CHAPTER IV

THE RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT OF HUMANITY

1. _The Social Element in Religion_

Religion is not merely a phenomenon of the individual and inner life:

it is also a social and historical phenomenon. Psychology lays bare

its root, but history alone reveals its power and range.

This social action of religion springs from its very essence. The

phrase "communion of souls" is of religious origin and hue. The thing

expressed by it--one of the most wonderful phenomena of collective

moral life--is never perfectly realised save in religion and by

religion. An identic faith, a common act of adoration, not merely

brings souls together: it makes them live in each other, blends them

into one soul in which each of them finds itself, multiplied, as it

were, by all the rest. That is what is properly called "edification,"

by which I mean that feeling of joy, of force, of fulness of life,

produced by the common act of worship in those who sincerely take part

in it. That is the reason why men of the same religion have no more

imperious need than that of praying and worshipping together. State

police have always failed to confine growing religious sects within the

sanctuary or the home. Their members have never been resigned to this

comparatively solitary life; they have braved all interdicts and

persecutions in order to turn it into social life and fraternal

communion.

God, it is said, is the place where spirits blend. In rising towards

Him man of necessity passes beyond the limits of his own individuality.

He feels instinctively that the principle of his being is also the

principle of the life of his brethren; that that which gives him safety

must give it to all. In the same Religion, souls the most diverse,

being affected in the same manner, become related to each other, and

form a real family, united by closer, stronger bonds than those of

blood. The religious life is a higher region. Those who rise into it

feel the barriers fall which hemmed in their existence. They become

free; they penetrate the souls of their neighbours and feel themselves

to be penetrated by them; and all live one life, which, although it be

larger and almost universal, is none the less very personal and very

intense. Have you ever been present in a crowd excited and exalted by

religious enthusiasm? Have you felt the contagion? Then you can never

forget it. It is said the early Christians were of one heart and one

soul. Their community of faith, of hope, of love, went so far as to

make them forget the idea of property and put their goods in common.

In how many monastic orders or mystic sects has not this same need of

equality and unity gone to the point of identity in costume and

deportment, and even of the loss of name and personal individuality?

It is not surprising therefore that religion, capable of creating in

modern times those moral societies called "Churches," should, in all

ages, have been the strongest bond of natural societies, primitive

families, savage tribes, great empires, civilised peoples. The first

stone of every hearth was a sacred stone. The first tombstone was a

monument of piety, and burial is an essentially religious ceremony.

Before they were regarded as protectors without, tribal gods were the

internal bonds of the tribe itself. All the individuals of the tribe

saw in the god a father and an ever present head, so that religion came

to double by this moral kinship their blood relationship. In this

matter the great civilisations do not differ from the rest. All have a

religious soul that differentiates and explains them. It is not merely

morals and philosophy that are affected by religion, but literature,

art, politics, social economy, and in a general way the whole destiny

of men. The secret of a race is hidden in its religion. It is there

that the forces of life and resistance to the causes of dissolution are

concentrated.... Let us enter with deep piety therefore on the history

of religion on the earth.... That history is still in embryo. The

comparative study of religions has arisen within our time; it is still

at its beginnings.... The idea of religious progress is a great and

luminous idea, but it is not possible to apply it to all the details of

history. Progress has not taken place along a single or continuous

line.... On four or five points the progress is undeniable; it must

suffice to point them out and mark their direction in order that we may

foresee the supreme end to which this faltering and laborious march is

tending.

In religions there are differences of degree and differences of kind:

the one mark in the scale of evolution the successive movements of the

religious consciousness in time; the others express the diversity and

simultaneity of religions in space. The first are explained by

inequalities of moral development; the second by variety of races,

climates, civilisations. Take, for example, the Hebrew tradition;

follow it in broad outline, and you will note religious forms which

give birth one to another and constitute an historical development--the

religion of the ancient Beni-Israel, prophetism, rabbinical pharisaism,

Christianity, Mohammedanism: there, in a continuous evolution, you have

what may be called differences of degree. But, on the other hand,

consider the Mongolian or Chinese religions, those of ancient Mexico,

of India, Egypt, or Greece: you have differences of kind which you

cannot classify in a single scale. And, as some of these peoples have

disappeared, and others been arrested in their growth, and as they have

never marched abreast, it is impossible to compare them or to put into

one category the religious forms which their history presents. But

some attempt must be made to trace them out.

2. _Progress in the Outward Forms of Religion_

In this universal religious evolution the progress that is most

apparent because most outward is the enlargement of the form of

religion itself, the movement, often interrupted but never stopped,

from the narrowest particularism to the most human universalism.... It

is characteristic of all religion to propagate itself: that is the

implicit affirmation that it is made for all men. Even when it is

abased to the level of a recipe and of a magical secret that is hidden

with a jealous selfishness, or even from a ferocious patriotism, there

is the avowal that it might be serviceable to others.... But we must

see how this passage from the particular to the universal is effected.

The beginnings of religion are everywhere the same. The number of

cults at first is almost endless, but they vary very little from each

other. It is impossible to write the history of barbarous religions,

and it is useless to enumerate them. Nothing is more monotonous than

the descriptions that have been attempted of them. Their most

characteristic feature is, that at first they are confined to the

family. Religion at this stage is a matter of instinct, and

instinctive matters are always uniform. In mental life, diversity only

appears with reflection and consciousness.

To the domestic and tribal succeeds the national stage of religion.

Political federations are formed, and the religious as well as the

social consciousness of the people is enlarged. This phenomenon is

seen in Greece in its most interesting form. The religion of Greece,

as witness the Homeric poems, was a confederation of local cults and

deities, just as Hellas was a federation of previously unconnected

tribes.

The conquests of Alexander and the extension of the Roman Empire

greatly enlarged the horizon of ancient thought. The philosophers in

the time of Cicero and Seneca had already risen from the national idea

to that of the human race. It must not be supposed, however, that the

universal religion sprang from the philosophic or religious syncretism

of the later ages of Graeco-Roman civilisation. The dissolution of the

national religions had preceded that of political nationalities, and,

so far from creating anything universal, the morbid curiosity of minds

denuded of all national tradition abandoned itself to individual

superstitions the most exotic and monstrous. Christianity was born,

not in Greece, in the schools, nor in Rome, at the foot of the throne

of the Caesars, but in a race the narrowest, the most fanatical and

intolerant that ever existed, and in the heart of a Son of Israel whom

no extra-Palestinian influence seems ever to have reached.

Nowhere is a universal religion the fruit of an unconscious evolution,

produced by the action of fatal and external laws. It presents itself

everywhere as an individual creation, as the free and moral work of a

few elect souls, in whom tradition by a profound crisis is purified and

enlarged. This was the role of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, of

the prophets of Israel, of Mohammed in Arabia. All of them were

reformers of the religion of their ancestors.... They did not discover

the universal religion outside themselves, but in their consciousness

and personal piety. Passing through their souls as through a filter,

the traditional religion of their race was gradually clarified and

freed from foreign or material elements, and it was found that, in the

end, the new faith appeared the more human and universal as it had

become more strictly religious, more inward, and more pure.... Not

that all the ancient cults were capable of transformation or all the

prophets equally inspired. Often the revelation would appear uncertain

or incomplete. On only one point and in only one consciousness would

it be seen to end in a clear and definitive conclusion. Progress

implies selection. As we rise from one stage to another in the history

of religious evolution we see the ranks enlightened and the number

diminished of concurrent religions. At the lowest stage, the savage

cults are almost innumerable. The great national or ethnic religions

were much fewer. Only three are frankly universalist: Buddhism,

Mohammedanism, and Christianity. And these three are universalist, if

I may so say, in a very unequal degree.

Mohammedanism was far from being an original religion. The element

which gives to it a higher moral and religious value came to it from

Judaism and Christianity. Its monotheism, its horror of idolatry, the

comparative purity of its ethics, have no other source, and, without

paradox, it has been possible to represent it as an inferior form of

Christianity accommodated to the needs and to the stature of

semi-civilised Semitic peoples. But, alongside this Christian

spiritualism it has conserved naturalistic elements, gross remnants of

old Arab cults which, having made its fortune, perhaps, in its early

days, now embarrass it and paralyse it. Moreover, in spite of its

conquests, it has always remained an Oriental religion with Mecca as

its centre and its head. If it would survive, it must reform itself;

it must enter into the path of moral and intellectual progress, free

itself from local superstitions, from its gross hopes, its hatred of

the infidel, its doctrine of good works; in other words, it will have

to cast off its old nature, and receive a new effusion of the Christian

spirit. It can only become universal in so far as it approaches the

moral principle of Christianity, in order, in the end, to become one

with it.

Buddhism has a more profound originality, but it also is afflicted with

an inward dualism which will ruin it. From the beginning there have

been two Buddhisms: the one an esoteric philosophy for the use of sages

convinced by experience of the vanity of all things, suffering from the

essential evil of existence and aspiring to Nirvana. It is an

unfruitful mysticism because it is Atheistic. The other is popular

Buddhism, which sinks and dies into puerile superstitions and into the

grossest polytheism. From which we may conclude that Buddhism only

becomes universalist when it ceases to be a positive religion, and that

where it still remains a religion it is anything but universalist.

With Christianity it is altogether different. The terms "universal

religion" and "Christian religion" coincide so exactly that if a form

of Christianity is not universalist on any side, on that particular

side it ceases to be Christian. In fact there cannot here be either

division or esoterism, nor consequently limitation or narrowness. We

are here in the absolute freedom of spirit. Christ did not propound

the theory of the unity of the human race; but He did something quite

different and much better: He gave us the gospel. Between His gospel

and the humanitarian philosophy there is all the difference that there

is between abstraction and life, between idea and love. All men enter

into the kingdom of God by the same door, and that door cannot be shut

by any one; for it is the door of humility, of confidence, of

self-renunciation, of the higher righteousness fulfilling itself by

fraternal charity. Rank in that kingdom is determined by the measure

of devotedness. The greatest is the one that humbles himself the most,

and the only way of being master is to serve. In the religion of Jesus

there is nothing religious but that which is authentically moral, and

nothing moral in human life that is not truly religious. The perfect

religion coincides with the absolute morality, and this naturally

extends to and is obligatory on all mankind. Jesus not only proclaimed

the only God, or even the God who is spirit, whose worship could not

thenceforth be confined to anything material or particular in time and

space: He showed us the Father who loves all His children with an equal

affection, and desires to dwell in the humblest as well as in the

highest consciousness. This divine Fatherhood, in proportion as it is

realised in our hearts, produces in them human brotherhood. The

religious and the human ideals here join, no more to be separated.

Having begun in the animal man, with the grossest form of religion,

humanity finds itself completed in the perfect religion.

3. _Progress in Representations of the Divine_

To represent the divine, man has never had any but the resources which

are in himself. These representations have varied therefore with the

general progress of experience and of thought.... From beginning to

end the evolution of religious images and notions is based on the idea

of spirit. It is in this idea that the resemblance and the kinship of

man to his God is based; only by this can there be understanding,

converse, harmony between them. Primitive religions, doubtless, are

neither spiritualist nor materialist; they are animistic. A simple

animism gives to men their first conceptions. The child projects the

life which animates him; he endows the things around him with a

personality similar to his own. For him there is nothing dead or

inert; the world is peopled with living beings with which he contends,

and talks, and is angry, to which he gives his love and his caresses.

Do not let us smile too much at this simplicity. The latest steps of

philosophy are rejoining our earliest thoughts. We are coming to see

that in sum we know nothing but ourselves, that our science is but the

projection of our consciousness without, and that it is solely on this

condition that the world becomes intelligible to us. Man never

worships anything purely material, anything that cannot hear and answer

him. When he perceives that the object of his worship is inanimate, he

thinks his god has deserted him, and he sets himself to pursue him. He

usually finds him and retains him under other names and forms. By

faith in ghosts, and by the memory of his dreams, he has learnt to

double himself, and to oppose his will to his thought, his interior ego

to his body, which he calls his house. He may easily quit this for

another. Nothing is more ancient than the idea of the transmigration

of souls. But at the same time he doubles the being of his gods; he

distinguishes between the god and the object in which he habitually

resides. This is the period at which _idolatry_ begins. It will only

be completed when the spirit-god has broken the bonds which bind him to

its visible prison and its material image; when He shall speak who says

that "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in

spirit and in truth." From that moment, mythology transforms itself

into theology, and external rites into inward piety.

Necessarily polytheistic in its origins, religion tended nevertheless

towards monotheism. The subordination which disciplined the heads of

the tribes on earth also ranged the divinities under the authority of a

supreme head. Force at first gave this supremacy. Zeus was the king

of gods and men because he was stronger than all of them put together.

This is the natural order of ideas. Force first imposed itself on

weakness; then intelligence conquered force; lastly, justice and love,

which is the supreme form and flower of righteousness, obtain supremacy

over intelligence itself. The highest and the chiefest is no longer

the strongest, or the wisest, but the best. In becoming moral, man has

moralised his gods, who, in their turn, becoming models and

authorities, have greatly helped to moralise the race.

It is very surprising that this evolution in the direction of moral

monotheism did not complete itself in the Indo-European family. But

the fact is that that family encountered an invincible barrier in the

very nature of its primitive mythology. The Greek and Hindu

philosophers, no doubt, pushed the notion of God to that of His

spirituality and unity, but they did not succeed in transforming the

religion of their race. Their rational criticism had power to

dissolve, but not to change. Their monotheism remained always an

object of speculation more or less esoteric. When, in the second and

third centuries of our era, in competition with Christianity,

Graeco-Roman polytheism endeavoured to reach a sort of monotheism, it

could only return to the most glorious mythus of its infancy, to the

worship of the Sun, and raise it to supremacy among the symbols of

their faith.

The transition from polytheism to monotheism was only made in Palestine

and in the tradition of the Hebrews. There were two reasons for this,

both of which bear witness to the divine vocation of that people: its

religious predispositions and the powerful action of its prophets, of

those men of God raised up in it from Moses to Christ. The desert is

not monotheistic, as M. Renan was pleased at first to say, nor are

nomads, shepherds, or freebooters nearer to the only God than sedentary

and agricultural peoples. But, owing to the special turn of mind of

the Hebrew family, its primitive polytheism, of which the plural,

_elohim_, still reminds us, had an abstract character, and was reduced

to a sort of anonymous plurality from which no divine genealogy could

spring. All these elementary spirits, these _elohim_ of the air, the

earth, the waters, were so similar to each other that the thought of

the Semite never succeeded in discerning and discriminating them. They

entered into one another, and ended by forming a sort of collective and

abstract power, analagous to that which is represented in our language

by the word "divinity." Add to this that, by the idea of holiness,

Jehovah, the national _elohim_, was equally separated from Nature, and

that, gradually divested of all corporeal form, He was predestined to

become the God of conscience, the invisible Creator of all things, the

Judge and the rewarder of all human actions.

Neither these original predispositions, however, nor these general

causes, account for the marvellous progress of the religion of Israel.

The faith of the prophets is a creation of the moral order; it is the

work of individual consciousnesses, of the religious heroes whom the

divine Spirit raised up in succession for more than a thousand years.

We shall explain elsewhere this heroic and age-long struggle of the

prophets of Jehovah against the customs, the tendencies, and even the

temperament of their people. Suffice it here to indicate the constant

direction of their efforts, the precision and the fixedness of their

ideal, the power of the common inspiration that animated them, the

vigorous and vivacious feeling in each one of them that makes their

work divine and carries them beyond their individual thoughts and

hopes. Like us they laboured on an infinitely vaster plane than they

conceived.

But their conception of a divine ideal of righteousness still left God

outside the consciousness. The image of His sanctity awakened in their

souls the sense of sin and raised a tragic conflict between the human

will enslaved by evil and the essentially inflexible law of God. God

and man were found to be more profoundly separated by this moral

antithesis of righteousness and sin than they had before been by the

antithesis of strength and feebleness. How was this hostility to

cease? A supreme revelation is about to respond to this cry of

distress. God will become internal to the consciousness; He will

manifest Himself, in man himself, as the principle of justification and

salvation. He who was called _El, Allah_, the Mighty God, in

patriarchal days,--He who from the times of Moses had been named

_Jehovah_, the living God, the vigilant guardian of the Covenant,--will

reveal Himself as the Father in the filial consciousness of Jesus

Christ. The revelation of love comes to crown the revelation of force

and righteousness. God desires to dwell in human souls. The Heavenly

Father lives within the Son of Man, and the dogma of the God-Man,

interpreted by the piety of each Christian, not by the subtle

metaphysics of the doctors and the schools, becomes the central and

distinguishing dogma of Christianity. Do not spoil its religious

meaning, leave the mystery intact, see what is wrapped up in it: the

sin of man effaced, the ancient conflicts ended, harmony restored, the

whole moral and spiritual life enrooted in the eternal life of God, the

Divine Life shed abroad in the heart of man. Try to comprehend this

consummation of the religious unity of the Divine and the human sought

for, cried for, in the dim desire of consciousness, and you will also

comprehend that, at this point of view, as at all the others, the

precedent religious evolution found its _raison d'etre_ and its final

aim in the soul and in the work of Christ. The orphaned human soul and

the distant unknown God are re-united and embraced in filial love, to

be no more divided or estranged.

4. _The History of Prayer_

The living expression of the relations of man to his God, prayer is the

very soul of religion. It brings to God the miseries of man, and

brings back to man the communion and the help of God. Nothing better

reveals the worth and moral dignity of a religion than the kind of

prayer it puts into the lips of its adherents. Now, progress is more

apparent here than anywhere else. The savage beats his fetish when it

is not complacent enough. The Christian in his greatest distresses

repeats the prayer of Jesus in the Garden: "Father, not my will, but

Thine be done!" What a long road man has travelled between these two

extreme points of religion!

At the outset, prayer would seem to have had nothing religious in it

except the vague trust which men placed in its efficiency. It was

almost everywhere conceived and practised as a sort of constraint put

by the worshipper on the will that he wished to master. There were

mysterious syllables, which, pronounced correctly, would produce an

irresistible effect. To the voice were added rites and ceremonies,

_i.e._ gestures menacing or wheedling, whose object was to move the god

and bind his will to that of man. Primitive stories and legends are

full of this idea. Out of it sprang magic, sorcery, necromancy.

With the supernatural beings around him man does as with other

neighbours. He seeks to induce them to help him, and that by the

self-same means. There is very little respect in these primary

relations. Ruse, violence, seduction by bribes or threats,--these are

the forms of that strange supplication. It is human selfishness

addressing itself naively to the selfishness of the gods. Regular

contracts are made between these two egoisms, each of which arms itself

against the other with the _Do ut des_. The god who fails in his

promise deserves to be chastised, and privations, and even blows, do

not fail to follow and punish his felony.

Sacrifice at first was merely a form of prayer. Man never approaches

his superior or his master with empty hands. To secure his favour or

appease his wrath he brings the offerings he believes to be the most

agreeable. The gods, like mortals, _e.g._, have need of nourishment.

For them, therefore, are reserved the first-fruits of the human repast;

libations, presents of honey and fine flour, the most luscious fruits,

the most delicious viands. What difficulty man has had in believing in

the goodness of his gods! He saw the effects of their anger in the

evils which befell him, and if good fortune came to him he felt obliged

to offer a sacrifice to turn aside the jealousy of higher powers. Was

a god supposed to have been offended? They trembled for years beneath

the strokes of his wrath; they offered in expiatory sacrifices all

possible equivalents; they invented penances, humiliations, tortures,

without being sure that the divine vengeance ever was appeased. These

are universal religious phenomena.

The religious is so different from the moral sense that, at the outset,

it exists by itself, and expresses itself in the most selfish and

ferocious manner. How many crimes have been committed in the name of

religion! with what baseness and sordidness has it not been sincerely

connected! But here also we must note the new revelation made in the

souls of prophets and of sages in order to raise the religion of

naturalism to morality. Confucius, Buddha, the prophets of Israel, the

philosophers of Greece, came simultaneously to feel that the true

relation of man to God must be a moral relation, that righteousness is

the only link which binds earth to heaven, that sacred words, rites,

interested offerings, outward compensations, can do nothing, and mean

nothing, the moment the religious man rises above the law of Nature and

enters upon the higher life of the spirit. If God be righteous, there

is only one means henceforth of putting one's self into harmony and

peace with Him--to become like Him. Thus religion and morality were

destined to approach each other and to penetrate each other more and

more, until the perfect religion should be recognised by this sign: the

highest piety under the form of the ideal morality. At bottom,

Christianity has no other principle, and it is for this reason more

than for any other that it is not only the highest form of religion,

but the universal and final religion. "The absolute religion" and "the

absolute moral life" are identical terms. The ancient dualism is

surmounted in the unity of Christian consciousness. It is not

surprising, therefore, that prayer should, in its turn, be transformed,

and that, having at first been the most violently interested act of

life, it should come in the end to be a pure act of trust and

self-abandonment, of disinterestedness the most religious and complete.

Is there need of many words for a child to make its father understand?

It is the heathen, says Jesus, who make many prayers. The Father knows

your needs before you ask Him. It is a mark of unbelief to be anxious

about food and raiment and the future. The essential thing is not to

multiply petitions, but to live near Him and feel Him ever near. Is He

not Almighty and all-good? Does He not love you better than you love

yourselves? Does He not make all things work together for the good of

His children? If trials come, or dangers threaten, what ought we to

do? Submit to God, as Jesus did. What is such prayer as His but the

defeat of egoism and the perfect liberation of the individual spirit in

the feeling of its plenary union with God?

Such was the prayer of Jesus. It did not consist in an outward flow of

words, but in a constant, silent state of soul which made Him say in

turning towards His Father: "I know that Thou hearest me always."

Confidence increases with renunciation. Admirable progress of

religion! Sublime reversal of roles! At the beginning the ambition of

the pious man was to bend the Divine will to his own; at the end his

peace, his happiness, is to subordinate his wishes and desires to the

will of a Father who knows how to be gracious, righteous, perfect!

There is another aspect of this progress. In all religions there is a

double gamut of feeling: the one, which rules in primitive religions,

and whose dominant note is fear and sadness; the other, which prevails

in the end, in which the dominant note is confidence and joy. It is a

natural effect of the progressive victory of the religious

consciousness gradually surmounting the contradictions in the midst of

which it is born and developed. At the outset, man, alone and

defenceless, finds no fewer enemies in heaven than on earth. He feels

as if surrounded by hostile and mysterious powers before which he

cringes in fear, awaiting their decisions with respect to him. But

everything changes when there rises within his soul the luminous dawn

of the moral revelation of God. With the darkness, vanish all the

frightful phantoms of the night. In the God whom he adores he sees his

own interior law glorified and become henceforth the supreme law of

things. That law of righteousness is, at bottom, a law of love.

Nothing can trouble me any more except the sense of my own

failure--that is, of my own sin, which alone can separate me from the

very principle of righteousness and life. But, see, justice manifests

itself as justifying grace! God gives it as He gives life to those who

thirst for it. Reconciliation is complete. The orphan has found his

Father; the Father, His child. The sinner, trembling, begins his

prayer, prostrated; he ends it upright, with the confidence and freedom

of a child that feels itself at home within the Father's house. The

Gospel bids us to rejoice; it makes of joy an obligation, while

distrust and sadness are the marks of selfishness and unbelief.

5. _Conclusion_

Such has been the course of religion through the centuries of human

history, and amid the complex and confused development of particular

faiths. The progress has not been on a straight line and by successive

additions, as in the scientific sphere. Religious evolution is more

like the evolution of art, in which the experience of the past is only

fruitful when translated by a higher inspiration and a mightier

creative force. There are periods of recrudescence of the religious

sentiment in which the passions of a past that seemed to have been

abolished are revived. These are the times of superstition. There are

also periods of religious inertia, when the soul seems to empty itself

of its eternal content, and divert itself into a frivolous activity and

a superficial wisdom. These are the ages of incredulity. Lastly,

there are epochs of crisis and confusion, in which mingle religious

traditions the most diverse, and currents of thought the most contrary.

We must pass over all these accidents and vicissitudes. In the

religious evolution of humanity there is a sequence, an order, a

progress which, in spite of all interruptions and reactions, manifest

themselves as soon as we rise high enough to embrace it in its vast

entirety.

* * * * *

A few years ago there assembled in Chicago what the Americans called

the Parliament of Religions. The official representatives of all the

principal religions of the new world and the old met together under a

common feeling of religious brotherhood. They did not discuss the

value of their rites or dogmas; their object was to approach each

other, to edify each other, and, for the first time in the world's

history, to present the spectacle of a universal religious communion.

When it came to the point, three things became clear: first, the common

name under which they were able to call upon God--the Father; secondly,

the Lord's Prayer was adopted and recited by all; thirdly, Christ

Himself, apart from all theological definition, was unanimously

recognised and venerated as the Master and Initiator of the higher

religious life.

In my own consciousness, this practical demonstration is completed. I

can hardly help being religious; but if I am seriously to be religious

I can only be so under the Christian form. I can hardly help praying;

but if I desire to pray, if moral anguish or intellectual doubt

constrain me to seek some form of prayer that I can use in all

sincerity, I never find but these words: "Our Father which art in

heaven." Lastly, I may disdain the inner life of the soul, and divert

myself from it by the distractions of science, art, and social life;

but if, wearied by the world of pleasure or of toil, I wish to find my

soul again and live a deeper life, I can accept no other guide and

master than Jesus Christ, because, in Him alone, optimism is without

frivolity, and seriousness without despair.

BOOK SECOND

CHRISTIANITY

CHAPTER I

HEBRAISM, OR THE ORIGINS OF THE GOSPEL

To understand Christianity we should need to see clearly and in one

view the link which connects it with the religious evolution of

mankind, the living originality by which it is distinguished, the

succession and the character of the forms it has assumed. Such are the

three points which we shall take up in turn. We must begin with its

origins.

There is never a complete break in the chain of history. Every

phenomenon arises in its place and at its time. It has its

antecedents, which prepare it and _condition_ it. However new

Christianity may have been, it is no exception to the rule. It springs

from the tradition of Israel by an evident affiliation. The old

theology did not dissimulate this kinship of origin; it rather

exaggerated it. The Christian Church made the Bible of the Jews the

first part of its own. The writings of the prophets were placed in the

sacred volume before those of the apostles, as if to intimate that the

one could not be understood without the other. _Novum Testamentum in

Vetere latet; Vetus in Novo patet_. At bottom, this old adage of the

schoolmen is true. It is an excellent rule of biblical exegesis to

trace the primary Christian ideas to their Hebraic root, and to regard

as foreign and adventitious those which are not attached to it. If

there is nothing essential in the New Testament the germ of which is

not to be found in the Old, there is nothing truly fruitful in the Old

which has not passed into the New. Such is the historical sequence and

connection that we must respect and follow. The study of the religion

of Israel is the natural introduction to the study of Christianity.

The only point to be considered here is how the one was preparatory to

the other.[1]

[1] Two non-essential sections have here been omitted, one on _The

Sacred History_, the other on _The Nation_.--Trans.

1. _Prophetism_

The miracle of the history of Israel is Prophetism. In this is to be

found the incomparable force by which the religious evolution we may

trace in its annals was effected.

But first let me explain what I understand by this word evolution, and

let me eliminate from it the fatalistic sense too often given to it.

If by evolution you mean a necessary and unconscious process, a

mechanical and continuous movement, which, without either effort or

danger, causes light to spring out of darkness, good from evil, and

raises a people or a race from a lower to a higher form of life, you

incur the reproach of confounding the laws of the moral world with

those of the physical order; you will be condemned to falsify history

in general and to understand nothing of the history of Israel in

particular. In the moral and religious progress which constitutes the

singular originality of that history, there is nothing facile, nothing

that can be logically deduced from the natural predispositions of the

nation. No doubt the prophets were the children of the nation and

intimately connected with it; but the inspiration which breathes in

them, raises them and animates them, is something entirely different

from the ethnic genius of their race. The contrast is so great that it

amounts to contradiction. The race, in Israel, as in Moab, or among

the Edomites or Philistines, had its interpreters and prophets. But

these were not the prophets of conscience. They flatter the people;

they do not elevate them. They are found to be false prophets. The

others, the witnesses for the righteous, holy God, only brought

Hebraism to the consciousness of its religious vocation by a saecular

and painful struggle against hereditary idolatry and immorality. This

was not a collective evolution, but an essentially individualist

reform; it was a moral creation continually interrupted and

compromised; it was a work of faith and will. Each prophet enters into

the conflict and utters his cry of battle and reform as if he were

alone, responsible only to the God who has sent him, and yet all of

them succeed each other and pursue the same design, because they are

all obedient to the same identic inspiration. They fight against all;

against the multitude that cannot break away from custom and from

prejudice; against the priests who have always from the beginning made

of the priesthood a _metier_ and of oracles a merchandise; against

kings whose vanity, whose crimes, and whose exactions they denounce;

against the great and rich oppressors of the weak and poor. They speak

in the name of Jehovah, because Jehovah speaks in their consciousness.

That is the origin of the prophetic spirit. It is a divine ferment

which, perpetuating itself, becoming clearer, stronger, from generation

to generation, gradually raises and transmutes the heavy mass of

primitive Semitism. No, this is not the work of time and Nature,

unless you see God at work in time, and, beneath this word Nature, by

the side of realised and manifested forces you perceive the hidden and

immeasurable virtualities which ferment in it and carry it beyond

itself into the higher life of liberty and love. In the apparition of

these prophets, in the energy of their faith, in the boldness of their

words, there is a positive revelation of a new world, the revelation of

a religious ideal which, after divesting itself, in the gospel of

Christ, of every national element, will naturally become the faith and

consolation of humanity.

* * * * *

The education of the people of God had been a long and laborious work;

besides the preaching of the prophets, it had needed repeated

catastrophes in which the nationality of Israel had perished, as if the

spirit could not free itself save by the annihilation of the matter

that had from the outset grossly closed it in. When in the age of

Cyrus we see the poor remnants of Benjamin and Judah return from

Babylon, they are no longer a people; they are already almost a Church.

The religious Law is now fixed. It enshrines the life, the ideas, the

ethics and the ritual, the minute practices and precautions, which will

for ever separate the Jew from all the other nations, and maintain him

in a state of legal purity and high morality in the midst of universal

corruption. It is the beginning of Pharisaism. In it the spirit of

prophetic piety deteriorates, hardens, freezes. Nevertheless, when we

think of the progress that had been accomplished, when we think of the

distance that separates this rigid monotheism and this rigorous law

from the old hard, cruel, sometimes impure Semitic cults, the prophets'

work in Israel will appear to us in its immense proportions and

immortal worth.

2. _The Dawn of the Gospel_

But Prophetism was not to end in the Talmud. The Isaiahs and Jeremiahs

were to have other heirs and successors than the Pharisees and the sons

of the Synagogue. Prophetism had in it the promise and the germ of a

higher and more human religion. The prophets had accents which their

immediate successors in history seem never to have heard. They

attacked nothing with more vehemence than formalistic piety or

practical religion divorced from righteousness. Listen to Amos, as he

makes Jehovah utter words like these: "I hate, I despise your feast

days," etc. (Amos v. 21 _et seq._); or to Isaiah on the same theme in

his first chapter. Hosea declares that heart-piety and mercy are

better than sacrifices. Jeremiah predicts the time when God will make

a new Covenant with His people, and write His laws in their hearts,

instead of on tables of stone. Or think of Elijah in the cave of

Horeb. Fatigued with fighting, almost in despair, the terrible

adversary of Baal, who had just had 450 of the priests of Baal put to

death, has retired to the mountains and is asleep in a cave. You know

the narrative (1 Kings xix. 9-13). The still small voice! Is there in

all the Bible a finer image containing a profounder thought? What is

this supreme revelation of the God of Israel but an apparition by

anticipation of the God of the Gospel? And the still, small voice,

"the sound of gentle stillness," what is it but the first faint accents

of the gracious, tender words: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and

are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and

learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest

unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light" (Matt.

xi. 28-30).

Beneath the breathings of this creative inspiration the religion of

legal righteousness and rigorous retributions is softened into the

religion of love. The God who punishes becomes the God who pardons and

restores. Beneath the tears of the poor, the vanquished, the afflicted

in Israel the gospel of divine compassion germinated and sprang up.

What tones of tenderness are heard in the later prophets, the prophets

of consolation, properly so called. "Comfort ye, comfort ye My people.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem. Say unto her that her warfare is

accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned." Read the chapter through

(Is. xl.), and the forty-second and the sixty-sixth, and Psalms xxiii.

and ciii. Such words as these announce and prepare the way for the

great religious revolution called by Jesus the New Covenant. The

relations between God and the human soul are in course of being

changed. From the beginning, a pact existed between Jehovah and His

people; a compact expressed and guaranteed in a Law on which depended

the destiny of the nation and of the individual. The Covenant has

become more inward and profound. To the law of strict remunerations is

now joined a bond of love. Between God and His people the relations

are those of Husband and wife. The wife has proved unfaithful to Him

who had loved her, who had found her poor and naked in the desert, and

had been desirous to enrich her. She has followed other gods.

Jehovah, by the mouth of His messengers, covers her with reproaches, in

order to excite her to repentance; but He has learnt to pity, and, in

the end, He pardons. The more the nation's miseries are multiplied,

the more its tears flow on the soil of alien lands, the more His heart

is melted in Him and the tenderer become His words. "Can a woman

forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the

son of her womb? yea, she may forget, yet will not I forget thee" (Is.

xlix. 15).

The idea beneath these words is the Christian idea. God loves His

people with a boundless love. His mercy extends infinitely beyond the

sins of the children of men. In the consciousness of the great unknown

prophet whom we call the second Isaiah, we see sketched, five centuries

beforehand, the drama of repentance and forgiveness, which Jesus, in

profounder and yet simpler words, sums up for all mankind in the

Parable of the Prodigal Son.

The long period of affliction and of misery between the Captivity and

the Advent of the Christ is like a time of painful gestation, during

which, in the bosom of the Hebraic tradition, fecundated by the spirit

of the prophets, was prepared in obscurity the gospel of the Beatitudes

and of the Parables. What a revolution! The ancient theocratic law

promised to the righteous length of days and great abundance of

material goods. The friends of Job regarded him as criminal because

they saw him in adversity. The problem of human destiny appeared to

the later prophets as less simple and more tragic. "Why do the wicked

prosper?" is the question ever on their lips. "Why do the righteous

suffer?" This spectacle has become so constant that the correlation of

the words has been reversed. "Rich and wicked" in the Psalmists, and

in the second Isaiah, are equivalent terms. "Poor and afflicted" are

synonymous with "the righteous" and "the friends of God." Riches and

high looks are the signs of malediction; humility, poverty,

persecution, tears, are the marks of piety and the pledges of divine

affection. It was at this time that the words were born that edified

the early Christians: "God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the

humble." Gather together in a common hope this family of little ones,

of the defeated and unhappy ones whose hearts were crushed and whose

eyes were filled with tears, and you have the true people of God, the

heirs of all the promises, the "little flock" to whom it is the

Father's pleasure to give the kingdom. It was from their ranks that

was to come the "Man of Sorrows," who should be scourged and put to

death for the sins of His people. The religion of suffering is born.

For the suffering of "the Servant of Jehovah," in whom is no iniquity,

cannot be the chastisement of His own crimes; it will henceforth be

accepted as the necessary part that fraternal solidarity imposes on the

best for the redemption of the rest. A tender, fragile flower, a bud

as yet scarce opened in the writings of the prophets, this thought will

expand into the Gospel and become the religion of mankind.

Pity joined to a severe ideal of righteousness in the notion of God;

morality introduced into religion by the subordination of rites to

rectitude of heart and will; hope of a future of peace and happiness by

the realisation of righteousness: these are the three great ideas

bequeathed by Prophetism to the Gospel. This heritage is a rich and

lovely one, but it must not be over-estimated or misunderstood. We are

still a long way off the Gospel. The thought of the prophets did not

go beyond the narrow limits of a national Messianism; it remained

Jewish, not only by its forms and symbols, but also by the religious

privilege which is to guard the people of Israel in the future as in

the past. The destiny of humanity is still bound up with the destiny

of Jerusalem, and the triumph of the Jews implies the partial or total

defeat and subjection of the Gentiles in the days of the Messiah and

after they are admitted into the kingdom of God. The saints of Israel

are the children of the household; the heathen may enter, and even

share in the felicity which fills them, but only as servants and

tributaries.

It should also be noted that, in the theology of the prophets, the

object of Jehovah's love is not the individual as a moral being, but

the chosen people. Only the nation counts in the eyes of the Eternal.

In its deliverance and triumph the citizens find salvation.... There

is something great and thrilling in this Messianic doctrine. It

elevated the soul of a people and of a religion to the point of the

sublime. It is something to have given hope to a defeated people and a

dying world. In this doctrine also we may note this admirable trait:

this national triumph is identified with the advent of righteousness to

all the earth. Nor have the hopes of Israel been belied. The dream of

the prophets was realised in ways of which they did not think, but in a

manner not less marvellous. The descendants of Japhet lodge to-day

beneath the tents of the children of Shem, and our eyes may see the day

approaching when the ancient promise made to Abraham and his seed shall

be fulfilled, and all the families of the earth be blessed in Him.

Between the religion of the prophets and the religion of Jesus,

however, there is one more barrier to be broken down. In the "Kingdom

of God," the idea of the nation must give place to the idea of

humanity. The universal God must be represented as the immanent God,

as present in every human soul. His seat and temple could not be in

Jerusalem or in Palestine; it could only be in pure and humble hearts.

A supreme crisis was necessary. The Hebrew nation must perish in order

to free the human conscience from its Jewish yoke. A divine flower had

been formed in the heart of Prophetism; but it would have been a barren

ornament, had there not been deposited in its calix a living and a

fruitful germ. The transformation of the piety of the prophets into a

purely moral creation and a Covenant really new with God, this was the

work of Jesus Christ. That is why Jesus is "He that should come," He

whom the prophets half unconsciously desired, He in whom, to the profit

of all mankind, was completed the religious development of Israel. Its

whole history ends in Jesus. Apart from Him the inspiration of the

prophets dies into rabbinical Talmudism or wanders into the vagaries

and delirium of the apocalypses. After giving birth to the Gospel,

Judaism dries up and withers like a tree that has borne its fruit and

whose season is past.

CHAPTER II

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

1. _The Problem_

We come at last to Christianity. What is its principle or essence?

This question must be answered or we cannot judge of it aright.

Now, during the eighteen centuries of its history, Christianity has

taken so many and such various forms, it has received so many

developments in every sense, it has become a thing so rich and

luxuriant, that it is far from easy to discover beneath this thick

growth of institutions, dogmas, ceremonies, and devotions the tap-root

of the tree from which it all has sprung, and from which it still

derives its nutriment. It would be next to useless to interrogate the

Churches. They would each answer according to their official

theologies and Confessions of Faith. This, they would say, is the

essence of Christianity. The Catholics would say it is the institution

and infallible authority of the Church, because everything rests on

this first foundation, and because no one can be in Christian truth who

is outside the Church. The Protestants would not be agreed: one would

propose the dogma of Justification by Faith; another the authority of

Scripture; a third the metaphysical divinity and the eternal

pre-existence of Jesus Christ, under the pretext that they could not

conceive the possibility of the subsistence of Christianity without

these dogmas. In entering on this examination we enter on an

interminable dispute.

The problem, happily, is simplified for the historian and the

psychologist. In asking what is the principle of Christianity, what do

we wish to know? Simply what it is that makes a Christian a Christian.

We desire to ascertain what is the inward element, present in the soul,

which compensates, at need, for the absence or defect of all the rest,

and which, being wanting, cannot be supplied or compensated for by

anything else. In short, we want to get at the religious experience

which determines and marks out the consciousness of all Christians,

which makes them members of one moral family, and which makes them to

be recognised as such in spite of differences of times and place, of

language and of culture, of rites and even of beliefs. To seize this

common feature there is no need of polemics; all we need is a little

history and psychology.

In history, Christianity offers itself to us as the term and crown of

the religious evolution of humanity. In the consciousness of the

Christian it is something more; it there reveals itself as the perfect

religion. How must we understand this perfection? Is it the

perfection of a complete system of supernatural knowledge, of a

religious science which would have been strange to former generations,

and which was shared by Christians alone? In no wise. If there are

enlightened Christians, there are many who are very ignorant. And yet

they are all Christians by one and the same principle, which is

entirely independent of degrees of culture. No Christian will maintain

that his knowledge is perfect. They all agree with St. Paul that at

present it is very imperfect. We see divine things dimly. What, then,

do they affirm who say with so much assurance that Christianity is the

perfect religion? They affirm that, religion not being an idea but a

relation to God, the perfect religion is the perfect realisation of

their relation to God and of God's relation to them. And this is not,

on their part, a theoretical speculation; it is the immediate and

practical result of their inward experience. They feel that their

religious need is entirely satisfied, that God has entered with them,

and they with Him, into a relation so intimate and so happy that, in

the matter of practical religion, not only can they imagine nothing,

but that they can desire nothing above it or beyond. They simply set

themselves to realise more fully and more effectually in themselves

this supreme relation, this piety whose principle is immanent to

themselves; they know that in it they have the germ of perfect

spiritual development and eternal life. This is why they affirm

without the slightest doubt that Christianity is the ideal and perfect

religion, the definitive religion of humanity.

Such is the first affirmation of the Christian consciousness. Here is

the second.

This perfect relation between God and my soul, this supreme religious

good, this kind of piety which constitutes my joy and strength, which

enlightens, renovates, sustains my whole inner life, does not date from

myself, and I well know that it is not my own virtue that has created

it. Nor can I refer the origin of it to my parents, although I may

perhaps have received it through them or through my teachers; nor to my

Church, although I still remain its catechumen; for parents, teachers,

churches, will acknowledge, with myself, that they have only

transmitted that which they themselves received. Remounting thus the

living chain of Christian experiences, I reach a first experience, a

creative and inaugural experience, which has made possible and

engendered all the rest. That experience was realised in the

consciousness of Jesus Christ. I affirm, then, not only that Christ

was the author of Christianity, but that the first germ of it was

formed in His inner life, and that in that life, first of all, that

divine revelation was made which, repeating and multiplying itself, has

enlightened and quickened all mankind. Christianity is therefore not

only the ideal, but an historical religion, inseparably connected not

only with the maxims of morality and with the doctrines of Jesus, but

with His person itself, and with the permanent action of the new spirit

which animated Him, and which lives from generation to generation in

His disciples.

These are the two affirmations, equally immediate and equally

essential, of every Christian consciousness. Now, the whole

theological problem is how to reconcile the two. How can that which is

ideal and perfect be realised in history? How can that which is

historical be held to be ideal and eternal? Does it not seem as if

these attributes were contradictory and exclusive of each other, and

that Christianity could not become an ideal religion without severing

all its links with a particular history, or that if it would remain an

historical religion it must renounce all pretensions to absolute

perfection? On the other hand, these two attributes, are they not

equally necessary to it? How can it subsist if it obeys the formal and

summary logic which summons us to choose between them? Will it be

anything more than a speculative philosophy if cut off from its

historic tradition? Will it continue to inspire me with confidence,

will it place me in security, if it ceases to appear to me to be the

perfect and definitive religion?

Theology, from the beginning, has had no other task; at all events, it

has had no task more arduous or pressing than that of reconciling these

two data. There have always been two tendencies amongst theologians

corresponding to two families of minds: the _Idealist_ tendency--that

of Origen and his emulators, which puts the emphasis en ideas and

constructs a religious metaphysic or gnosis, which of necessity

rationalises dogma, and for which history is but a temporary envelope,

a sort of external and sensible illustration; and the _Realist_

tendency, represented by the genius of Tertullian, which, obeying an

opposite instinct, materialises ideas, gives an anthropomorphic body to

everything, even to God, deifies phenomena, and changes contingent

history into an eternal metaphysic. From these two tendencies,

perpetual and parallel, have issued the two solutions given by

Rationalism and by Orthodoxy to the problem as to the essence of

Christianity.

The first finds that essence in a few simple truths of reason or of

consciousness, which are of all time and all lands, and which impose

themselves on every man by their own natural evidence. Jesus of

Nazareth was the preacher and the martyr of these truths; but it is

clear that His personality is no more essential to Christianity than

that of Plato is to his philosophy. Only, mind, in thus severing

itself from Christ the Christian Religion ceases to be positive and

becomes an abstract and dead doctrine; it loses its religious pith and

power.

Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, avoids this reef but strikes

upon another. In making of Christ the Second Person of the Eternal

Trinity, the Son of the Father, consubstantial and equal, it removes

Him from history and transports Him into metaphysics. But thus to

deify history is also in a fashion to destroy it. The dogma annuls the

limited, contingent, and human character of the appearance of Jesus of

Nazareth. His life loses all reality. We have no longer a man before

our eyes, although the Church, theoretically, maintains the humanity of

Christ alongside His divinity. This fatally absorbs everything. We

have only a deity walking in the midst of His contemporaries, hidden

beneath a human figure. The traditional Christology has been so

incurably Docetic that it has been practically impossible, from this

point of view, to write a serious Life of Jesus without falling into

the heresy at once modern and semi-pagan of _Kenosis_, the theory

according to which the pre-existent and eternal deity commits suicide

by incarnating Himself in order gradually to be re-born and find

Himself God again at the end of His human life. Can this strait be

crossed? Is there a passage between Scylla and Charybdis? Not so long

as you cling to the intellectualist conception which forms the error

common to both Rationalism and Orthodoxy, and ensures their final

failure. If the essence of Christianity lies in the revelation of

natural truths or supernatural dogmas, the problem is insoluble. All

Apologetics will inevitably dash themselves to pieces against the

insurmountable contradiction that they will soon encounter. Strauss's

argumentation, which the philosophers do not cease to repeat, and which

the theologians pretend not to hear, springs into one's mind. So far

from weakening it, the historical studies of the past half century have

only added sharpness to its edge. "The idea does not pour all its

riches into a single individual. The Absolute does not descend into

history. It is against all analogy that the fulness of perfection

should be met with at the outset of any evolution whatsoever; those who

place it at the origin of Christianity are victims of the same illusion

as the ancients, who placed the Golden Age at the beginning of human

history."

Before going further it may be convenient to estimate the strength and

weakness of this famous dilemma, and to inquire how we may escape from

it. The traditional theology succumbs to it. But this only proves

that that theology needs reforming. Let us place ourselves at a

different point of view, and examine for a moment the idea of

perfection which serves as the premise to Strauss's reasoning. When he

speaks of the total or plenary perfection which cannot be found in the

first link of an historical chain, he doubtless means a quantitative

perfection--that is to say, a complete collection of virtues, merits,

and faculties the numerical addition of which makes the notion entire.

Now, from this point of view, Strauss's observation is incontestable.

Neither the perfection of science comprising all scientific

discoveries, nor the perfection of civilisation embracing all the

progress and all the forms of human life, are ever found or could be

found at the beginning or at any given moment in the course of history.

One individual, however great, could not exhaust the life or labour of

the species so as to render evolution useless. But have you noticed

that this idea of perfection is contradictory, and therefore

chimerical? Under the category of quantity or of extension there could

be no real perfection either for the individual or for the species. No

sooner is anything that can be counted or measured conceived than the

mind instantly conceives something greater. There is no such thing as

perfect number. Here therefore it is needful to make an essential

distinction. We must distinguish between the quantity and the quality,

or rather, the intensity, of being. Now, between the degrees of both

these things there is not the slightest relation, nor consequently any

common measure. And that which is true in the one becomes false in the

other. Take a cubic metre of stone, multiply it by a thousand or a

million, you will still have the same stone--that is to say, there is

not more true reality in a million cubic metres of stone than there is

in one. But let a bit of moss spring up in a fissure in that stone; in

that bit of living moss there is more being, or, if you will, being of

a higher quality than that of a whole mass of rocks. Still, do not

forget that it needed a germ to produce it, and that this germ was a

sort of positive perfection in relation to all inorganic matter, whose

last end is life. This is why we may boldly say that evolution is not

the cause of anything; that no development ever gives more than what is

hidden in the new germ which engenders it; that a hundred thousand

imbeciles do not make a man of genius, and that if man descended from a

monkey all the monkeys in creation put together do not make up one

human consciousness. From this synthetic point of view, it will no

longer seem contradictory, but natural, and in full accordance with the

analogies of history, that we should meet in the person of the Founder

of Christianity that perfect relation to God, that perfection of piety

which every Christian still experiences within himself, and which he

declares he has drawn from communion with Him.

Lastly, let us fortify ourselves, and finish this brief statement of

this somewhat novel view with Pascal's pregnant words. There are, he

says, three orders of greatness. From all bodies put together you

could not extract one thought, if there were not first a mind to

conceive it. From all thoughts you could not draw a single movement of

charity, if there were not there a heart to produce and feel it So far

from needing to manifest themselves by the same attributes, these

various kinds of greatness are absolutely independent of each other and

even incommensurable. That which makes one shine forth would diminish

or obscure the others. Alexander came with a pomp which dazzled the

eyes and astonished the imaginations of mere carnal men. Archimedes

had no need of the pomp of Alexander in order to impress the minds of

men; his greatness, purely intellectual, was of an altogether different

order. And, so, the Christ did not come with the _eclat_ of Alexander

or Archimedes. His greatness is of another order still. It is in fact

so different that neither the glory of the conqueror nor the potency of

genius would add anything to it, and that it had need, the better to

shine forth to all, to appear in lowliness and humiliation. Therefore

He was humble, patient, gentle, holy towards God, merciful towards man,

terrible to all the hosts of darkness. Without sin, without external

goods, without the productions of science, He was in His own order.

Oh, with what pomp, with what transcendent magnificence, did He appear

to the eyes of the heart that discerns true wisdom!

2. _The Christian Principle_

We must therefore come to the religious consciousness of Jesus Christ

as to the fountainhead from which the Christian stream has flowed. It

is certain that we shall find in it the principle and essence of

Christianity itself, for it would be too paradoxical to maintain that

the Master alone was excluded from the benefit of the religion that He

has bequeathed to all His disciples. No; we may affirm in all security

that the principle of Christianity was at first the very principle of

the consciousness of Christ. To determine the one will be to define

the other.

What we call the religious consciousness of a man is the feeling of the

relation in which he stands, and wills to stand, to the universal

principle on which he knows himself to depend, and with the universe in

which he sees himself to be a part of one great whole. If then we

would know exactly what was the essential element in the consciousness

of Jesus, what was the distinctive characteristic of His piety, we must

ask in what relation did He feel Himself to stand towards God and

towards the universe. The answer will be neither difficult nor

uncertain. If there are matters on which the true thought of the

Master remains obscure, nothing shines out with more evidence and

continuity through all His teaching and His life than the religious

attitude of His soul towards God and man.

He felt Himself to be in a filial relation towards God, and He felt

that God was in a paternal relation towards Him. The name of Father

that He gives to God continually, exclusively, uniquely; the name of

Son that He takes to Himself; the nature of His adoration; the form of

His prayer; the motive of His devoted obedience even unto death; the

way in which He works His cures, hails His first successes, accepts the

apparent failure of His work, and explains the incredulity of His

people,--all announce, manifest, and confirm that intimate relation,

that communion and union of spirit, by which a father prolongs his life

in the life of his child, and the child feels himself to live by the

life of his father. This was clearly the essential element in His

consciousness, the distinctive and original feature of His piety; it is

also the principle and essence of Christianity.

That which we observe in the consciousness of Jesus we find in the

experience of all Christians. They are Christians exactly in

proportion as the filial piety of Jesus is reproduced in them. They

are recognised by this unique but sufficient sign, by the confidence

with which they call God their Father, abandoning themselves to His

love for all that regards their present or future destiny, and living a

life of self-renunciation and of devotion to the good of others. All

whose inner life has been raised from the region of selfishness and

pride to the higher realm of love and life in God,--who have found in

that profound conversion, together with the pardon and oblivion of

their past, the germ of a higher life,--of the perfect, and, by

consequence, eternal life, are the true religious posterity of Christ;

they reproduce His spirit, continue His work, and are as dependent upon

Him and as like Him religiously as are the descendants of an ancestor

whose blood and whose life have not ceased for an instant to flow in

their veins.

This feeling, filial in regard to God, fraternal in regard to man, is

that which makes a Christian, and consequently it is the common trait

of all Christians. It should be added that this principle of

Christianity admirably corresponds to the two fundamental affirmations

of the Christian consciousness already established. The contradiction

that appeared to us so menacing is thus resolved and reconciled. On

the one hand, Christianity, by this filial union with God, is seen to

be the ideal and perfect religion; on the other, it appears as a real

fact in the consciousness of Jesus Christ, so that this religious

reality comes to us with the imperative character of the ideal.

Through prejudice men may neglect religion, but if they desire to have

one they can neither desire nor imagine a relation at once closer and

more moral, more sacred and more joyous, freer and more trustful, than

that which was inaugurated in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ.

What can they have in the shape of life superior to the life of perfect

and reciprocal affection,--God giving Himself to man and realising in

him His paternity, man giving himself to God without fear, and

realising in Him his humanity? Is not religious evolution accomplished

when these two terms, God and man, opposed to each other at the origin

of conscious life on earth, interpenetrate each other till they reach

the moral unity of love, in which God becomes interior to man and lives

in him, in which man becomes interior to God and finds in God the full

expansion of his being? Christianity is therefore the absolute and

final religion of mankind.

At the same time, this filial piety in the person of Jesus and His

followers is an observable phenomenon; so that the ideally perfect

religion has manifested itself from the beginning as an historical and

positive religion. It is not an abstract ideal, a theoretical

doctrine, floating above humanity, but a principle and a tradition of

new life, an inexhaustibly fruitful germ inserted in human life to

raise it, not in idea but in fact, to a higher form. That which the

first human consciousness was on earth, separating itself from its

maternal animality, and bringing with it the kingdom of man, the

initiative consciousness of Christ, issuing from the bosom of antique

humanity, has been, and it has founded on our humble planet the kingdom

of God, the kingdom, _i.e._, of free, pure spirit, of righteousness and

love. We are no longer therefore in face of a rational doctrine or a

speculative view, but of a positive force, of a power of life with

which no one can break (I do not say in form and from without, but in

fact and in the inner man) without at the same time breaking with the

higher life of spirit as well as with all hope and joy, and health of

soul.

* * * * *

3. _The Gospel of Jesus_

The Christian principle appears in its simple and naked form, in the

form of feeling and of inspiration, in the soul of Jesus. It is

described, explained, expanded, in His Gospel. The Gospel in fact is

merely the popular translation and the immediate application of the

principle of the piety of Jesus in the social _milieu_ in which He

lived. Everything springs from His filial consciousness as a natural

and wonderful efflorescence: His messianic vocation, His twofold

ministry of preaching and healing, His deeds and His discourses, His

ethics and His doctrine, the absolute gift of Himself in life and

death. We must place ourselves at this luminous centre if we would see

the rest dart forth like rays. In it is found the inner, living unity

of His teaching and His destination. He promulgates no law or dogma;

He founds no official institution. His intention is quite different:

He wishes, before everything else, to awaken the moral life, to rouse

the soul from its inertia, to break its chains, to lighten its burden,

to make it active, free, and fruitful. He regards His work as finished

when He has communicated His life, His piety, to a few poor

consciousnesses that He found asleep and dead. Never man spake like

this man, because never had man less concern about what we call

"orthodoxy"--that is, about abstract and accurate formulas. He prefers

the language of the people to the language of the schools; He makes use

of images, parables, paradoxes, of current and traditional ideas, of

every form of expression which, taken literally, is the most inadequate

in the world, but which, on the other hand, is the most living and

stimulating. Each of His sentences or parables is enclosed in a hard

shell that has to be broken before you can get at the kernel. Jesus

wished to force His hearers to interpret His words, because He called

them to an inward, personal, autonomous activity, because He wished to

put an end to the religion of the letter and of rites, and to found the

religion of the spirit. Even now, he that does not give himself to

this labour of interpretation and assimilation in reading the

Gospel,--he who does not penetrate through the letter and the form to

the inspiration and the inmost consciousness of the Master,--cannot

understand or profit by His teaching. He who does not collaborate with

Him while listening to Him, who does not pierce through His words to

His soul, will come away empty. He only gives to those who have, or at

least desire to have. He only leads the seeker to the truth. He only

pardons those who repent, or comforts those who mourn, or fills the

hungerers and the thirsters after righteousness.

Such is the character of His Gospel. We cannot here set forth its

contents; we can only note the religious attitude of Jesus with regard

to things and men, to Nature and Society.

At peace with God, Jesus found Himself at peace with the universe. The

idea of Nature, that formidable screen erected between ourselves and

God, destroying hope and quenching prayer, did not exist for Him.

Nature--that was the Will of His Father. He submitted to it with

confidence and joy, whereas we submit to it with desperate resignation.

He did not feel Himself to be an orphan or an exile in the world; He

conducted Himself in it with ease and in security, not as a slave, but

as a son in the house which the Father filled with His presence. It is

the Father that directs all things; He makes His sun to shine upon the

evil and the good; He watches over the sparrows; He clothes the lilies

of the field; He gives life and food, the body and raiment; He notices

the work we have to do, the trials we must bear. He never leaves us to

ourselves. His spirit vivifies and fortifies our own. He is at the

origin of our life and at the end. We are ever in the Father's hands.

The outlook of Jesus, it is true, is not our own. He shared the

outlook of His race and time.... But His filial piety did not depend

upon His knowledge of the universe. The amount of culture does not

count in this order of feelings. Irreligion was not less easy or less

frequent then than now, and if His outlook on the universe was

narrower, it must not be imagined that it was less full of scandalous

fatalities, of moral difficulties, of rude shocks to piety and faith.

The world of the apocalypses, which was the world in which Jesus had to

live and act, was not less full of mysteries and terrors than our own.

His filial piety alone gave Him the means and strength by which to

overcome them. The duty of man, He considered, was to change his heart

rather than to change the order of things, _i.e._ the will of God.

There is no trace of sorcery or magic or the appetite for miracles in

the prayer He taught to His disciples. At bottom it amounts to this:

"Our Father, let Thy will be done!" His heart-obedience was composed

half of childlike confidence, half of heroic renunciation. In face of

His trials He submitted without weakness and without complaint, and in

face of death He breathed the prayer of faith, the only one that still

remains to us: "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit."

In face of the universe and its laws the individual ego is necessarily

called on to submit and to renounce itself. The only matter of

importance is to know upon what altar we shall make this sacrifice.

Those who offer it on the altar of that blind divinity, "the nature of

things," remain still unconsoled. Those who, with Jesus, make it in

the arms of the Heavenly Father, accomplish it with strength and joy.

From the awakening of consciousness to its highest point of

development, man carries within him this radical contradiction: he

feels that there is a mortal conflict between the idea that he

gradually forms of the world and the idea he forms of himself. The ego

wishes to conquer and does actually conquer the world; it even goes

beyond it by thought; but the world has its revenge; it dominates the

ego, it crushes it beneath the weight of its invincible laws, and it

swallows it up,--itself, its efforts, its works, its thought,--like an

ephemeral nonentity. Jesus felt this opposition; He suffered from this

conflict. He resolved the antithesis by a third term, in which was

realised the other two: the notion of the Father, whose beneficent will

is equally sovereign in man and in the universe. And it is this happy

solution of the enigma of life that still renders the religion of Jesus

the religion of hope.

Amongst men, in the midst of society, Jesus felt other relations and

new obligations formed in His heart. His filial piety became a

fraternal piety. The first commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy

God with all thine heart," necessarily gave birth to the second: "And

thy neighbour as thyself." The Father who lives in me lives equally in

my neighbour; He loves him as much as He loves me. I ought therefore

to love Him in my neighbour as well as in myself. This paternal

presence of God in all human souls creates in them not only a link but

a substantial and moral unity which makes them members of one body,

whatever may be the external and contingent differences which separate

them. From the Fatherhood in heaven flows the brotherhood on earth.

From a relation of righteousness and love towards God springs a similar

relation between men.

In thus defining the religious connection of Jesus with His brethren I

am afraid of weakening it. For Him it was not a matter of theory; for

He never constructed any theory or formulated any doctrine of human

fraternity; it was with Him a passionate sentiment, a deep-felt

solidarity and kinship, a true family life, in which this Elder

Brother's heart reverberated on the one hand with the love and pity of

the Father, and, on the other, with the miseries and distresses of His

brethren. In His parables Jesus does not say "The Father" simply; He

habitually says "the father of the family," "the head of the house."

It is because the father does not exist without his children, and

because humanity, on earth at least, is the family, by means of which

the paternity of God is realised.

But in the society of men Jesus encountered sin with all its effects in

the shape of moral deformity and physical suffering. From the contact

of His filial piety with this enormous human misery sprang a twofold

appeal: the voice of His Father in His soul, the plaint of His brethren

all around; and to this double cry the answer was--His ministry of

relief, of consolation, and salvation: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon

Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He

hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of

sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to

proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke iv. 18, 19, R.V.).

It all flows from the same source. It was not only individuals who

needed to be healed and saved. The family of God was not less broken

down, oppressed, disorganised, by all the powers of evil, a prey to

hatred, selfish ambition, intestine wars. Would it not be necessary

here also to effect a work of restoration, to reconstruct this family

so highly-favoured of the Father for the salvation of the world, to

inaugurate the kingdom of God announced by so many of the prophets, and

expected so impatiently by all pious souls and all the victims of

unrighteousness? This was His messianic vocation. But how would this

victory of the Messiah be realised? Would it be the work of Divine

power, flashing forth and executing its pitiless reprisals? Since the

paternal heart of God had been opened and poured into His own, Jesus

had perceived another law and another force, the law and force of love,

which triumphs by self-sacrifice. Soon there arose in His

consciousness a new image of the Messiah, that of the Servant of

Jehovah, bearing the sins and miseries of His people, bruised,

humiliated, dying to procure them life and healing. It was the gospel

of the Cross. The further He advanced in this emptying of self, and in

this work of love and pain, the larger and more luminous became the

revelation of the Father in His soul. When at last He had the clear

and perfect consciousness that He had no longer any will to do but the

will of God, no other plan to follow than His mysterious designs, no

other cause to serve and to defend but His, He did not doubt the final

victory; His faith shone forth triumphantly, appropriating to itself,

to express itself in perfect freedom, the boldest promises of the

Ancient Testament and of the contemporary apocalyptic seers. By His

union with the Father, the heir of the past felt Himself master of the

future. On the throne of immolated love He has founded a kingdom that

will never end. Such is the inner secret of His hope, such the moral

and religious meaning of His prophecies of speedy victory, and of His

return upon the clouds of heaven.

Jesus was fond of saying that a wise man knew how to bring forth from

the treasury of his heart things new and old. It was in this way that

He accomplished the most radical of religious revolutions while seeming

only to fulfil the law and the prophets. What was there then that was

so new and potent in the least of His discourses? The treasure of His

filial consciousness. The inner inspiration springing up in them

incessantly gives to every detail of His teaching, the oldest words,

the most familiar metaphors, a meaning altogether new, a reach and

bearing infinite. His speech confines itself to the antithesis that

had become traditional with all the prophets, of man's weakness and

God's strength, of sin and pardon, of repentance and confidence, of

sickness and healing, of humility and exaltation. But He had a way of

looking at them, and even of making them spring out of each other, that

entirely renovated them. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs

is the kingdom of heaven! Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall

be comforted! Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after

righteousness, for they shall be filled!" To press thus and to

stimulate the sense of need, of misery and sin, so far that it changes

into its opposite; to draw riches out of poverty, comfort out of

sorrow, victorious strength from weakness; to find in sorrow for sin

the germ of saintly life and in hunger and thirst the very source of

satisfaction; to make every human soul thus pass through this inward

drama of repentance and conversion in which it is regenerated and

renewed,--such is the unique but admirable and all potent mystery of

the Gospel.

Christ did not construct a theory of man, of his moral life, any more

than He constructed a theory with respect to God and the universe. He

was content to place Himself at the centre of the human consciousness,

and to dig down to the source of life. He takes man as he is in all

climates and in all conditions. He does not declare him to be

radically impotent for good, but neither does He flatter him by veiling

his natural misery. He knows him to be ardent and feeble, full of

needs and of illusions, capable of conversion, subject to all passions,

the victim of all slaveries. He treats him as diseased, which is the

truth, and He does not think He can make him find the principle of a

serious cure, save in the very sense of his malady. So far from

blunting the edge of the moral law, He sharpens it as one sharpens a

dissecting knife in order the better to pierce the living flesh and

penetrate to the very joints and marrow; He infinitely enhances the

demands of the traditional ideal; from the outward act He descends to

the inward feeling; He makes lust equal to adultery, and anger or

hatred to murder itself. He tells His disciples to love their enemies,

to pray for those who persecute them, to answer violence by gentleness,

and injuries by love. He speaks thus not to weaken the vigour of

righteousness, but because He sees in love and gentleness a higher

righteousness and the sole means of securing the final triumph of good

over evil. That is why the righteousness of His friends exceeds the

righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. It is no longer dictated

by an outward letter, but it has, for soul, the very spirit of the

Father, and, for inward rule, the ideal the Master has lit up in the

conscience: "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."

This morality would easily become ascetic and appear impossible if it

were not blended with an opposite element which renders it human and

fruitful without either lowering or destroying it. That element is

mercy and forgiveness; it is pure, unconditional grace which in misery

makes room for hope, and in repentance opens the door to faith and to

the work of faith. These two elements, inexorable law and

unconditional grace, are so intimately blended in the Gospel of Christ

that the Gospel only subsists in its originality and with its power by

their perfect fusion and reciprocal and constant action. Without the

inflexible rigours of the moral ideal, repentance would not be

possible--at least it would never be profound enough to produce the

renovation of the heart; but, without faith in the divine mercy,

repentance itself, changing into despair, would be barren and

ineffectual. These two elements of the Christian life are as fruitful

by their union as they are impotent and liable to degeneration when

isolated or opposed. What does Christian law become without the

sentiment of love, without the impulse of mercy, but a sort of moral

Stoicism, rigid and severe? And what would be the doctrine of grace

apart from the sacred obligation of the law but the theory of a

mischievous indulgence or a Pagan mysticism? To decompose the Gospel

salt is to destroy its savour.

* * * * *

4. _A Necessary Distinction_

At the close of this long meditation, one thing seems to me very clear,

the necessity, or rather the obligation under which I stand henceforth

of distinguishing between the purely moral essence of Christianity and

all its historical expressions or realisations, even the highest and

most faithful of them. If religion is an inward life, a real and felt

relation between God and man, and if Christianity is that life carried

to a higher degree, it is certain that religion in general, and

Christianity in particular, must have the two characteristics of all

living things. Life is a force, ideal in its essence, real in its

manifestations. It can only manifest itself in the organisms that it

creates and animates. But, while incarnating itself in its works, it

does not exhaust itself or remain imprisoned in any of them. Jesus was

well aware of this when He compared His gospel to the leaven which

raises the dough and to the seed which germinates in the soil into

which it falls.

This necessary distinction will neither be made nor admitted by

everybody. Many who concede it in theory deny it in practice.

Protestants smile at the Catholics, who identify Christianity with the

Church. But while admitting and making the distinction, when it comes

to particular churches and particular systems of dogmas, they resist

and protest in their turn, if it becomes necessary to apply it to the

Bible, and to distinguish between the Word and its human and historical

expression.

Should we go further still? May we, ought we in all fidelity to apply

the distinction to the Gospel of Christ itself and to the primitive

form in which it has come down to us? Most of those who have

accompanied us thus far will now recoil and leave us. They will employ

against us the very same arguments which appear to them so pitiful when

used with respect to the Church and to the Bible. For my part, I

cannot comprehend this fear of the freedom left to criticism. It seems

to me impossible to deny that in the teaching of Jesus there are parts

which are uncertain, things which have been either badly understood or

badly reported, an oriental and contingent form which needs to be

translated into our modern languages. Who does not see that neither in

His language nor in His thought is there anything absolute? Both of

them are constantly determined by the generally received ideas of His

time, the state of mind of His interlocutors; and unless you desire to

deny that Jesus was a man of His age and of His race, how can you

abstract Him from His environment and attribute to Him ideas which have

neither date nor place? I have already compared Christianity to an oak

which has lived and grown for eighteen centuries, and the Gospel to the

acorn from which it sprang. But in that acorn itself, as in the tree,

it is manifest that there are two things: a principle of life, and some

matter borrowed from the Hebraic soil, with which the creating

principle was obliged to amalgamate itself in order to enter into

history and to become fruitful. The characteristic of life is to

render possible and to institute the constant exchange of the materials

with which it builds up its works. When this exchange has ceased, life

has disappeared. If the Gospel of Jesus were something fixed and

finished like a code of laws or a collection of formulas, it would no

longer be a power of life. His words defy the centuries and never

wither; they are truly eternal, because they leave free and do not

imprison in a rigid and immutable letter the spirit of life which

animates them.

Arrived at this point of view, I see the relations between Christianity

and historical criticism change completely, and find myself once more

in the greatest religious security. Criticism will always be a just

cause of alarm to those who elevate any historical and contingent form

whatever into the absolute, for the excellent reason that an historical

phenomenon, being always conditioned, can never have the

characteristics of the absolute. But criticism can do nothing against

the Christian principle, which, brought back to the consciousness,

always disengages itself from the relative and fleeting expressions in

which it has clothed itself by the way. Criticism makes it to appear

again in its ideal purity and eternal worth. Far from being injurious,

it becomes necessary to it. It is not doubtful that the teaching and

the work of Christ, having been preserved in the simple oral tradition

for half a century, have not been transmitted to us without some

corruptions and some legendary elements. What then does historical

criticism, with all its rigour, do? Nothing but purify this uncertain

tradition, remove the veils, set forth more certainly the authentic

soul of Christ, and, consequently, place the Christian principle in its

surest, clearest light.

What has been said of the Master's teaching is still more true of that

of His disciples. The Christian plants have all sprung from the same

seed; but they vary according to the soil in which they grow. They are

all of the same species, but in that species there are innumerable

varieties. How could the external result possibly have been the same

whether the divine seed fell into the heart of a simple fisherman of

Galilee, or a rabbi of genius, or a thinker brought up in the school of

Alexandria? Could you possibly have the same Church, the same

theology, the same ritual in Arabia and in Greece, among a savage race

and in the university circles of Germany, at Rome or in England, in the

Middle Ages in a feudal society, and in our democracies in a time of

emancipated reason and free government?

And here it will be convenient to pause and reflect a moment on that

wonderful variety in the historical forms of Christianity, none of

which are perfect and none contemptible. A superficial examination may

draw from this spectacle a lesson of indifference; a more conscientious

and attentive study finds in it an opposite lesson, the lesson of an

ever-pressing obligation on both individuals and churches never to

repose in a deceitful satisfaction, but to progress unceasingly; for

Christianity is nothing if it is not in us at once an ideal which is

never reached and an inner force which ever urges us beyond ourselves.

5. _The Corruptions of the Christian Principle_

The differences which separate the historical forms of Christianity

are, like those of religion in general, of two kinds: there are

differences of kind and differences of degree. The differences of kind

are those which arise from diversity of races, languages,

civilisations, temperaments, genius. The differences of degree are

those connected with the very intensity and purity of the Christian

faith and life. Churches and peoples are diversified at once by their

constitution and by their degree of culture and of moral life. It goes

without saying that these two classes of differences are not

juxtaposed; they are mixed incessantly and complicated endlessly. It

remains none the less true that they provoke and legitimate two sorts

of judgment. The first are accepted with tolerance and sympathy, since

it would not be reasonable to blame a man for the colour of his skin.

But the second may and should be discussed and analysed, for they imply

intellectual errors or moral defects, the corruption or the weakness of

the Christian principle, and they can only be corrected and remedied by

discussion and criticism.

The Christian seed is never sown in a neutral and empty soil. No soul,

no social state, is a _tabula rasa_. The place is always occupied by

anterior traditions of ideas, rites, or customs, by institutions in

possession. Christianity cannot therefore root itself anywhere without

entering into conflict with the regnant powers, without giving battle

to prejudices, manners, and superstitions which naturally resist, and

which, when conquered, spring up again in other forms in the victorious

religion. Take the Ebionite Christianity of the first centuries: what

is it but a mixture, a compromise between Jewish and Christian

elements? What shall we say of the Catholic Church after Constantine?

Is it not true that, in the religious transformation at that time

effected, there was a double and mutual conversion, and that it is hard

to say whether the pagan world was more modified by Christianity or

Christianity more deeply penetrated and invaded by the manners and the

religion that it was supposed to replace?

In this order the most striking victories are never complete. Even

after the most radical conversion, the old man survives, at least by

its roots, in the new man. The Pharisee long survived in St. Paul

after he became an Apostle of Christ. The same in human societies:

political or moral revolutions never abolish the past. After those

great battles in which passions and interests have often as much weight

as noble ideas and generous sentiments, there is always established a

sort of equilibrium by mutual concessions and spontaneous alliances

between the vanquished and the victorious tendencies. Hence come what

we have named the corruptions of the Christian principle in the course

of historical Christianity, for which alone should be reserved the name

of heresies.

It must not be imagined, however, that these corruptions or heresies,

against which it is the duty of Christian criticism ceaselessly to

protest, are arbitrary things, or that their number is unlimited. On

the contrary, they fall, and must necessarily fall, into two

categories. The cause of the corruptions of the Christian principle in

social life can only be found in the previous tradition, in one of the

moral and religious tendencies that Christianity aspires to conquer and

replace. Now, these tendencies may be reduced to two: the tendencies

of the religions of Nature, or Pagan; and the tendency of the legal, or

Jewish, religion. Closely examine all that has disfigured or that

still disfigures historical Christianity, and you will see that each of

these corruptions is connected, by its character, with a Jewish or a

Pagan root. The Gospel as the religion of free spirit and pure

morality has never had, and could never have had, any other enemies

than Judaism or Paganism, ever ready to spring up in its bosom and

transform it either into the religion of Nature or into the religion of

the Law.

Christianity, for example, in its pure essence, implies the

absoluteness of God--that is to say, His perfect spirituality and His

perfect independence. Hence, worship in spirit and in truth, the only

worship that can be universal, the only one that corresponds to the

Christian idea of God. Therefore every tendency, even in Christianity

itself, to shut up God in a phenomenal form, to bind Him to something

material, local, or temporary, to blend the Creator with the creature,

or to fill up the gap between them by a hierarchy of divine beings

which, under pretext of serving us as intermediaries, interrupt our

free and immediate communion with the Father, is, properly speaking, a

resurrection of Paganism, and a return to idolatry. Paganism and

idolatry, of which we pretend to have so much horror, are simply the

localisation and materialisation, more or less conscious, of the divine

spirit and of divine grace, whatever may be the visible organ to which

you bind them, or on which you make their action to depend,--Pope of

Rome or Pythoness of Delphi, images of gods or images of virgin and of

saints, sacramental liturgies, the deification of a church, a

priesthood, or a book.

Take another example: Christianity is not only the liberty of God; it

is also His holiness; it is pure morality placed above all the

instincts of nature; it is, finally, the unity of morality and

religion. Hence, all that tends to break this unity, every blow at the

divine law, every attempt to cultivate religious emotion apart from

conscience, all magic and mystagogy, aesthetic piety, religious

romanticism, Christianity a la Chateaubriand, sensuous

mysticism,--these essays, so numerous in our day, at philosophic or at

literary gnosis, these new religions without repentance or conversion,

all these cults without any element of moral sanctification--these are

so many corruptions of the Christian principle, and consequences more

or less immediate of the Paganism always latent in the human heart.

By the side of this Pagan is the Judaising heresy. Christianity is not

only moral law and intransigeant holiness; it is also unconditional

love, grace, mercy, the inward action of the Spirit of God in the

spirit of man in order to produce in it that which He desires to find,

and to realise that which His law commands; it is everything that

scandalised Pharisaism in the teaching and conduct of Jesus in regard

to the sinful and the lost: pardon without reproach, rehabilitation and

salvation through repentance and affection, the sincere impulse of the

heart that has been raised above external works; the very opposite of

legal compacts, meritorious and atoning virtue, formalist religion and

ritual piety. All that tends to separate the Father from the child;

that places the liberty and virtue of man outside and apart from God as

having some merit in His sight; all Pelagianism, every theory of

salvation by works, every condition laid down to divine grace except

faith to receive it: adhesion to a doctrinal formula, sacramental

usages, priestly absolution, outward mortification, asceticism whether

monkish or puritanical, which divides morality and, in the name of a

fantastic sanctity, introduces dualism into the work of God,--all this

should be called by its right name; it should be taken for what it

really is--a relapse into the legal and formalist spirit of Jewish

Pharisaism.

Finally, I see on what condition Christianity may remain faithful to

itself while realising itself in history. It is only by an incessant

struggle of the Christian principle against all the elements of the

past which find, alas, in human propensities, and in the inertia of the

multitude, a complicity so constant and effectual. So far from

religious indifference being permissible, critical action and Christian

prayer become, in every church and every life, permanent duties. I now

understand the paradox of Christ: "I am not come to send peace on the

earth, but a sword." For the Christian principle, in fact, war is

life. To cease to fight is to succumb; it is to allow yourself to be

submerged by the rising tide of human superstitions; it is to die. Who

does not see the danger of allowing Christianity to become absorbed in

one church form, Christian truth in one formula, the Christian

principle in one of its particular realisations? All these contingent

expressions, being imperfect, must be reformed sooner or later. How

can they be unless the spirit of Christianity disengages itself without

ceasing and floats above them as an ideal? For eighteen centuries a

river of life has flowed through human history. Break down the

barriers which fanaticism and superstition are always setting up

athwart its course. If the waters cease to flow they stagnate, and

corrupt and poison the very land it was their mission to fertilise.

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT HISTORICAL FORMS OF CHRISTIANITY

1. _The Evolution of the Christian Principle_

The distinction between the Christian principle and its successive

realisations renders it easy to resolve the question, formerly so much

debated, as to the perfectibility of Christianity. It is perfect

piety, plenary union with God, consequently the absolute and definitive

Religion. But, regarded in its historical evolution, not only is it

perfectible, but it must ceaselessly progress, since, for it, to

progress is to realise itself. The germ could not be perfected in its

essence, as germ and ideal type of the tree that it potentially

contains. But the tree itself only comes into existence by the

development of the germ. No reform, no progress, no perfecting, could

raise Christianity above itself--that is to say, above its principle;

for these reforms and this progress only bring it into closer

conformity with that principle--that is, make it more Christian. On

the other hand, the principle itself must enter into evolution in

history in order to manifest its originality and its force, to realise

in individual and social life, in the realm of thought and in the realm

of action, in a word in the whole of civilisation, all its virtualities

and all its consequences. Jesus saw this when He spoke the Parable of

the Mustard Seed (Matt. xiii. 31-32).