Switzerland, M. Alexandre Vinet was of French extraction; he
belongs to France as much as to Switzerland, for he knew, and
understood, and loved France as much as he did Switzerland. He
served, too, the cause of religious liberty, and the Christian
reaction, in France not less than in Switzerland. A delicate
child, son of a poor and an austere school-master, who destined
him to the obscure life of a village clergyman, he manifested
from the commencement of his laborious career an ardent taste for
literature and for study, which promised him a rich reward in the
intellectual enjoyment of the chef-d'oeuvres of ancient and
modern literature. He was found upon one occasion in his little
chamber in a fit of enthusiasm and affected to tears by a perusal
of the "Cid." At the age of twenty he became Professor of French
Literature at Bâle; and there he devoted himself to the service
of every candidate upon the Rhine or upon the Swiss Alps who
required to be taught to comprehend and admire the great writers
of France of whatever age, and in whatever department of
literature.
{171}
Philosophers and orators, prose-writers and poets, Christians or
Freethinkers, Catholics or Protestants, Conservatives or
Reformers, Classicists or Romanticists--all the men who have
constituted the intellectual and literary glory of France,
obtained in this fervent Methodist of the Valdenses an admirer as
warm as he was intelligent and impartial. The prevailing
characteristic of M. Vinet's literary essays and criticisms is
their geniality; and wherever he encounters any spark or trace of
the true or the beautiful, under whatever banner they appear, and
however they may be mingled with opinions otherwise shocking to
his feelings, he is at once attracted and moved, and he admires
and praises with enthusiasm. His was a mind of comprehensive
sympathies, open to every impression, keen to appreciate, always
ready to enjoy everything that deserved to give pleasure, even
although it might be only momentarily and in passing.
{172}
This passionate admirer of the beautiful, this critic, so
liberal-minded and so impartial, was a sound and uncompromising
moralist, as well as a pious and firm Christian. The predominant
idea of all his literary judgments is moral; and this determines
the tone of his criticism, and the impression which it leaves
behind it, without ever rendering it either harsh, or illiberal,
or narrow-minded. In the sphere of positive belief, without
importing into controversies between believer and believer any
microscopic criticism of detail, M. Vinet has never, upon the
divine origin and the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, had the
least hesitation, never made the smallest concession; he grapples
directly with the most specious and the most popular objections
of his adversaries, and combats them with a conviction the
expression of which becomes more and more eloquent the clearer
and the more complete its manifestation. "To attempt to
distinguish morality from dogma," he says, "is to attempt to
distinguish a river from its source.
{173}
The Christian dogma is at its outset a morality, although a
Christian one. Just as God, in the creed of Christianity, reveals
himself under a form that nature did not announce, Christian
morality, in its turn, invests itself with a character that
nature would never have impressed upon it. Man finding his own
inability to make himself a religion, God came to aid him in his
weakness. It is now rather more than eighteen centuries since, in
an obscure corner of the world, there appeared a man. I do not
say that a long series of prophets had announced the coming of
that man; that a long series of miracles had marked with the seal
of God the nation where he was to be born, and even the prophecy
which foretold him; that, in a word, an imposing mass of evidence
surrounds and authenticates him. I say merely that that man
preached a religion. That religion is not natural religion; the
dogmas of the existence of God and of the soul's immortality are
everywhere taken for granted in his discourses--never taught,
never proved.
{174}
Neither are the ideas which he teaches deduced logically from the
primitive axioms of reason; that which he teaches, that which
forms the substance of his doctrine, embraces subjects which
confound the reason, and to which the reason has neither way nor
access; he preaches a God on earth, a God man, a God poor, a God
crucified; he preaches wrath involving the innocent, mercy
exempting the guilty from all condemnation, God the victim of
man, and man forming one person with God; he preaches a new
birth, without which man can never be saved; he preaches the
sovereignty of God's grace, and the plenitude of the liberty of
man. I do not in any way qualify his teaching; I give them to you
as they are, and without disguise; I seek not to justify them.
You may, if you please, feel surprise, you may take offense;
scruple not to do so. But when you have to your heart's content
wondered at their strangeness, I on my side will propose to you
another subject for your wonder.
{175}
These strange dogmas conquered the world. In their very infancy
they invaded learned Athens, rich Corinth, haughty Rome. They
gathered together 'Confessors' from workshops, from prisons, from
schools, from the courts of justice, and from thrones. Conquerors
of civilization, they triumphed over barbarism; they made to pass
under the same yoke the degraded Roman, the savage Sicambrian.
The forms of society have changed; society has been dissolved and
moulded afresh. They alone have endured in their integrity. No
other doctrine, whether of philosophy or of religion, lasted:
each had its time; each time its idea; and, as a celebrated
writer has said, the religious sentiment, abandoned to itself,
chose for itself moulds in accordance with the time, which it
broke when the time was no longer there. But the dogma of the
Cross persisted in recurring.
{176}
Had it only taken possession of a certain class of persons it
would have been much, it would perhaps have been even
inexplicable; but you find followers of the Cross in the camp and
in civil life, among the rich and among the poor, among the bold
and among the timid, among the learned and among the ignorant.
This dogma is good for all, everywhere, always; it never grows
old. The religion of the Cross appears nowhere in arrear of
civilization; on the contrary, far as civilization may progress,
it ever finds Christianity in advance. Suppose not that a
complaisant Christianity will ever cancel any article or expunge
any idea to accommodate itself to the age: no, it derives its
strength from its inflexibility, and needs not make any surrender
to be in harmony with what is beautiful, legitimate, true; for it
is in itself the type of them all. Still it is not a religion
which flatters man; and the worldly, by keeping aloof, show
plainly enough that Christianity is a strange doctrine. Those who
dare not reject it strive to render it palatable. They strip it
of what offends them--of its myths, as they are pleased to style
them; they almost make out of Christ's doctrine a
_rationalism_.
{177}
But, singular to say, once a rationalism it has no longer any
force; in this respect resembling one of the most marvelous
creatures in the animate world, to which it is death to lose its
sting. The _strange_ dogmas disappear, but with them all
zeal, fervor, sanctity, charity, disappear also; the salt of the
earth has lost its savor, and we know not by what means to
restore it. But, on the other hand, do you learn that somewhere
or other there is an awakening of Christians, that Christianity
is resuscitating, that faith shows signs of life, that zeal
abounds? Ask not in what soil these precious plants are
springing; you may pronounce yourself: it is in the rude and
rugged soil of orthodoxy, in the shade of the mysteries which
confound human reason, and of which human reason would like so
much to get rid, ... Some passages in the fair work of M.
Saint-Marc Girardin upon dramatic literature might, at least I
fear so, lead to the conclusion that Christianity is, in its
essence, only the result of a natural progress of man's mind, a
gradual development of ancient wisdom.
{178}
Such, for instance, is the passage where the author tells us that
the Greeks were advancing step by step toward Christian
spiritualism. We regret that M. Saint-Marc Girardin did not say
in what sense he understood this, and within what limits. We hope
that he will not see in us the champion of a captious orthodoxy,
if we say that nothing so much weakens the authority of
Christianity, that nothing prejudices in men's minds its cause
more, than to treat it as a link in the chain, which chain in
reality it severed. That events, that is, Providence, did
aforehand hollow a bed in the regions of the west for this divine
river, what believer, however rigid, would ever entertain any
scruple in admitting? But still it is essential that we should
not misapprehend the source whence that river welled forth.
{179}
No natural development of events, either among the Jews or among
the Greeks, can account for the existence of Christianity.
Whatever the progress made by the ancients, there never was a
time when there existed not an infinity between their ideas, and
the ideas of Christianity; and infinity alone can fill up the
gulf between. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in
thinking the contrary--if they succeed in causing the
Supernatural to assume a place in one of the compartments of the
Philosophy of History. As far as we are concerned, we would
prefer for the Christian religion the most outrageous denial, to
an admiration circumscribed within such limits. Christ's faith is
nothing if not, like Melchisedek without earthly parent here
below, and without genealogy." [Footnote 26]
[Footnote 26: Essai sur la manifestation des convictions
religieuses, p. 85. Premiers discours, pp. 14, 50, 53.
Littérature Française, vol. iii, p. 623.]
{180}
Whoever indicated with greater distinctness the keystone in the
edifice of Christianity, or ever clung to it more closely? M.
Vinet occupied himself in turn with freedom of conscience and of
man's thought, with the faith of Christ, and with the literature
of France. These three subjects became the passions of his life,
stirring his soul, though at unequal depths. But of these three
only one, the passion for literature, was a source to him of
tranquil and unmitigated enjoyment. In his advocacy of man's
liberty and of Christianity, M. Vinet had to pass not only
through the ordeal of intellectual labors and combats, but
through the solicitudes and sorrows of life. The defender of the
liberty of forms of worship, crowned as such by the "Societé
Français de la Morale Chrétienne," lived to see this liberty
attacked in his native Switzerland, at once by popular fury and
by civil authority. The fervent promoter of the Christian
reaction, beheld one hundred and sixty evangelical pastors of the
Canton of the Vaud, his companions in this pious work, forced to
quit their "Chairs" in order to preserve their faith.
{181}
And it was in sickness, and at the approach of death, that M.
Vinet had to undergo all this. Neither his faith nor the
tranquillity of his soul was disturbed. He continued, to his last
hour, to be the active champion of liberty, the faithful servant
of Christ, the eloquent admirer and commentator upon French
literature, which he followed in all its phases, whether calm or
stormy, whether pure or defiled. "After all," so he wrote in
1845, "I am not one of those who despair; God, without any
violence to our freedom of action, rather by that freedom itself,
conducts us to the unknown shores. The ports at which we land do
not all of them afford secure mooring; we know something of that
even in this little country. Our progress will be slow, and amid
storms; but the circle of universal truth will be completed, and
man's sense of moral right and wrong will be improved, at the
same time that man's science will be enriched.
{182}
I should feel horror if I thought that _Some One_ is not at
the center of all this movement, holding all its elements in his
hand; _Some One_ to whom, whether they know him or do not
know him, the aspirations of all creatures ascend in their
sorrow, and whom they instinctively salute with the sweet
reassuring name of 'Father.'" [Footnote 27]
[Footnote 27: Notice sur M. Alexandra Vinet, par M. E.
Souvestre, published in the Magazin Pittoresque de 1848, p.
81.
The principal works of M. Alexandre Vinet are:
1. Traité et Polémique sur la liberté des cultes. 1826, 1852.
2. Discours sur quelques sujets religieux. 1831, 1853.
3. Essais de philosophic et de morale religieuse. 1837.
4. Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, et
sur la séparation de l'Église et de État. 1842, 1858.
5. Études et méditations évangéliques. 1847, 1849, 1851.
6. Études sur Pascal. 1848, 1856.
7. Chrestomathie Française, Histoire de la littérature
Française au XVIII siècle, et Études sur la littérature
Française au XIX siècle. 1829, 1849, 1853, etc.
He wrote, besides, numerous short pieces, and articles in
reviews and journals, suggested by topics of the day.]
Upon a single point, the relations of Church and State, his usual
comprehensiveness of view and independence of thought appeared to
abandon M. Vinet.
{183}
Justly struck and afflicted by his own experience of the
inconveniences of a strict bond between Church and State,
disgusted at the servility and falsity which frequently are,
sometimes on the part of the State, sometimes on the part of the
Church, its results, he concluded that in all cases all alliance
between the two conditions of society is radically vicious; and
he declared their entire separation a general and absolute
principle, the sole reasonable and just system, the sole
efficacious guarantee of truth and of liberty in spirituals or
temporals. He thus ignored, it appears to me, the natural causes
which produce, and the human motives which sanction, a certain
alliance between societies civil and ecclesiastical; he ignored
also the inestimable advantages which, at certain times and in
certain circumstances, each may derive, and has actually derived,
from that alliance. In the United States of America, the entire
separation of the State and of the different Churches was
necessary and salutary, for it was the spontaneous consequence of
the condition of men's minds, and of the position of society.
{184}
In England, in spite of the acts of injustice, and the ills
engendered by the intimate union of the state with a Church
legally constituted and having exclusive privileges, the
coexistence of the Church of England with the freedom, more and
more every day complete and recognized, of the Churches of the
Dissenters, was for the Christian religion a potent principle of
life, of force, and of durability.
And if we go back to the ancient history of Europe, who can doubt
that at the fall of the Roman Empire, if the State and the Church
had not, although distinct institutions, been allied, the
development of Christianity would have been far less energetic,
and its conquest of its barbarous conquerors far more
problematical? This is, I repeat, a question not of principle,
but of time, of place, of circumstance, and of condition of
society. A complete separation of Church and State may be good
and practicable; it is neither the only good system, nor is it
always a practicable system.
{185}
An alliance of the two upon certain fixed terms has its
inconveniences and its perils, but its effects may be also very
salutary; it may be essential, and does not of necessity exclude
religious sincerity or religious liberty. M. Vinet, in discussing
the subject, lost sight of the general history of human
societies, and attached too much importance to the specious and
transient facts which he had before his eyes.
If M. Vinet were now living, he might in his own country behold
two fair examples of the good results of the mixed systems which
he so absolutely condemned. In the Cantons of the Vaud and of
Geneva, after the violent and painful contests to which I have
above referred, a dissenting Independent Church was established
by the side of a Church recognized and supported by the State. In
neither canton was this establishment a temporary expedient, the
fruit of a momentary ardor; the Independent Church has
consolidated and developed itself; it endures and prospers. Like
the Establishment, it has its pastors, its churches, its
solemnities, its schools for general and for superior
instruction.
{186}
I have before me facts and figures which prove its vitality and
its progress. And not only did the Established Church finally
acquiesce in the peaceable existence of the independent Church,
it also profited by it, and its salutary influence has been
frankly acknowledged by its worthiest pastors. In Switzerland, as
in England, Scotland, and Holland, and in our days more easily
and more promptly than in ancient times, the existence on the one
side of a national Church recognized by the State, has given to
the different forms of Christian belief a stability and a dignity
which have secured its permanent effects upon succeeding
generations; the existence, on the other side, of independent
Churches, and the religious emulation between the two
establishments, have turned in both to the profit of faith and of
piety.
{187}
M. Adolphe Monod seemed, even more than M. Vinet, to promise by
natural bent of his character, and by the incidents of his life,
to become the champion of an entire separation of Church and
State. At the very commencement of his career, he suffered from a
Government based upon their connection. Pastor at Lyons, in 1831,
of the established Protestant Church, he was dismissed from these
functions by the Consistory of that city, as too exacting in his
orthodoxy, and as troubling by his exigencies the peace of his
Church. He then became the founder and pastor of a small
dissenting and independent Church at Lyons. The energy with which
he expressed his convictions, and the excellence of his
preaching, rapidly spread, and increased his renown for piety.
Numerous Protestants manifested the desire to see him once more
within the pale of the national Church. He made no objection; a
Chair becoming vacant in the Faculty of Montauban, M. Adolphe
Monod was nominated, and from 1836 to 1847 he both lectured and
preached at Montauban with a commanding ability that made itself
felt, not only among the majority of the students, but propagated
its influences to a distance among the principal centers of
French Protestantism.
{188}
In 1847 he was summoned to Paris as the suffragan of another
pastor, M. Juillerat. Nor did he scruple to accept this secondary
and precarious situation. He had full confidence in the divine
vocation, and was firmly resolved to proceed to any place where
the faith of Christ might demand his services. He had, in the
evangelical chair, even more success at Paris than at Lyons and
Montauban. When, after the Revolution of 1848, a general assembly
of the Reformed Churches of France assembled for the purposes of
considering their institutions and discussing points of common
interest, a grave question was raised, and became the subject of
warm and lengthened debate: Should French Protestants proclaim
their ancient Confession of Faith, that of Rochelle, or should
they proclaim a confession of new articles; or lastly, should
they remain passive and do nothing? some, and particularly their
pastor, M. Frederic Monod, elder brother of M. Adolphe Monod,
announced their determination to retire from the assembly and
from the established Church, unless they adopted a Confession of
Faith in accordance with the traditional principles of the
Reformation.
{189}
The inertness of the hesitating and timid assembly was equivalent
to a refusal, and they did in effect retire. To the great
surprise and great regret of his adversaries, M. Adolphe Monod,
although favorable to the principles of the Confession of Faith,
did not follow the example by retiring; he even succeeded his
brother as titular pastor in the Church of Paris, and published
to the world the motives of his conduct. [Footnote 28]
[Footnote 28: In his work entitled, Pourquoi je demeure dans
l'Église établie.]
{190}
His motives were good, such as a man of elevated character and
energetic purpose might conceive and might avow. In spite of
their importance, the questions which concern the organization of
the Church and its eternal relations were, in the eyes of M.
Adolphe Monod, only secondary considerations, subject in a
certain measure to time and to circumstance. For him the question
of faith was supreme; and he occupied himself infinitely more
with the spiritual state of souls than with ecclesiastical
government. To the serious thinker the Christian faith is quite
different from any conception or conviction of the understanding;
it is a general condition of the whole man; it is the very life
of the soul; not merely its actual life, but the source and the
guarantee of its future life. The faith in Christ Jesus, the
Redeemer, the Saviour, makes the life of a Christian; and the
life of a Christian is a preparation for an eternal salvation.
With this faith penetrating to his very marrow, and with the
intimate persuasion of its consequences, the duty of giving a
voice to that faith, and of diffusing it, was the dominant idea,
the permanent passion, of M. Adolphe Monod.
{191}
He had not himself been always firmly settled in his religious
convictions; he had been a prey to great moral perplexities, and
to attacks of profound melancholy. When he had escaped from
these--or rather, to use his own words, "when God had become
really the master of his heart"--he had no other thought but that
of bringing other souls to the same state, and of rousing them to
a faith in Christ, with a view to their eternal salvation. The
position which he regarded as of all the most appropriate for
himself, was one in which he could most profitably forward this
work. When in 1848 the question was thus put to him, and when he
had been convinced both by his past observation of the Protestant
Church of France during the last twenty years, and by his own
experience of it, that the established Church offered to him in
his Christian purpose the vastest field of exertion, and the best
chance of success, he did not hesitate to remain in it. "I find
in the situation," he said, "grave disorders, of which it is my
duty to seek unceasingly the reform; but that situation has also
its hopeful side.
{192}
A long development of my ideas would be superfluous; let us
confine ourselves to some striking facts. Try and reckon how many
orthodox pastors our Church possessed when the reaction began in
1819, and then make a similar calculation for 1849. I do not mean
to fix the precise numbers; but is it too much to say, that in
the course of a single generation the number of orthodox pastors
is ten, fifteen, twenty times perhaps as great? This applies to
the clergy, of whom everywhere the immense influence is felt.
Among their congregations it is less easy to follows things; but
the attentive observer does not fail to mark similar indications.
Behold our religious societies: are not the most popular among
them those which hoisted most manfully the colors of orthodoxy?
And if some are in a languishing condition, is it not because
they offered in this respect fewest guarantees? Evidently the
first condition of existence for our religious institutions of
charity is sound doctrine.
{193}
My readers, permit me to question you still more closely. Throw
your eyes upon the eight or ten families best known to you,
beginning with your own, and compare what they are now with what
they were in 1819; contrast their occupations, tastes,
sacrifices, and intercourse, the modes of education, the books
read, friendships formed, and so on; and then declare, thankless
ones, if God has allowed you to be without encouragement."
[Footnote 29]
[Footnote 29: Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie, par
M. Adolphe Monod, pp. 25-32. Paris, 1849.]
M. Adolphe Monod had good reason to draw attention to this
general progress of Christianity; but there was another progress
also deserving notice, that which he had himself made, and which
he was making more and more every day, in the attainment of the
true and distinguishing character of a Christian.
{194}