
+and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and
+vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and
+learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the
+fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_208">{208}</a></span>
+At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw
+in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a
+sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by
+Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his
+appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings;
+but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who
+detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council
+and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and
+the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to
+have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council,
+a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in
+reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the
+apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of
+Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching
+these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself
+to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred,
+joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him,
+were scattered and brought to nought.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_209">{209}</a></span>
+After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the
+taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished;
+and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I
+say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if
+this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But
+if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found
+even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 48: Acts v. 21, 33&mdash;39.]
+</p>
+<p>
+The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity
+at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already
+made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the
+living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son
+of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 49: Matthew xxvi. 63, 64.]
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_210">{210}</a></span>
+<p>
+The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A
+short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as
+their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide
+the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in
+repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof
+was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries
+of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of
+Christianity,&mdash;the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption,
+the Inspiration of the Scriptures,&mdash;became the grand dogmas of
+Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its
+turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed
+from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to
+undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly
+interests and human errors and passions had a great part;
+Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes
+converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so
+constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was
+theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of
+practical application in every form and every shape.
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_211">{211}</a></span>
+The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all
+these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows
+of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and
+is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the
+same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph,
+with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and
+the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living.
+The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its
+Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The
+authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of
+the next and last series of my "Meditations."
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_212">{212}</a></span>
+<br>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_213">{213}</a></span>
+<br>
+               <h2>Appendix.</h2>
+<br>
+<p>
+Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at
+London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance
+a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues:
+all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or
+simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or
+attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself,
+perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone,
+has just made it the subject of three articles, which are
+remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They
+appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his
+country. [Footnote 50]
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by
+    Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen
+    Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of
+    January, February, and March, 1868.]
+</p>
+<p class="cite">
+  "No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation'
+  (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be
+  said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified
+  authorship&mdash;that has appeared within the same interval, has
+  attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism
+  which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled
+  'Ecce Homo.'"
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_214">{214}</a></span>
+<p>
+The anonymous author has expressed in a very short preface his
+intention in writing this volume, as well as its fundamental
+ideas. "Those who feel," says he, "dissatisfied with the current
+conceptions of Christ, if they cannot rest content without a
+definite opinion, may find it necessary to do what, to persons
+not so dissatisfied, it seems audacious and perilous to do. They
+may be obliged to reconsider the whole subject from the
+beginning, and placing themselves, in imagination, at the time
+when he whom we call Christ bore no such name, but was simply, as
+St. Luke describes him, a young man of promise, popular with
+those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favour, to
+trace his biography from point to point, and accept those
+conclusions about him, not which Church doctors, or even apostles
+have sealed with their authority, but which the facts themselves,
+critically weighed, appear to warrant.
+</p>
+<p>
+"This is what the present writer undertook to do for the
+satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good
+many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that
+there was no historical character whose motives, objects and
+feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which
+proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others.
+</p>
+<p>
+"What is now published is a fragment. No theological questions
+whatever are here discussed. Christ as the Creator of modern
+Theology and Religion will make the subject of another volume;
+which, however, the author does not hope to publish for some time
+to come. In the meanwhile, he has endeavoured to furnish an
+answer to the question, 'What was Christ's object in founding the
+Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to
+attain that object?'"
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_215">{215}</a></span>
+<p>
+On merely considering, even after a first perusal, the brief
+words which I have here extracted, it is, I think, impossible not
+to perceive how much there is that is artificial and embarrassed,
+I had almost said how much there is that is false, not only in
+the position in which the Author has placed himself at the very
+outset, but in the special intentions which he avows. To study
+the life and the aim of the life of Christ without considering
+him "as the Creator of Modern Theology and Religion," to defer
+all examination and conclusion upon this last subject; to aspire
+to know the person and the mind of Christ after thus separating
+him from his work; to inquire what he meant to accomplish when
+living, without considering what he in effect accomplished in the
+ages which followed his passage through the world; to treat him,
+in short, and to examine him as we should treat and examine a
+person unknown to us&mdash;a fossil man, so to say, of which the
+features might be traceable in some contemporary document,
+showing that he once existed, but who has left no other trace to
+supply us with argument or proof of what he intended, or what he
+performed;&mdash;this, undoubtedly, is a strange manner of proceeding,
+one which holds out very little chance of an accurate and true
+comprehension of the immense fact called Christianity, thus
+mutilated in its very cradle, Christianity of which the writer
+limits himself to a bare search after the germ in the nascent
+thought of its owner, whereas it might have been observed, and
+its nature verified in its positive and vast development.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_216">{216}</a></span>
+<p>
+This is a species of decomposition, of which the great facts of
+history and morality do not admit. We are not here, like
+anatomists, describing the autopsy of a corpse. To know and
+comprehend such facts really, we must study them in their
+different elements and in all the development of their life. They
+form a drama in which we are actors, not a manuscript which we
+are deciphering.
+</p>
+<p>
+I can easily understand how the anonymous writer of the "Ecce
+Homo" came to conceive the idea of his book, and to confine it
+within the limits which he has himself assigned: I can also
+understand his motives. Like all his contemporaries, he is placed
+and lives in presence of the grave questions agitated in these
+days respecting Christianity and its author. What was Christ?&mdash;a
+man or very God, or God and man at once? How did the divine
+nature and the human nature manifest themselves in him? Did he
+really effect the miracles assigned to him? Can there be such
+things as miracles? What are we to understand by the
+supernatural? Is God a real being personal and free, existing and
+accomplishing his works in a region beyond that which we style
+Nature? Christianity and the life of its founder inevitably
+suggest all these questions, which in our days occupy and
+violently agitate men's minds. The anonymous author of the "Ecce
+Homo" did not wish to enter upon them; nay, it was his aim to
+study and comprehend Christ without touching them at all. Is it
+because upon these grave problems he entertains himself no
+positive and decided opinions? Or, because he wished, to a
+certain extent, to accommodate himself to the state of opinion of
+some of his contemporaries, and to treat Christ as those speak of
+him who only see in him a man, who regard Christianity as a fact
+not supernatural, owing its origin, like other natural facts, to
+the sole and proper force of mankind?
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_217">{217}</a></span>
+<p>
+Upon this I can form no opinion; I neither know the anonymous
+author of the "Ecce Homo," nor the motives which actuate him:
+what is certain is, that he is quite right in entitling his book
+"Ecce Homo," for it is only the Man Christ that he has proposed
+to study, and it is by studying the Man Christ that he has
+proposed to explain Christianity.
+</p>
+<p>
+I do not know if, after having written his book, he was aware of
+the result to which it leads, but the result is in effect a
+strange one,&mdash;it is condemnatory and destructive of the
+fundamental idea of the book, it demonstrates by a sincere and
+honest, although an incomplete and superficial study of the
+facts, the impossibility of explaining either Christ by the human
+nature alone, or the Christian Religion by any merely natural
+operations of humanity.
+</p>
+<p>
+The work is divided into two parts, and contains altogether
+twenty-four chapters. The first part is devoted to the study of
+Christ personally, his peculiar character, his manner of dealing
+with men, the mission which he proposed to himself to accomplish,
+the nature of the society which he sought to found, and the
+authority which he counted upon exercising. In the second part,
+the Christian society itself, its points of resemblance to the
+systems of philosophy and its points of difference therefrom, its
+fundamental principles and positive laws, and the habits and
+sentiments which are developed by those laws, all become in turn
+the objects of the author's observations and descriptions.
+Observations often profound, descriptions often exact and
+striking, although somewhat minute and lengthy; everywhere,
+however, there breathes forth a sentiment unquestionably moral,
+and full of the gentlest sympathy for humanity.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_218">{218}</a></span>
+<p>
+All this gives to the work a real attractiveness, in spite of the
+vagueness of the ideas which reign there, and in spite of the
+perceptible incertitude of the author's conclusions upon the
+solemn questions which he approaches, but upon which he does not
+enter.
+</p>
+<p>
+I have no intention of saying more; I have not to render an
+account in detail of this book or to discuss any of the author's
+opinions or assertions upon which I may not agree with him; my
+aim is only to determine the character of his work, and to show
+plainly, first its tendency and then its insufficiency. There
+precisely is his originality; in setting out, and dealing with
+the subject of the purely human nature both of Christ and of
+Christianity, he seems not far from participating the opinions of
+Rationalistic criticism; but the more he advances, the farther he
+departs from the goal at which the Rationalists arrive: he
+appears predisposed in their favour; the process of his thought
+seems often to conform to theirs; his conclusions are not clearly
+contrary, but in effect, under the empire either of his instincts
+or under the influence of his historical and moral studies, he is
+more Christian than he appears, perhaps even more so than he
+believes himself to be; and if the firm doctrines of Christianity
+find in him no sure and declared defender, neither do they
+encounter in him the consistent hostility of a severe logician or
+the indifferentism of a mere sceptic.
+</p>
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_219">{219}</a></span>
+<p>
+There are several passages of this remarkable work which are
+particularly distinguished by these characteristics. To these I
+feel pleasure in referring the reader. They are in both parts of
+the book; that is to say, in the first part, chapter fifth,
+entitled <i>Christ's Credentials</i>, and chapter ninth,
+[Footnote 51] entitled <i>Reflections on the Nature of Christ's
+Society;</i> in the second part, chapter tenth, entitled
+<i>Christ's Legislation compared with Philosophic systems</i>,
+and chapter the eleventh, <i>The Christian Republic</i> [Footnote
+52] A perusal of these passages will, if I do not deceive myself,
+fully justify the impression which the work has made upon me, and
+satisfy the reader that I am right in what I have said of the
+author's inconsistency with respect to religion.
+</p>
+<p class="footnote">
+    [Footnote 51: Ecce Homo, ed. 1866, pp. 41-51, 81&mdash;102.]
+<br><br>
+    [Footnote 52: <i>Ibid</i>, pp. 108&mdash;119, 120&mdash;126.]
+</p>
+<p>
+Without expressly referring to any other passages I simply
+remark, that there are in this book ideas expressed and
+particular assertions made, which suggest numerous questions and
+call for many observations. I find in the entire volume a
+singular mixture of plain and practical common sense with a
+subtlety sometimes tinctured with piety, and sometimes with
+philosophy. There reigns in it, upon the nature of man and of
+human societies, an intellectual elevation, both moral and
+religious, which embarrasses and obscures itself in a long and
+painful process of refinements. It bears the impress of a
+grandeur of thought and of sentiment, without presenting them,
+however, in a form sufficiently simple and vivid. But I have no
+idea of examining or discussing here in detail this remarkable
+work; my aim is only to make the result clear to the reader, to
+which I have already referred, and indeed it appears
+incontestable. The author's aim has been to study and portray the
+human part of Christ, the human part of his doctrine as well as
+of his life. He has declared this to be his aim by entitling his
+book "Ecce Homo," and by saying that he deferred to another
+volume "every theological question, every study of Christ as the
+Creator of Theology and of Modern Religion."
+<span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_220">{220}</a></span>
+He has already done much more than he is aware; the striking
+inference from his first volume being that there was in Christ
+much more than man, and that if he had been but man, however
+superior we may picture his nature to be to that of ordinary
+humanity, the work of Christianity, such as it in fact was and
+is, would have been to him a thing not only which he could not
+have accomplished, but which he could not even have conceived.
+</p>
+<br>
+                 <h3>The End.</h3>
+
+<br><br>
+
+
+
+
+  <h3>Bradbury, Evans, And Co., Printers, Whitefriars.</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Christianity Viewed In Relation To The
+Present State Of Society And Opinion., by François Guizot
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+</pre>
+
+</body>
+
+</html>