and contests, parties are liable to two errors of equal gravity:
they may misapprehend their respective perils, or their
respective strength. Wisdom consists in a just appreciation of
these perils and of these forces, and it is upon such an
appreciation precisely that success itself depends. The actual
perils to which Catholicism is exposed are evident to all. It
owes its development and its constitution to times essentially
different from the present. It adapts itself with reluctance to
the principles required and the demands made upon it in this age.
{124}
Its antagonists think and assert that it will never so adapt
itself. Most of the lookers-on, who are indifferent or
vacillating--and their number is great--incline to believe its
antagonists in the right. This is the trial through which
Catholicism is at this moment passing. To pass through it
triumphantly, it has two great forces to rely upon; the one is,
the reaction in favor of religion occasioned by the follies and
the crimes of the Revolution, the other is, the liberal movement
that took place among the Catholics after the faults of the
Restoration, and the new opening made for them by the Government
of 1830. The Concordat built up again the edifice of the Catholic
Church; Liberalism is laboring to penetrate its sanctuary, and,
without impairing its faith, to obtain for it once more the
sympathies of civil government.
{125}
Let sincere Catholics reflect well upon their course, for here is
their main stay, here their best chance for the future; let them
maintain with a firm hand the strong constitution of their
Church, but accept frankly, and at once claim, their share also
in the liberties of their age; let them take care of their
anchors and spread their sails, for this is the conduct
prescribed to them by the supreme interest, which should be their
law, the future interests, I mean, of Christianity.
The time has been short, but the experiment has been made and is
successful. I have now enumerated the principal events connected
with religion which have taken place in the course of this
century in the bosom of the Catholic Church of France. In spite
of the obstacles, the oscillations, the deviations, and the
faults that are remarkable, the awakening of Christianity is
evident. Under the influence of the causes which I have pointed
out, Christian faith has evidently made progress; Christian
science, progress; Christian charity, as shown by works,
progress; Christian force, progress; progress incomplete and
insufficient but still progress, real, and fall of fruit,
symptomatic of vital energy and future promise.
{126}
Let not the enemies of Christianity deceive themselves; they are
waging a combat of life and of death, but their antagonist is not
in extremis!
---------------------------------
II. Awakening Of Christianity In France.
I pass without any transitional stage from the awakening of
Christianity in the Roman Catholic Church to the awakening of
Christianity in the Protestant Church. What need of a transition?
I am not quitting the Christian Church. With respect to their
claims as Christians, Protestant nations have been put to the
test. They have had, like Catholic nations, to pass through
violent struggles, to combat evil tendencies, to undergo perilous
trials; but the peculiar characteristic of Christianity, the
simultaneous action of faith and of science, of authority and
liberty, has received a glorious development in the bosom of
Protestant nations.
{127}
England and Holland, Protestant Germany, Sweden, Denmark,
Switzerland, and the United States of America, have had their
vices, their crimes, their sufferings, and their reverses; but,
after all, these States have in the last four centuries labored
with effect at the solution, in a Christian sense, of that grand
problem of human society--the moral and physical progress of the
masses, as well as the political guarantee of their rights and
liberties. And in these days the States to which I have alluded
resist effectually the shocks--now of anarchy, now of despotism,
which alternately trouble the peace of Christendom. As for the
Christian Faith itself, if, in Protestant countries, it does not
escape the attacks elsewhere made upon it, neither is it without
its powerful defenders and faithful followers. In those
countries, Christian Churches are full of adherents, and the
cause of Christianity finds every day valiant champions to devote
to its service the arms which science and liberty supply.
{128}
There is on the part of the Romanists a puerile infatuation upon
this subject, which makes them absolutely close their eyes to
facts; by an error fatal to themselves, they persist in imputing
the fermentation in society, and the abandonment of religion, to
the influence of the Protestant nations--nations among whom
these two scourges are combated with at least as much resolution
and effect as elsewhere. It is not my wish to institute
disparaging comparisons, or to foment a rivalry opposed to the
spirit of Christ's religion. Protestantism is not, in
Christendom, the last, neither is it the sole bulwark of
Christianity; but there exists none that is stronger, that offers
fewer weak points to assailants, or that is better provided with
faithful and able defenders.
{129}
At the commencement of this century, and in the years which
followed the promulgation of the Concordat, the Protestants, like
the Catholics in France, thought only of the re-establishment of
their worship and of the liberty of their faith. A liberty the
more precious in their eyes, as it followed upon two centuries of
persecutions and of sufferings of which we cannot, in these days,
read the accounts without mingled sentiments of astonishment, of
indignation, and of sorrow. Faithfully should men guard the
memory of such outrages; they would be infinitely better than
they are if they had always present to their minds the vivid
pictures of the iniquities and woes which fill the page of their
history; and evils would not so soon recur if they were not so
soon forgotten. The system of Terrorism under the Revolution had
confounded Catholic and Protestant in a common oppression; it had
abolished the forms of worship of each, denied all free
expression of opinion to Christians; and without distinction
condemned to the same scaffold the "pastors of the desert" and
the bishops of the Court of Versailles--Rabaut Saint-Etienne as
well as the nuns of Verdun.
{130}
When this terrible regime had ceased to exist, neither party had
religiously or politically any desires or pretensions that were
not extremely moderate: the one thing regarded by all as the
sovereign good was, the right to live without molestation and the
liberty to address their prayers to God in the light of day. No
other subject so seriously interested them; and they heartily
wished to show their gratitude and deference to the Government,
which, while it gave security to their bodies, permitted their
souls to breathe freely. The condition of the Protestants was in
one sense better than that of the Catholics, for the former were
now experiencing the joy, not only of a deliverance but of a
positive conquest; they had just escaped as well from the system
of Terrorism, as from the ancient régime; they had lost nothing
to regret; no revengeful feeling made them desire a reaction;
their sole aspiration was for the consolidation of their rights,
and of their new acquisitions.
{131}
"You who lived, as we did, under the yoke of intolerance," (thus
they were addressed in 1807 by M. Rabaut-Dupuy, formerly
president of the legislative body, and the last surviving son of
one of their most estimable pastors,) "you, the relics of so many
persecuted generations, behold! compare! It is no longer in the
desert and at the peril of your lives that you render to the
Creator the homage which is his due. Our temples are restored to
us, and every day beholds new ones erected. Our pastors are
recognized as public functionaries; they receive salaries from
the State; a barbarous law no longer suspends the sword over
their heads. Alas! to those whom we have survived it was
permitted, it is true, to ascend Mount Nebo, and to obtain thence
a glimpse of the promised land, but it is we alone who have taken
possession."
What wonder if, on the morrow after the Concordat, which had
procured them the free exercise of their faith and the
impartiality of the law, the Protestants acquiesced without
difficulty in the incomplete organization with which the new
system had left their Church, and that they troubled themselves
little with the attacks made upon its independence and its
dignity!
{132}
But this modest enjoyment of their new privileges did not render
them indifferent to their ancient belief, and they returned to
the open practice of Christ's faith simultaneously with the
acquisition of their liberty. In 1812, in the midst of the
profound silence which reigned throughout the Empire, a professor
of the faculty of Protestant theology at Montauban, M. Grasc,
attacked, in his teaching, the dogma of the Trinity. Earnest
remonstrances were instantly made from the general body of the
Protestants in France; a great number of consistories, among
others those of Nîmes, of Montpellier, Montauban, Alais, Anduze,
Saint Hippolyte, pastors and laity, addressed their complaints,
some to the "Doyen" of the faculty of theology, others to M. Gasc
himself, demanding, all of them, the maintenance of the doctrine
of the Protestant Church.
{133}
The grand master of the University, M. de Fontanes, "earnestly
invited the professor not to depart from it," and M. Gasc himself
admitted that his teaching ought to be in conformity. The spirit
which had animated the Reformation in France in the sixteenth
century was still living in the nineteenth; and under the
new-born system of liberty, the Awakening of Christianity
announced itself by a summons to the faith.
When, under the Restoration, France had regained her political
liberty, it was not long before that liberty bore its natural
fruits in French Protestantism; it was accompanied, both on
religious and political subjects, by the manifestation of
discordant ideas and discordant tendencies, which were soon to
struggle for victory.
{134}
As at epochs of great intellectual crises eminent men emerge who
represent dominant ideas, so now M. Samuel Vincent and M. Daniel
Encontre immediately appeared in the Protestant Church: both were
pastors, and each worthily represented one of the two principles
which naturally develop themselves in the bosom of Protestantism,
faith in traditions and the right of private judgment; principles
different without being contradictory; principles which may
subsist in peace provided they remain respectively in their
proper places, and within the limits of their rights. M. Samuel
Vincent was a man of a mind remarkably comprehensive and of great
versatility and fecundity; but his habits at the same time were
those of a student, fitting him rather for intellectual
meditation than qualifying him either for expansive sympathies or
for action; he was versed in the philosophy and erudite criticism
of Germany, at that time novel and rare to France; he made the
essence of Christianity, according to his own expression, "to
consist in the liberty of inquiry." [Footnote 14:]
[Footnote 14: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M.
Samuel Vincent. 2e édition, p. 15. Paris, 1859.]
{135}
He rejected all written articles of faith, every limited idea of
religious unity, and claimed within the Church, for both pastors
and congregation, the greatest latitude in matters of opinion and
of teaching. But when he clung closely to this view of the
subject, and was pressed to indicate the extreme point to which,
within the Church itself, the diversity of men's individual
beliefs might be carried, his embarrassment became extreme, for
he had too much sense to admit that this diversity had no limit,
and that a Church, whether Protestant or not, could exist without
certain articles of faith common to all its members, and
recognized by them all. "Protestantism," said he himself, "must
not be merely a negation; it should also have its real and
positive side; it must be beyond all things a religion; that is
to say, it must be in the possession of the means to endure and
of the means to edify men by the propagation of a doctrine
benevolent and Christian. ... Christianity is the basis of
ecclesiastical teaching." [Footnote 15]
[Footnote 15: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M.
Samuel Vincent, pp. 17, 22.]
{136}
When, after having laid down this principle, M. Samuel Vincent
inquired how the Protestant Church could remain a Church, and a
Christian Church, in the midst of the independence of individual
beliefs, he found no other way out of the difficulty than "to
determine," he said, "by conventions, oral and unwritten, a
certain number of opinions that each man should, in the interest
of the general peace, be entreated to keep to himself." [Footnote
16]
[Footnote 16: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, p. 24.]
How strange a proceeding, how difficult of realization, to
prescribe with once voice silence and liberty! M. Samuel Vincent
did not attempt to determine what those opinions were which, in
order to maintain the existence of a Christian Church in the
midst of the broadest system of free inquiry, "each man should be
entreated to keep to himself."
{137}
As for himself, he professed his faith in the supernatural, in
the revelation of the Old and of the New Testaments, in the
inspiration of the Scriptures, in the divinity of Jesus Christ;
in the grand historical facts as well as in the moral precepts of
the Gospel; he was one of the pastors, too, who signed the
remonstrance of the consistory of Nîmes, for the irregularity in
preaching of which Professor Grasc had been guilty. Did M. Samuel
Vincent regard every opinion contrary to these great evangelical
doctrines as an opinion which each man should, in the interest of
the general peace, be entreated to keep to himself? I doubt
whether he would have dared to engraft upon the liberty of
judgment such a reservation; but I doubt at the same time if he
would have persisted in regarding as true and faithful pastors of
the Protestant Church, men who should have openly deserted and
combated, in its most essential foundations, that Christian faith
which he himself professed. He dreaded almost equally "unity
defined," and "dissent declared." He would have remained in the
embarrassment into which those inevitably fall who neither accept
one basis and manifesto of a common faith, nor admit the moral
necessity of a separation into free and distinct Churches when a
common faith does not exist. [Footnote 17]
[Footnote 17: The principal works of M. Samuel Vincent are:
1. Vues sur le protestantisme en France, première édition. 2
vols. 8vo. 1829. A second edition, in 1 vol. 12mo., was
published in 1859 by M. Prévost-Paradol.
2. Observations sur l'unité religieuse et observations sur la
voie d'autorité appliquée a la religion, (1820,) contre
l'Essai sur l'indifférance en matière de religion de l'Abbé
de la Mennais.
3. Meditations ou recueil de sermons, 1829.
4. Mélanges de religion de morale et de critique sacrée. A
periodical published from 1820 to 1825.]
{138}
No such embarrassment was experienced by M. Daniel Encontre when
he began his career to serve the movement of awakened
Christianity in the bosom of French Protestantism. I will not
venture here to cite the precise words, harsh and severe,
employed by him on the 13th of December, 1816, at Montauban, in
his capacity of "Doyen" of the faculty of Protestant Theology,
respecting those termed by him "the pretended ministers of the
Gospel, disbelievers in the Gospel and in the divinity of Jesus
Christ."
{139}
He regarded harmony of faith and language, harmony between
shepherd and flock, as the first law of religious society. Born
in a grotto of La Vaunage, to which his mother had fled to escape
from the flames of persecution; devoted from his birth by his
father, the Pastor Pierre Encontre, to the service of a "preacher
in the desert," M. Daniel Encontre belonged to that class of
indomitable Protestants who cling to their faith through all the
perils, sufferings, and sacrifices which it entails. His first
steps in life seemed to indicate in him other aptitudes, and to
promise for him a different career. After having studied divinity
at Lausanne and at Geneva, and been consecrated by his father
himself to the ministry of the Gospel "in an assembly in the
desert," he seemed to doubt his own vocation; for while
performing the functions of his ministry he devoted himself to
the study of mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the classical
languages, with an enthusiasm eager to become familiar with every
department of knowledge, and encountering no hinderance from,
internal obstacles or from preconceived opinions.
{140}
Having established himself at Montpellier, where his taste for
science found subjects of gratification, he led there, during the
dark days of the Revolution, a life very obscure, and at the same
time most laborious; giving lessons to the master masons upon
stone-cutting, imparting instruction, rendering the aids of
religion to Protestants, celebrating the baptismal and marriage
services, and pursuing at the same time his labors in geometry,
botany, philosophy, divinity, literature, and even poetry. When
order began to be re-established, he was led by his own natural
tastes and the counsel of his friends to select as his career
that of public instruction. He competed for and obtained, first
the appointment of professor of literature at the École Centrale
of Montpellier; then that of the higher mathematics, at the Lycée
and in the faculty of science, of which he was nominated "Doyen."
{141}
As his merits established themselves by repeated proofs, his
reputation increased; the papers of learned societies were filled
with his contributions, and the École Polytechnique with his
pupils. "I have met in our department," said Fourcroy, "two or
three heads equal to his, but not one superior." M. de Candolle
gladly selected him to aid him in his "Researches respecting the
Botany of the Ancients;" and M. de Fontanes has more than once
spoken of him to me as one of the men who most honored the
University. But in him, neither the mathematician, the botanist,
nor the philologist took precedence of the Christian. At one time
as expounder of Moses and of Genesis, [Footnote 18] at another as
a writer defending the Apostles, accused of being a copyist of
Plato. [Footnote 19] he neglected no occasion of placing his
scientific attainments at the service of Christianity;
[Footnote 18: Dissertation sur le vrai système du monde
comparé avec le récit que Moïse fait de la création.
Montpellier, 1807.]
[Footnote 19: Lettre à M. Combes-Dounous, auteur d'un Essai
historique sur Platon. Paris, 1811.
A remarkable essay of M. Daniel Encontre, "sur le Péché
original," was published, after his death, in 1822, and he
left a great number of manuscripts, among others a "Traité
sur l'Église," (600 pages,) written in Latin; "Etudes
théologiques," a Hebrew Grammar, a "Cours de philosophie," a
"Cours de litérature Française," a "Flore biblique," several
"Memoires de mathématiques transcendantes," etc. As a teacher
of transcendental mathematics at Montpellier he had as pupil
M. Auguste Comte, the head of the "École positiviste," who,
in spite of the profound diversity of their opinions,
regarded it as a duty to dedicate to him in 1856 his
treatise, "Sur la Synthèse subjective," in testimony of
admiration and of gratitude.]
{142}
and when, in 1814, he was asked to quit Montpellier, to abandon
his habits, his tastes, and his friends, for the chair of the
professorship of divinity at Montauban, where he was to fulfill
the functions of "Doyen," he sacrificed without hesitation the
enjoyment of his life to his religious vocation, and applied
himself with unceasing energy to the warlike activity of a
Christian professor, until the day when, overcome by fatigue and
sickness, he accorded to himself the melancholy satisfaction of
returning to Montpellier, in order to die near the tomb of a
beloved daughter, who had long aided him in his labors.
{143}
The destinies of Protestantism in France have, to a singular
degree, been at once varied and uniform, confused and simple.
After having in the sixteenth century valiantly disputed the
victory, it was vanquished, decimated, expelled. But it resisted,
and survived not only its defeat, but the gradual process of its
enfeeblement and its expulsion. In the course of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries the French Protestants lost the
protection of the laws, their secure sanctuaries, their great
chiefs, their great divines, their great writers; but they
preserved nevertheless their faith and their religious honor. In
the times that ensued their successors remained faithful to the
belief and the customs of their fathers; even persecuted and
condemned to death, having their property confiscated, or become
tenants of prisons and laborers in the galleys, they found in
their very sufferings a resource to confirm them in the
principles of Protestant piety.
{144}
Theological controversies died away from among them, leaving
behind them the fundamentals of Christianity--living and guiding
principles.
Among the higher and wealthier classes, the philosophical ideas
of the eighteenth century made also their way; the great liberal
movement filled the Protestant section of the nation with joy,
and commanded its sympathy without detaching it from its
religious habits and traditions. In its members faith had ceased
to be erudite; the popular Protestant sentiment had been always
profoundly biblical and evangelical. Freer and more fortunately
situated than their fathers, the French Protestants now anxiously
desired to remain, as they had been, Christians; and when, in
1790, Rabaut Saint-Etienne, who succeeded the Abbé de Montesquieu
as President of the Constituent Assembly, wrote to his aged
father, the Pastor Paul Rabaut, "The President of the National
Assembly is at your feet," he manifested to the humble and
zealous preacher in the assemblies of the desert, the pride at
once of a politician, the piety of a son, and the fidelity of a
Protestant.
{145}
M. Daniel Encontre was, at the commencement of the nineteenth
century, the faithful representative of this traditionally
religious character of French Protestantism; just as M. Samuel
Vincent was the well-meaning and sincere introducer to it of the
science and criticism of the Germans. The former corresponded
more closely to the pious and national spirit of Protestant
France of the olden times; the latter to the tendencies, at once
novel and indefinitely latitudinarian, of a foreign philosophy
and a foreign erudition. Doubtless, neither measured the range of
the religious crisis of which they were themselves the symptoms;
neither foresaw that within the bosom of Protestantism that
crisis was to be marked by an avowed struggle between Rationalism
in its progress and Christianity in its reaction.
{146}