RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.
I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable
possession of humanity?—Frequent confusion of a sentiment
for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and
morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference between the evolution
of belief in the individual and the evolution of belief
in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void
behind?
II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a
dissolution of morality among the people?—Is religion
the sole safeguard of social authority and public
morality?—Christianity and socialism—Relation between
non-religion and immorality, according to statistics.
III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage
between religion and free-thought?—Projects for
Protestantizing France—Michelet, Quinet, De Laveleye,
Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual, moral, and political
superiority of Protestantism—Utopian character of
the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals, of
substituting one religion for another—Is the possession
of religion a condition _sine qua non_ of superiority in
the struggle for existence?—Objections urged against
France and the French Revolution by Matthew Arnold;
Greece and Judea compared, France and Protestant nations
compared—Critical examination of Matthew Arnold’s
theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their
respective ideals from within?
We have seen the dissolution which menaces religious dogmatism, and
even religious morality, in modern societies. And from the very fact
of such dissolution certain more or less disturbing social problems
arise. Is it really a perilous thing, this gradual enfeeblement of
what has so long served as the basis of social and domestic virtue?
Certain people delight in subjecting nine-tenths of the human race to
a sort of ostracism. They declare in advance that the people, and all
women and children, are incapable of rising to a conception which it
is recognized that a large number of men have attained. The mass of
the people, it is said, and women and children, must be appealed to on
the side of the imagination; only, one must take care to choose the
least dangerous form of appeal possible, for fear of injuring those
whom one means to serve. Let us consider to what extent this incapacity
of the people, of women and children, for philosophy is capable of
demonstration. It is the more necessary in this book, in that it
is the sociological aspect of religion that is here the subject of
investigation.
_I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of
humanity?_
[Sidenote: Tendency to regard religious beliefs as necessary in
proportion to their absurdity.]
In our days, be it remarked, religious sentiment has found defenders
among those who, like Renan, Taine, and so many others, are most
firmly convinced of the absurdities of the dogmas themselves. So
long as such men occupy a purely intellectual point of view—that
is to say, their real point of view—the whole of the contents of
religion, all the dogmas, all the rites appear to them to be so many
astounding errors, a vast system of unconscious, mutual deception;
but the instant, on the contrary, they regard religion from the point
of view of sensibility—that is to say, from the point of view of
the masses—everything becomes justifiable in their eyes; everything
that they would attack without scruple as a bit of reasoning becomes
sacred to them as a bit of sentiment, and by a strange optical illusion
the absurdity of religious beliefs becomes an additional proof of
their necessity; the greater the abyss which separates them from the
intelligence of the masses, the greater their fear of having this
abyss filled up. They do not for themselves feel the need of religious
beliefs, but on this very account they regard them as indispensable for
other people. They say, “How many irrational beliefs the people do have
that we get along very well without!” And they conclude, therefore,
“These beliefs must be extremely necessary to the existence of social
life and must correspond to a real need, in order thus firmly to have
implanted themselves in the life of the masses.”[73]
[73] Moreover when one has passed one’s life, or even many
years, in any study whatsoever, one is inclined extremely to
exaggerate the importance of this study. Greek professors
believe that Greek is necessary to the best interests of
humanity. When any question arises of drawing up a curriculum,
if the professors of the several studies are interrogated, each
wishes to see his own especial branch of science in the first
rank. I remember that after I myself had been making Latin
verses for some years I would have ranged myself voluntarily
among the defenders of Latin verse. Whenever anyone makes an
especial study of some work of genius, that of an individual,
or _a fortiori_ that of a people—Plato, Aristotle or Kant, the
Vedas or the Bible, this work tends to become in his eyes the
very centre of human thought; the book of which one makes a
special study tends to become _the_ book. A priest looks upon
the whole of human life as an affair of faith simply; knowledge
to a priest means simply a knowledge of the Fathers of the
Church. It is not astonishing that even members of the laity,
who have made religion the principal object of their studies,
should be inclined to magnify its importance for humanity,
or that the historian of religious thought should regard it
as including the whole of human life, and as acquiring, even
independently of any notion of revelation, a sort of inviolable
character.
[Sidenote: Free-thought for an intellectual aristocracy.]
Frequently, along with this belief in the omnipotence of the religious
sentiment, there goes a certain contempt for those who are the victims
of it; they are the serfs of thought, they must remain attached to
the soil, bound within the limits of their own narrow horizon. The
aristocracy of science is the most jealous of aristocracies, and
a certain number of our contemporary men of science are bent on
carrying their coat of mail in their brain. They profess toward the
mass of the people a somewhat contemptuous charity, and propose to
leave it undisturbed in its beliefs, immersed in prejudice as being
the sole habitat in which it is capable of existing. For the rest,
they sometimes envy the people its eternal ignorance, platonically
of course. The bird no doubt possesses vague regrets, vague desires,
when he perceives from on high a worm trailing tranquilly through
the dew, oblivious of heaven; but the bird, as a matter of fact, is
always careful to retain his wings, and our superior men of science
do the same. In their judgment, certain superior minds are capable of
enfranchising themselves from religion, without evil results following;
the mass of the people cannot. It is necessary to reserve freedom of
conscience and free-thought for a certain select few; the intellectual
aristocracy should defend itself by a fortified camp. Just as the
ancient Roman people demanded bread and spectacles, so modern people
demand temples, and to give them temples is sometimes the sole means
of making them forget that they have not enough bread. The mass of
humanity must, as a mere necessity of existence, adore a god, and not
simply god in general, but a certain God whose commandments are to be
found in a pocket Bible. A sacred book, _that_ is what is necessary.
We are reminded of Mr. Spencer’s saying, that the superstition of
the present day is the superstition of the printed page; we believe
that some mystical virtue inheres in the four and twenty letters of
the alphabet. When a child asks questions concerning the birth of his
younger brother, he is told that one found him under a bush in the
garden; and the child is content. The mass of the people is a big child
simply, and must be dealt with after the same fashion. When the mass
of the people asks questions about the origin of the world, hand it
the Bible—it will there see that the world was made by a determinate
Being, who carefully adjusted its parts to each other; it will learn
the precise amount of time that was consumed in the work; seven days,
neither more nor less; and it needs learn nothing further. Its mind is
walled in by a good solid barrier which it is forbidden to overleap
even by a look—the wall of faith. Its brain is carefully sealed, the
sutures become firm with age, and there is nothing to do but to begin
the same thing over again with the next generation.
Is it then true that religion is thus, for the mass of mankind, either
a necessary good or a necessary evil, rooted in the human heart?
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Confusion of religious sentiment with need for philosophy
and morality.]
The belief that the religious sentiment is innate and perpetual rests
upon a confusion of the religious sentiment with the need that exists
in mankind for philosophy and morality; and however closely bound up
together philosophy and morality and religion may be, they are in
themselves distinct and separate, and tend progressively to become more
and more manifestly so.
[Sidenote: Religious sentiment not innate.]
In the first place, how universal soever the religious sentiment may
appear to be, it must be admitted that it is not innate. Persons who
have passed their childhood without any communication with other
human beings, owing to some corporal defect, display no signs of the
possession of religious ideas. Dr. Kitto, in his book on the loss of
the senses, cites the case of an American woman who was congenitally
deaf and dumb, and who later, after she was capable of communicating
with the people about her, was found not to possess the slightest
notion of a divinity. The Rev. Samuel Smith, after twenty-three
years intercourse with deaf mutes, says that, education apart, they
possess no notion of a divinity. Lubbock and Baker cite a great number
of examples of savages who are in the same case. According to the
conclusions set forth above, in the beginning religions did not spring
ready-made out of the human heart: they were imposed on man from
without, they reached him through his eyes and through his ears; they
contained no element of mysticism—in their first steps. Those who
derive mysticism from an innate religious sentiment reason a little
after the manner of those who in politics should derive royalty from
some supposed innate respect for a royal race. Such a respect is the
work of time, of custom, of the sympathetic tendencies of a body of men
long trained in some one direction; there is contained in it no single
primitive element, and yet the power of the sentiment of loyalty to
a royal race is considerable. The Revolution showed as much, in the
wars of the Vendée. But this power wears out some day or other, the
cult for royalty disappears with the disappearance of royalty itself;
other habits are formed, creating other sentiments, and the spectator
is surprised to see that a people which was royalist under monarchy
becomes republican under republicanism. The reign of sensibility over
intelligence is not perpetual; sooner or later, the position of the two
must be reversed; there is an intellectual habitat to which we must as
inevitably adapt ourselves as to our physical habitat. The perpetuity
of the religious sentiment depends upon its legitimacy. Born, as it is,
of certain beliefs and certain customs, its fate is one with theirs.
So long as a belief is not completely compromised and dissolved, the
sentiment attaching to it may no doubt possess the power of preserving
it, for sentiment always plays the rôle of protector and preserver.
The human soul in this respect is analogous to society. Religious or
political sentiments resemble iron braces buried in some wall menaced
with ruin; they bind together the disjointed stones, and may well
sustain the edifice for some time longer than, but for them, it would
have stood; but let the wall once be undermined, so that it begins
to give way, and they will fall with it. No better method could be
employed for securing the complete and absolute extinction of a dogma
or an institution than to maintain it till the last possible instant;
its fall under such circumstances becomes a veritable annihilation.
There are periods in history when to preserve is not to save but
definitely to ruin.
[Sidenote: Post hoc ergo propter hoc.]
The perpetuity of religion has therefore in nowise been demonstrated.
From the fact that religions always have existed it cannot be concluded
that they always will exist; by ratiocination like that one might
indeed achieve singular consequences. Humanity has always, in all
times and places, associated certain events with others which chanced
to accompany them; _post hoc ergo propter hoc_ is a universal sophism
and the principle of all superstition. It is the basis of the belief
that thirteen must not sit down at table, that one must be careful
not to spill the salt, etc. Certain beliefs of this kind, such as
that Friday is an unlucky day, are so widespread that they suffice
sensibly to affect the average of travellers arriving in Paris on
that day of the week by train and omnibus; a number of Parisians are
averse to beginning a journey on Friday, or to attending to business
that can be postponed; and it must be remembered that the intelligence
of Parisians, at least of the men, stands high in the scale. What can
one conclude from that if not that superstition is tenacious of life
in the bosom of humanity and will long be so? Let us reason, then, in
regard to superstition as in regard to mythological religion. Must we
not admit that the need of superstition is innate in man, that it is
part of his nature, that his life would really be incomplete if he
ceased to believe that the breaking of a mirror is a sign that someone
will die? Let us therefore set about finding some _modus vivendi_
with superstition; let us combat superstitions which are harmful not
by exposing their irrationality but by substituting in their stead
superstitions which are contrary to them and inoffensive. Let us
declare that there are political superstitions and instruct women and
children in them; let us inoculate, for example, feeble minds with
that ingenious Mohammedan aphorism, that the duration of one’s life is
determined in advance and that the coward gains absolutely nothing by
fleeing from the field of battle; if he was fated to die, he will die
on his own doorstep. Does not that strike one as a useful belief for an
army to hold and more inoffensive than a great many religious beliefs?
Perhaps it even contains an element of truth.
[Sidenote: That religious beliefs have been useful no reason for
retaining them.]
One might go far along that path and discover a number of necessary
or at least useful illusions, a number of “indestructible” beliefs.
“It is,” says M. Renan, “more difficult to hinder mankind’s believing
than to induce it to believe.” Certainly it is. In other words, it is
more difficult to instruct than to deceive. If it were not so, what
merit would there be in the communication of knowledge? Knowledge is
always more complex than prejudice. A knowledge sufficiently complete
to put one on one’s guard against lapses of judgment demands years
of patience. Happily, humanity has long centuries before it, long
centuries and treasures of perseverance; for there is no creature more
persevering than man and no man more obstinate than the savant. But
it may be said that religious myths, being better adapted than pure
knowledge to popular intelligence, possess after all the advantage of
symbolizing a portion of the truth; and that on this score one may
permit them to the vulgar. It is as if one should say that the “vulgar”
should be permitted to believe that the sun moves round the earth
because the common man is incapable of conceiving, with accuracy, the
infinite complexity of the motion of the stars. But every theory, every
attempted explanation, however crude it may be, is in some degree a
symbol of the truth. It is symbolic of the truth to say that nature
experiences a horror of a vacuum, that the blood lies motionless in
the arteries, that the line of vision runs from the eye to the object,
instead of from the object to the eye. All these primitive theories are
incomplete formulations of the reality, more or less popular efforts to
“render” it; they rest upon visible facts not yet correctly interpreted
by a completer scientific knowledge; and does that constitute a reason
for respecting all these symbols, and for condemning the popular
intelligence to fatten upon them? Primitive and mythical explanations
served in the past to build up the truth; they ought not nowadays to
be employed to obscure it. When a scaffolding has served its purpose
in aiding one to erect an edifice, one tears it down. If certain
tales are good to amuse children with, one at least should be careful
that they are not taken too seriously. Let us not take outworn dogmas
too seriously, let us not regard them with excessive complacency and
tenderness; if they are still legitimately objects of admiration to us
when we reset them among the circumstances to which they owed their
birth, they cease to be so the instant one endeavours to perpetuate
them among the circumstances of modern life where they are quite out of
place.
[Sidenote: Preliminary acquisition of falsehood not necessary to
recognition of truth.]
Like M. Renan, Mr. Max Müller almost sees an example to be followed
in the castes established by the Hindus among the minds, as among the
classes of the people, in the regular periods or asrâmas through which
they oblige the intelligence successively to pass, in the hierarchy of
religions with which they burden the spirit of the faithful. For them
traditional error is sacred and venerable; it serves as a preparation
for the truth; one must place a bandage on the eyes of the neophyte in
order to be able to take it off again afterward. The tendencies of the
modern mind are precisely the opposite; it likes to supply the present
generation at once, and without superfluous preliminary, with the whole
body of truth acquired by the generations which have passed away,
without false respect or false courtesy for the errors it replaces;
it is not enough that the light should filter into the mind through
some secret rift, the doors and windows must be thrown wide open.
The modern mind fails to see in what respect a deliberate effort to
inculcate absurdity in a portion of the community can serve to secure
rectitude of judgment in the remaining portions; or in what respect it
is necessary to build a house of truth upon a foundation of falsehood;
or to run down the part of the hill that we have already climbed, as a
preparation for climbing higher.
[Sidenote: Transformation of faith inevitable.]
If the religious sentiment should disappear, it may be objected, it
would leave a void which it would be impossible to fill, and humanity’s
horror of a vacuum is even greater than nature’s. Humanity, therefore,
would satisfy somehow or other, even with absurdities, that eternal
need of believing of which we have spoken above. The instant one
religion is destroyed another takes its place; it will be always so
from age to age, because the religious sentiment will always exist as
a continuing need for some object of worship which it will create and
re-create in spite of all the ratiocination in the world. No victory
over nature can be lasting; no permanent need in the human breast
can be long silenced. There are periods in human life when faith is
as imperious as love; one experiences a hunger to embrace something,
to give one’s self—even to a figment of the imagination; one is a
victim to a fever of faith. Sometimes this mood lasts throughout
one’s whole life, sometimes it lasts some days only or some hours;
there are cases in which it does not present itself till late, and
even very late, in life. And the priest has taken note of all these
vicissitudes; he is always there, patient, waiting tranquilly for the
moment when the symptoms shall appear, and the sleeping sentiment
shall awaken and become masterful; he has the Host ready, he has
great temples reverberating with sacred prayers, where man may come
to kneel, and breathe in the spirit of God, and arise strengthened.
The reply is that it is a mistake to regard all humanity as typified
in the person of the recently disabused believer. It has often been
made a subject of reproach to free-thinkers that they endeavour to
destroy without replacing, but one cannot destroy a religion in the
breasts of a people. At some certain moment in its history it falls of
its own weight, with the disappearance of the pretended evidences on
which it was resting; it does not, properly speaking, die; it ceases
simply—becomes extinct. It will cease definitely when it shall have
become useless, and there is no obligation to replace what is no longer
necessary. Among the masses, intelligence is never far in advance
of tradition; one never adopts a new idea until one has by degrees
become accustomed to it. It all takes place without violence, or at
least without lasting violence; the crisis passes, the wound closes
quickly, and leaves no trace behind; the forehead of the masses bears
no scar. Progress lies in wait for the moment of least resistance, of
least pain. Even revolutions do not succeed except in so far as they
are purely beneficial, as they constitute a universally advantageous
evolution. For the rest, there is no such thing as a revolution, or a
cataclysm, properly so called, in human belief. Each generation adds a
doubt to those which existed before in the minds of their parents, and
thus faith falls away bit by bit, like the banks of a river worn by the
stream; the sentiments which were bound up with the belief go with it,
but they are incessantly replaced by others, a new wave sweeps forward
to fill the void, and the human soul profits by its losses and grows
larger, like the bed of a river. The adaptation of a people to its
environment is a beneficent law. It has often been said, and justly,
that there is food for the soul as well as food for the body; and the
analogy may be pursued by remarking that it is difficult to induce
a people to change its national diet. For centuries the inhabitants
of Brittany have lived upon imperfectly cooked buckwheat cakes, as
they live by their simple faith and infantine superstitions. It may,
however, be affirmed, _a priori_, that the day will come when the reign
of the buckwheat cake in Brittany will be at an end, or at least will
be shared by other, and better prepared, and more nourishing foods; it
is equally rational to affirm that the faith of Brittany will some day
come to an end, that the somewhat feeble minds of the inhabitants will
sooner or later seek nourishment in solider ideas and beliefs, and that
the whole of their intellectual life will, by degrees, be transformed
and renewed.
[Sidenote: The disenchantment that accompanies it temporary.]
It is only those who have been reared in a faith, and then disabused
of it, that preserve, along with their primitive sentiments, a certain
home-sickness for a belief to correspond to these sentiments. The
reason is that they have been violently hastened in their passage from
belief to incredulity. The story of the passing disenchantment with
life, which the recent disbeliever experiences, has often been told.
“I felt horribly exiled,” M. Renan once said, in speaking of the moral
crisis through which he himself had passed. “The fish in Lake Baikal
have taken thousands of years, it is said, to transform themselves from
salt-water to fresh-water fish. I had to achieve my own transformation
in the course of some weeks. Catholicism surrounds the whole of life
like an enchanted circle with so much magic that, when one is deprived
of it, everything seems insipid and melancholy; the universe looked to
me like a desert. If Christianity was not true, everything else seemed
to me to be indifferent, frivolous, scarce worthy of attention; the
world looked mediocre, morally impoverished to me. The world seemed
to me to be in its dotage and decadence; I felt lost in a nation of
pigmies.” This pain incident to metamorphosis, this sort of despair at
renouncing everything that one has believed and loved up to that time,
is not peculiar to the Christian who has fallen away from Christianity;
it exists in diverse degrees, as M. Renan well knew, whenever a love of
any sort comes to an end in us. For him who, for example, has placed
his whole life in the love of a woman and feels himself betrayed by
her, life seems not less disenchanted than for the believer who sees
himself abandoned by his God. Even simple intellectual errors may
produce an analogous sentiment. Archimedes no doubt would have felt
his life crumble away beneath him, if he had discovered irremediable
lacunæ in his chain of theorems. The more intimately a god has been
personified and humanized, the more intimately he comes to be beloved,
and the greater must be the wound he leaves behind when he deserts the
heart. But even though this wound be in certain instances incurable,
that fact constitutes no argument in support of the religion of the
masses, for an illegitimate and unjustifiable love may cause as
much suffering when one is deprived of it as a legitimate love. The
bitterness of truth lies less in truth itself than in the resistance
offered to it by intrenched and established error. It is not the world
which is desert when deprived of the god of our dreams, it is our own
heart; and we have ourselves to blame if we have filled our hearts with
nothing better than dreams. For the rest, in the majority of cases, the
void, the sense of loss which a religion leaves behind, is not lasting;
one adapts one’s self to one’s new moral environment, one becomes
happy again; no doubt not in the same manner—one is never happy twice
in the same manner—but in a manner less primitive, less infantine,
more stable. M. Renan is an example of it. His transmutation into a
fresh-water fish was achieved in reality tranquilly enough; it is
doubtful whether he ever dreams now of the salt-water stretches of the
Bible, and nobody has ever declared so forcibly that he is happy. One
might almost make it a matter of reproach to him, and suggest that the
profoundest happiness is sometimes not so precisely aware of itself. If
every absolute faith is a little naïve, one is not absolutely without
naïveté when one is too confident of one’s own happiness.
[Sidenote: The essential cheapness of religious speculation.]
To the surprise and to the disenchantment which a former Christian
experiences in the presence of scientific truth may be opposed the
even more profound astonishment which those who have been exclusively
nourished on science experience in the presence of religious dogma.
The man of science can understand religious dogmas, for he can follow
the course of their birth and development century by century; but he
experiences, in his effort to adapt himself to this narrow environment,
something of the difficulty that he might feel in an effort to enter
a Liliputian fairy palace. The world of religion—with the ridiculous
importance which it ascribes to the earth as the centre of the
universe, with the palpable moral errors that the Bible contains, with
its whole body of legend, which is affecting only to those who believe
in them, with its superannuated rites—all seems so poor, so powerless
to symbolize the infinite, that the man of science is inclined to see
in these infantine dreams the repugnant and despicable side rather
than the elevated and attractive side. Livingstone says that one day,
after having preached the Gospel to a new tribe, he was taking a walk
in the neighbouring fields when he heard near him, behind a bush, a
strange noise like a convulsive cough; he there found a young negro who
had been taken by an irresistible desire to laugh by the account of
the Biblical legends, and had hidden himself there out of respect for
Livingstone, and in the shadow of the bush was writhing with laughter
and unable to reply to the questions of the worthy pastor. Certainly
the surprising legends of religion can give rise to no such outburst
of gaiety as this in one who has spent his life among the facts of
science and the reasoned theories of philosophy. He feels rather a
certain bitterness, such as one feels generally in the presence of
human feebleness, for man feels something of the same solidarity in the
presence of human error as in the presence of human suffering. If the
eighteenth century ridiculed superstition, if the human mind was then
“dancing,” as Voltaire said, “in chains,” it is the distinction of our
epoch more accurately to have estimated the weight of those chains; and
in truth, when one examines coolly the poverty of the popular attempts
that have been made to represent the world and the ideal of mankind,
one feels less inclination to laugh than to weep.
[Sidenote: Inevitable extinction of fanaticism.]
But, however that may be, the evolution of human belief must not be
judged by the painful revolutions of individual belief; in humanity
such transformations are subject to regular laws. The very explosions
of the religious sentiment, explosions even of fanaticism, which
still occur and have so often occurred in the course of religious
degeneration, enter as an integral part into the formula of the very
process of degeneration itself. After having been so long one of the
most ardent interests of humanity, religious faith must, of necessity,
be slow in cooling. Every human interest resembles those stars which
are gradually declining at once in light and heat, and which from
time to time present a solid exterior and then, as the result of some
inner disturbance, burst through their outer rind and become once
more brilliant to a degree that they had not rivalled for hundreds
of centuries; but this very brilliancy is itself an expenditure of
light and heat, a phase simply of the process of cooling. The star
hardens once more on its surface, and, after every fresh cataclysm and
illumination, it becomes less brilliant and dies in its efforts to
revive. A spectator who should be watching it from a sufficient height
might even find a certain comfort in the triumphs of the very spirit
of fanaticism and reaction which result in a prolonged subsequent
enfeeblement and a more rapid approach toward final extinction. Just
as haste is sometimes more deliberate than deliberation, so a violent
effort to reanimate the past sometimes results in hastening its death.
You cannot heat a cold star from the outside.
_II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of
morality among the people?_
The general enfeeblement of the religious instinct will set free, for
employment in social progress, an immense amount of force hitherto
set aside for the service of mysticism; but it may well be asked also
whether there are not a number of forces hurtful to society, and
hitherto held in check or annulled by the religious instinct, which
upon its disappearance will be given free play.
[Sidenote: One must respect what is respectable only.]
“Christianity,” Guizot said, “is a necessity for mankind; it is
a school of reverence.” No doubt; but less so perhaps than Hindu
religions, which go the length of proposing the absolute division of
mankind into castes as an object for reverence; however contrary it may
be to the natural sentiments of mankind and the operation of social
laws. Assuredly no society can subsist if its members neither respect
nor reverence what is respectable and venerable; respect is decidedly
an indispensable element in national life; the fact is one which we too
easily forget in France; but society is barred from progress if one
respects what is not respectable, and progress is a condition of life
for a society. Tell me what you respect, and I will tell you what you
are. The progress of human reverence for objects ever higher and more
high is symbolic of all other kinds of progress achieved by the human
mind.
[Sidenote: Christianity quite the opposite of a defence against
communism.]
But for religion, say the Guizot school, the property-question would
sweep away the masses of the people; it is the Church which holds
them in check. If there is a property-question, let us not seek to
ignore it; let us labour sincerely and actively at its solution. _Qui
trompe-t-on ici?_ Is God simply a means of saving the capitalist? More
than that, the property-question is not one which is more intimately
bound up to-day with religion than with free-thought. Christianity,
which implicitly contains within it the principles of communism,
is itself responsible for spreading ideas among the people which
have inevitably germinated in the course of the great intellectual
germination which distinguishes the present epoch. M. de Laveleye,
one of the defenders of liberal Christianity, confesses as much.
It was well known that among the first Christians all property was
held in common, and that communism was the immediate consequence
of baptism.[74] “We hold everything in common except our women,”
Tertullian and St. Justin say; “we share everything.”[75] It is well
known with what vehemence the Fathers of the Church have attacked the
right of private property. “The earth,” says St. Ambrose, “was given
to the rich and poor in common. Why, oh, ye rich! should ye arrogate
to yourselves alone the ownership of it?” “Nature created rights in
common, usurpation has created private rights.” “Wealth is always the
product of robbery,” says St. Jerome. “The rich man is a robber,”
says St. Basil. “Iniquity is the basis of private property,” says St.
Clement. “The rich man is a brigand,” says St. Chrysostom. Bossuet
himself cries, in a sermon on the distribution of the necessities
of life: “The murmurs of the poor are just: why this inequality of
condition?” And, in the sermon on the eminent dignity of the poor:
“The politics of Jesus are directly opposed to those of this century.”
And finally Pascal, summing up in an illustration all the socialistic
ideas which compose the bulk of Christian doctrine: “‘That dog is
mine,’ say these poor children; ‘that place there is my place in the
sun.’ Behold the beginning and the type of the usurpation of the
earth.” When “these poor children” are men, they do not always view
the usurpation of the earth with resignation; from the Middle Ages
down they have, from time to time, risen in revolt and there have
been resulting massacres. Men like Pastoureaux and Jacques in France
and Wat Tyler in England, the anabaptists and John of Leyden in
Germany, are examples of what we mean. But, these great explosions of
popular clamour once at an end, the Christian priest had always at his
disposal, to subdue the crowd, a robust doctrine of compensation in
heaven for one’s sufferings on earth; all the beatitudes are summed up
in “Blessed are the poor, for they shall see God.” In our days, owing
to the progress of the natural sciences, anything like certitude on the
subject of compensation in heaven has disappeared; even the Christian,
less sure of Paradise, aspires to see the justice and compensations of
heaven realized in this world. The most durable element in Christianity
is, therefore, less the check that it imposes upon the masses than
the contempt for the established order with which it inspires them.
Religion is nowadays obliged to call in social science to aid it in
its struggle against socialism. The true principle of private property
as of social authority cannot be religious; it lies essentially in
the sentiment of the rights of other people and in an increasingly
scientific acquaintance with the conditions of social and political
life.
[74] _Acts_ ii. 44, 45; iv. 32, sqq.
[75] Tertull. _Apolog._ c. 39, Justin., _Apolog._ I, 14.
[Sidenote: Religion not necessary to morality.]
But is not religion a safeguard of popular morality? It is true
that immorality and crime are habitually conceived as associated
with non-religion, and as products of it. Criminologists, however,
have demonstrated that no proposition could be less tenable. If one
considers the mass of the delinquents in any country, one will find
that irreligion among them is an exception, and a rare exception. In
unusually religious countries like England delinquents are not less
numerous, and the average of belief among them is higher; the greater
number, Mayhew says, profess to believe in the Bible. In France,
where non-religion is so common, it is natural that it should also
be common among the criminal classes, but it is far from being the
rule; it is most frequent among the leaders, the organizers of crime,
those, in effect, who rise above the mass of their fellows, like
Mandrin in the last century, La Pommerais, Lacenaire. If sociologists
find themselves obliged to attribute a positive antisocial bias to
certain criminals, it is not surprising that they should recognize
in a number of them an amount of instruction and a degree of talent
amply sufficient to disembarrass them of the superstitious beliefs of
the multitude, which are shared by their companions in crime. Neither
their talents nor their culture have sufficed absolutely to check
their evil disposition, but certainly they have not been responsible
for it. Criminologists cite a number of facts which go to prove that
the most minute and sincere practice of religion may go along with the
greatest crimes. Despine relates that Bourse had scarcely finished a
robbery and a homicide, before he went to kneel and take part in a
church service. G., a courtesan, as she set fire to her lover’s house,
cried: “God and the ever blessed Virgin do the rest!” The wife of
Parency, while her husband was killing an old man as a preliminary to
robbery, was praying God for her husband’s success. It is well known
how religious the Marquise of Brinvilliers was; her very condemnation
was facilitated by the fact of her having written with her own hands
a secret confession of her sins in which she made mention, along with
parricides, fratricides, arsons, and poisonings without number, of the
list of the number of times that she had been remiss or negligent in
confession.[76] Religion is no more responsible for all these crimes
than non-religion is; the higher elements of both are equally debarred
of entrance into the brain of a criminal. Although the moral sense
and religious sentiment are in origin distinct, they act and react
incessantly upon each other. It may be announced, as a law, that no one
whose moral sense is obliterated can be capable of experiencing genuine
religious sentiment in all its purity, though such a person may well
be more than usually apt to attach a value to the superstitious forms
of a cult. The religious sentiment, at its height, always rests upon a
refined moral sense, although, when religious sentiment goes further
and becomes fanaticism, it may react on and debase the moral sense. On
a person who is deficient in moral sense, religion produces no effects
but such as are evil—fanaticism, formalism, and hypocrisy—because it
is of necessity ill-comprehended and misconstrued.
[76] It must not be believed that even prostitutes, who
as a class are so closely allied to criminals, are wholly
non-religious. A case is cited of a number of prostitutes who
subscribed the money to have one of their companions, who was
on the point of death, removed from a house of ill-fame to
some place where the priest might visit her; others subscribed
money for a great number of masses to be said for the soul of
a companion who was dead. At all events prostitutes are quite
superstitious, and their religion swarms with strange and
ridiculous beliefs.
In Italy criminals are usually religious. Quite recently the
Tozzi family of butchers, after having killed and dismembered a
young man, sold his blood, mixed with sheep’s blood, in their
shop, and went none the less to perform their devotions to the
Madonna, and to kiss the statue of the Virgin. The Caruso band,
Lombroso says, habitually placed sacred images in the caves
and woods in which they lived, and burned candles before them.
Verzeni, who strangled three women, was an assiduous frequenter
of the church and the confessional, and he came of a family
which was not only religious but bigoted. The companions of
La Gala, who were imprisoned at Pisa, obstinately refused to
take food on Friday during Lent, and when the keeper tried
to persuade them to do so, they replied, “Do you think we
have been excommunicated?” Masini, with his band, met three
countrymen and among them a priest; he slowly sawed open the
throat of one of them with an ill-sharpened knife, and then,
with his hands still bloody, obliged the priest to give him the
consecrated Host. Giovani Mio and Fontana went to confession
before going out to commit a murder. A young Neapolitan
parricide, covered with amulets, confessed to Lombroso that
he had invoked the aid of the Madonna de la Chaîne in the
accomplishment of his horrible crime. “And that she really
helped me I conclude from this, that at the first blow of the
stick my father fell dead, although I am myself personally
weak.” Another murderer, a woman, before killing her husband,
fell on her knees and prayed to the blessed Virgin to give her
the strength to accomplish her crime. Still another announced
his acceptance of a line of action devised by his companion in
these words, “I will come, and I will do that with which God
has inspired thee.”
[Sidenote: Ignorance, not Catholicism, responsible for immorality.]
Catholic countries often supply an unusually high percentage of
criminals, because Catholic countries are more ignorant than Protestant
countries. In Italy, for example, as many as sixteen out of every
hundred deaths in the Papal States and Southern Italy, have at times
been deaths by violence, whereas in Liguria and Piedmont only two
or three out of every hundred are deaths by violence. The population
of Paris is not, on the whole, more immoral than that of any other
great European city, although it is distinctly less religious; what
a difference, for example, between London and Paris! The churches,
temples, and synagogues in Paris would not hold one-tenth of the
population, and, as they are half empty in time of services, a
statistician may with some show of reason conclude that only about a
twentieth of the population fulfil their religious duties. Whereas
Paris contains only 169 places of worship, London, in 1882, possessed
1231—without counting the religious assemblies which regularly gather
in the parks, the public squares, and even under the railway viaducts.
[Sidenote: Non-religion not responsible for French Revolution and the
Commune.]
But should not the crimes of the Commune and those of the French
Revolution be set down to non-religion? One might, with more show of
truth, render religion responsible for the massacres of St. Bartholomew
and of the Dragonnades, for, in the wars of the Huguenots, of the
Vaudois, of the Albigenses, the issue was a religious issue, whereas in
the case of the Commune the issue was wholly a social one; religion was
only very indirectly involved in it. The analogy for the Commune is to
be found in the wars concerning the agrarian laws of ancient Rome, or
in contemporary strikes which are so often accompanied by bloodshed, or
in any of the brutal uprisings of the labourer or the peasant against
the capitalist or the owner of the soil. Be it remarked, moreover,
that in all these and the like contests the stronger party—the
representative of society and, it is alleged, of religion—commits,
in the name of repression, violences comparable to and sometimes less
excusable than those with which they charge the party of disorder.
[Sidenote: Labour for labour’s sake.]
What demoralizes races and peoples is not so much the downfall of
religion as the luxury and idleness of the few and the discontented
poverty of the many. In society demoralization begins at the two
extremes, top and bottom. The law of labour is open to two species
of revolt; the revolt of the discontented working man who curses the
law of labour even while he obeys it, and the revolt of the idle
noble, or man of fortune, who ignores it simply. The richest classes
in society are often those whose lives show a minimum of devotion, of
disinterestedness, of true moral elevation. For a fashionable woman,
for example, the duties of life too frequently consist in an unbroken
round of trifles; she is utterly ignorant of what it means to take
pains. To bear a child or two (to exceed the number of three, one of
them has said, is the height of immorality), to have a nurse to take
care of them, to be faithful to one’s husband, at least within the
limits of coquetry—behold the whole duty of woman! Too frequently,
in the upper classes, duty comes to be conceived simply as a matter
of abstinence, of not being as nasty or as wicked as one might.
Temptations to do evil increase in number as one mounts in the social
scale, whereas what one may call temptations to do good decrease in
number. Fortune enables one to hire a substitute, so to speak, in
all the duties of life—in caring for the sick, in nursing children,
in rearing them, and so forth; the rich are not obliged to pay, as
the saying is, with their person—_payer de la personne_! Wealth too
often produces a species of personal avarice, of miserliness of one’s
self, a restriction of moral and physical activity, an impoverishment
of the individual and of the race. The shopkeeping class constitute
the least immoral section of the rich, and that because they preserve
their habits of work; but they are constantly affected by the example
of the higher classes, who take a pride in being useless. The remnant
of morality, which exists among the middle class, is partly due to
the love of money; money does, in effect, possess one advantage, that
it must in general be worked for. Nobles and business men love money
but in different ways. Young men of good family love it as a means of
expense and of prodigality, people in a small way of business love it
for its own sake, and out of avarice. Avarice is a powerful safeguard
for the remnants of morality in a people. It coincides, in almost all
its results, with a disinterested love of labour; it exercises no evil
influence except in the matter of marriage, where the question of the
girl’s portion becomes paramount, and in the matter of children,
of which it tends to restrict the number. All things considered, as
between prodigality and avarice, the moralist is obliged to cast
his vote for the latter on the ground that it is not favourable to
debauchery, and does not therefore tend to dissolve society; both are
maladies which benumb and may destroy one, but the former is contagious
and is transmitted by contact. We may add that love of expense rarely
serves to encourage regular labour: it produces, rather, an appetite
for gambling and even for robbery; clever strokes on the stock-exchange
amount, in certain cases, to robbery pure and simple. Thence arises a
secondary demoralizing influence. Prodigals are necessarily attracted
to the more or less shaky forms of financial speculation, by which,
absolutely without labour properly so called, more money can be amassed
than by labour; the miser, on the contrary, will hesitate, will prefer
effort to risk, and his effort will be more beneficial to society. In
effect, the only thing that can maintain society in a healthy state
is that love of labour for its own sake which is so rarely met with,
and which one must endeavour to develop; but this love of intellectual
and physical labour is in nowise bound up with religion; it is bound
up with a certain broad culture of the mind and heart which render
idleness insupportable.
[Sidenote: Religion the creature of circumstance.]
Similarly with the other moral and social virtues which are alleged
to be inseparable from religion. In all times humanity has found a
certain average of vice, as of virtue, necessary. Religions themselves
have always been obliged to give way before certain prevalent habits
and passions. If we had been living at the time of the Reformation,
we should have heard Catholic priests maintaining, with all the
seriousness in the world, that, but for Catholic dogmas and the
authority of the Pope, society would dissolve and perish. Happily
experience has proved that these dogmas and that authority are not
indispensable to social life; the conscience of mankind has attained
its majority and no longer needs the services of a guardian. The day
will come, no doubt, when Frenchmen will no more feel an inclination to
enter into a house of stone and invoke God to the sound of a hymn than
an Englishman or a German experiences to-day an inclination to kneel
before a priest and confess to him.
_III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion
and free-thought?_
[Sidenote: Dependence of Catholicism on power.]
Over and above free-thinkers, properly so called, there exists in every
country a class of men who understand perfectly the defects in the
religions in force about them, but have not the power of mind necessary
to lift them above revealed dogma generally, and every form of external
cult and rite. They begin accordingly to dabble in the religions
of neighbouring peoples. A religion which is not in force in one’s
immediate neighbourhood always possesses the advantage of being seen
from a distance. At a distance its faults are scarcely distinguishable,
and the imagination freely endows it with all excellent qualities.
How many things and persons gain thus by aloofness! When one has seen
one’s ideal, it is sometimes good not to approach it too near if one is
to preserve one’s reverence for it. A number of Englishmen, indignant
at the aridity of the hard and blind fanaticism of the extreme
Protestants, cast envious glances across the Channel, where a religion
seems to reign that is more friendly to art,—at once more æsthetic
and more mystical, capable of affording a completer satisfaction to
certain human needs. Among those who are thus favourable to a properly
understood Catholicism may be cited Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman;
and one might even add the Queen of England herself. In France, as
might be expected, quite the opposite disposition obtains. Wearied of
the Catholic Church and of its intolerance, we should gladly escape
its dominion: compared with the objections against Catholicism which
assail our eyes, the objections against Protestantism appear to us as
trifling. And the same notion has occurred simultaneously to a number
of distinguished Frenchmen: why should France remain Catholic, at least
in name? Why should not France adopt the religion of the more robust
people who have recently vanquished her; the religion of Germany, of
England, of the United States, of all the young, strong, and active
nations? Why not begin again the labour interrupted by the massacre
of St. Bartholomew and the Edict of Nantes? Even if one should not
succeed in converting the masses, it would suffice, according to the
partisans of Protestantism, to propagate the new religion among the
élite of the population very sensibly to modify the general course
of our government, of our national spirit, even of our laws. The
laws regulating the relations of Church and State would promptly be
corrected; they would be reconstructed so as to offer protection to
the development of the Protestant religion, as they at this moment do
in a thousand ways to the outworn religion of Catholicism. Ultimately
Protestantism would be declared to be the national religion of France;
the religion, in other words, toward which she ought to endeavour
to move, and which constitutes her real ideal, her sole hope of the
future, the sole means open to Latin nations to escape death, and
to outlive, in some sense, themselves. Add that, in the judgment of
the authors of this hypothesis, the Protestant religion, once fairly
entered in the lists against Catholicism, must inevitably and speedily
win the day; the iron pot would make short work of the earthen pot.
The partisans of Protestantism invoke history in support of their
conclusions; Protestantism was vanquished among us by force, and
not by persuasion; its defeat is therefore not definitive. Wherever
Catholicism has not employed violence, persecution, and crime to
maintain itself, it has always succumbed; its only tenable argument
has been to put its opponents to death; to-day this comfortable method
of backing the syllogism by the sword is out of date, and Catholicism
is condemned the instant it is attacked. It contains, moreover,
an essential and irremediable vice, auricular confession. By the
confessional it excites the open or secret hostility of every husband
and every father, who sees the priest interposing between him and his
wife, between him and his children. The confessor is a supernumerary in
every family; a member who has neither the same interests nor the same
ideas, and who, nevertheless, is perfectly informed of everything the
other members do, and can, in a thousand ways, oppose their projects,
and, at the moment when they least expect it, bar their path. When one
takes into consideration the mute state of war which so often exists
between the married man and the Catholic priest; when one analyzes the
other causes of dissolution which are working in Catholicism; when
one considers, for example, that the dogma of infallibility is simply
inacceptable to anyone whose conscience is not absolutely distorted,
one must admit that the project of Protestantizing France, how strange
soever it may seem at first glance, is worthy of serious attention.
[Sidenote: Proposal to Protestantize France.]
It is not astonishing that it should have won to its side a number
of partisans, and should have provoked a certain intellectual
fermentation. Michelet and Quinet were desirous that France should
become Protestant, at least transitorily! In 1843, during a journey
to Geneva, Michelet discussed with some clergymen the means of
accelerating the progress of Protestantism in France and of creating
a really national church. Two men, whose names are known to all those
who have laboured in philosophy or in social science, MM. Renouvier
and De Laveleye, are among the promoters of this movement. Convinced
free-thinkers, like M. Louis Ménard, acquiesce in it, making use of
the names of Turgot and Quinet; and M. Pillon also has sustained the
project. Many Protestant ministers have turned the whole of their
activity in this channel, have founded journals and written for the
reviews; pamphlets, works often remarkable in their kind, have been
composed and circulated. Protestants are more disposed than Catholics
to propagandism, because their faith is more personal. They feel
that in a number of provinces they form an important nucleus which
may grow in time like a snowball. A number of villages, of Yonne, la
Marne, l’Aude, etc., have already been converted; in spite of all the
obstacles raised by the civil and religious authorities, in spite of
vexations and annoyances of every sort, the neophytes have finally
succeeded in establishing a Protestant pastor among them. Materially
considered, these results are small; their consequences, however, may
some day be of great importance. One never suspects how many people
there are ready to listen and to believe; how many people there are
ready to preach and to convert. It need not be a matter of surprise,
some day or other, to see Protestant clergymen fairly rise out of
the soil and overrun our country districts. The Catholic clergy, who
present an almost unbroken front of incapacity, will scarcely be able
to hold their own against a new and ardent adversary.
[Sidenote: Contrary to the tendency of French history.]
The most serious opposition to Protestantism in France is not to be
looked for from the Catholics, but from the free-thinkers. It is in the
name of free-thought that we shall consider the following question:
Ought France really to accept as its ideal any religion whatsoever,
even though it be superior to the one professedly in possession at
the present day? Is not the acceptance of any religion as an ideal
precisely contrary to the whole movement of the French mind since the
Revolution?
[Sidenote: French Revolution still being accomplished.]
It has been said that, if the French Revolution was put down before it
had produced all of the results which were expected of it, the reason
was that it was undertaken, not in the name of a liberal religion,
but in antagonism to all religion. The nation rose as a body against
Catholicism, but it had nothing to offer in its stead; it was an
effort in the void and resulted necessarily in a fall. To address
such a reproach to the Revolution, is precisely to fail to recognize
its distinguishing peculiarity. Theretofore religion had usually been
involved in the political discussions of men; the English Revolution,
for example, was in part religious. And when an uprising was, as it
happened, wholly religious, its purpose was to pull down one cult and
set up another; the aid of a new God had to be called in to expel the
old; but for Jesus or some other unknown divinity, Jupiter would still
have been enthroned on Olympus. Also the result of these religious
revolutions was easy to predict; at the end of a certain number of
years some new cult was bound to carry the day, to intrench itself, and
to become quite as intolerant as its predecessor; and the revolution
was achieved—that is to say, everything was practically in the same
state that it was before. A determinate end, close at hand, had been
pursued and attained; a little chapter in the history of the universe
had been written, and one was ready to close it with a period and to
say that was all. What drives the historian to despair in the case
of the French Revolution, is precisely the impossibility of writing
a peroration, of reaching a final stop, of saying, “That is all.”
The great fermentation persists, and passes on from generation to
generation. “The French Revolution has come to nothing,” it is said;
but the reason is perhaps simply that it has not miscarried. The French
Revolution is still in its earliest stages; if we are still unable to
say where it is leading us, we may at least affirm with confidence
that it is leading us somewhere. It is precisely the incertitude and
the remoteness of their aim that constitute the nobility of certain
enterprises; if one wants something very big, one must be resigned to
want something a little vague. One must be resigned also to a settled
discontent with everything that is offered one as a substitute for the
fleeing ideal that constitutes one’s aim. Never to be satisfied—behold
a comparatively unknown state of mind in many parts of the world! Some
thousands of years ago there were a number of revolutions in China,
which brought forth results so precise and so incontestable that they
have come down in a state of absolute preservation to the present day.
Is China the ideal of those who wish a people to achieve once for
all a state of satisfaction, of stable equilibrium, of established
environment, of unalterable outline and form? Certainly the bent of
the French mind is precisely the opposite of that of the Chinese.
Horror of routine, of tradition, of the established fact in the face
of reason, is an attribute that we possess to a fault. To carry reason
into politics, into law, into religion was precisely the aim of the
French Revolution. It is no easy thing, it is even futile, to attempt
to introduce simultaneously logic and light into everything; one makes
mistakes, one reasons ill, one has one’s days of weakness, one succumbs
to concordats and empires. In spite, however, of so many temporary
divergences from the straight path, it is already easy to recognize the
direction toward which the Revolution tends, and to affirm that this
direction is not religious. The French Revolution affords an example,
for the first time in the world, of a liberal movement disassociated
from religion. To wish, with Quinet, that the Revolution should become
Protestant is simply not to understand it. Republican in the sphere
of politics, the Revolution tends to enfranchise man, in the sphere
of thought also, from every species of religious domination, and of
uniform and irrational dogmatic belief. The Revolution did not achieve
this end at the first attempt; it was guilty even of imitating the
intolerance of the Catholics; therein lay its prime fault, its great
crime; we suffer from it still. But the remedy does not consist in
adopting a new religion, which would simply be a disguised return to
the past.
[Sidenote: Advantages of Protestantism.]
Let us examine, however, the substantial apology for Protestantism,
presented by M. de Laveleye. He maintains the superiority of
Protestantism principally in regard to three points: 1. It is
favourable to education; 2. It is favourable to political and religious
liberty; 3. It does not possess a celibate clergy living outside of the
family, and even outside of the country. Let us pass these different
points in review. In Protestantism the need of instruction, and
therefore of a knowledge of how to read, is inevitable, for the reason
that, as has been often remarked, the reformed religion is founded on
the interpretation of a book, the Bible. The Catholic religion, on the
contrary, rests upon the sacraments and certain practices, such as the
confession, and the Mass, which presuppose no knowledge of reading.
Luther’s first and last word was, “God commands you to educate your
children.” In the eyes of the Catholic priest an ability to read is
not, so far as religion is concerned, an unqualified advantage, it
exposes the possessor to certain dangers, it is a path that may lead
to heresy. The organization of popular instruction dates from the
Reformation. The consequence is that Protestant countries are far in
advance of Catholic countries in the matter of popular instruction.[77]
Wherever popular instruction attains its height, labour will be
directed with more intelligence, and the economic situation will
be better; Protestantism therefore gives rise to a superiority not
only in instruction, but in commerce and industry, in order and in
cleanliness.[78]
[77] In Saxony, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Scotland (not
England), illiteracy is at a minimum. Even in the most favoured
Catholic countries, such as France and Belgium, at least a
third of the population are illiterate. In this comparison race
goes for nothing; Switzerland proves as much; purely Latin but
also Protestant cantons Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva are on a
level with the Germanic cantons of Zürich and Bern, and are
superior to such as Tessin, Valais, and Lucerne.
[78] In Switzerland the cantons of Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva
are strikingly in advance of Lucerne, Valais, and the forest
cantons; they are not only superior in matters of education,
but in matters of industry, of commerce, and of wealth; and
their artistic and literary activity is greater. “In the United
States,” says De Tocqueville, “the majority of the Catholics
are poor.” In Canada the larger order of business interests,
manufacturing, commerce, the principal shops in the cities, are
in the hands of Protestants. M. Audiganne, in his studies on
the labouring population in France, remarks on the superiority
of the Protestants in respect to industry, and his testimony
is the less suspicious because he does not attribute that
superiority to Protestantism. “The majority of the labourers
in Nîmes, notably the silk-weavers, are Catholics, while the
captains of industry and of commerce, the capitalists in a
word, belong to the Reformed religion.” “When a family has
split into two branches, one of which has clung to the faith
of its fathers, while the other has become Protestant, one
almost always remarks in the former a progressive financial
embarrassment, and in the other an increasing wealth.” “At
Mazamet, the Elbœuf of the south of France, all the captains of
industry with one exception are Protestants, while the great
majority of the labourers are Catholics. And Catholic working
men are, as a class, much less well educated than Protestant
working men.” Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
members of the Reformed church had taken the lead in all
branches of labour, and the Catholics, who found themselves
unable to maintain a competition with them, had the practice of
a number of different industries in which the latter excelled
forbidden them by a series of edicts beginning with the year
1662. After their expulsion from France the Huguenots carried
into England, into Prussia, into Holland, their spirit of
enterprise and of economy; and enriched the districts in which
they settled. The Germans owe some portion of their progress
to Huguenot exiles. Refugees from the Revocation introduced
different industries into England, among others the silk
industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized
Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye _De l’avenir des peuples
catholiques_.)
[Sidenote: Protestantism favours self-government.]
Similarly in civil and political matters, Protestants have always been
partisans of self-government, of liberty, of local autonomy, and of
decentralization. Side by side with the advance of the Reformation
in Switzerland, in Holland, in England and America there went a
dissemination of the principles of liberty which later became the
articles of faith of the French Revolution. Calvinists, notably, have
always been inclined to an ideal of liberty and equality which has
rightfully rendered them objects of suspicion to the French monarchy;
they realized this ideal only beyond the seas in the American
Constitution, which may be regarded, in some sort, as the product
of Calvinistic ideas. As early as the year 1633 an American, Roger
Williams, proclaimed universal liberty, and liberty of conscience
in particular; he proclaimed the complete equality of all modes of
religious worship before the law, and on these principles founded
the democracy of Rhode Island and the town of Providence. The United
States, with the local autonomy and decentralization which characterize
its government, still forms the type of the Protestant state. In such
a state the widest liberty exists only, to say the truth, within the
limit of Christianity: the founders of the American Constitution
scarcely foresaw the day when a wider tolerance would be necessary.
And it would be to form an extremely false idea of the United States
to imagine that the civil power and religion are wholly disassociated.
The separation between Church and state is far from being as absolute
in America as is often supposed, and M. Goblet d’Alviella very justly
corrects the too enthusiastic assertions, on this point, of M. Guizot
and M. de Laveleye.[79]
[79] “Public institutions are still deeply impregnated with
Christianity. Congress, the State legislatures, the navy, the
army, the prisons, are all supplied with chaplains; the Bible
is still read in a large number of schools. The invocation of
God is generally obligatory in an oath in a court of law, and
even in an oath of office. In Pennsylvania the Constitution
requires that every public employee shall believe in God, and
in a future state of reward and punishments. The Constitution
of Maryland awards liberty of conscience to deists only. The
laws against blasphemy have never been formally abrogated.
In certain States, more or less stringent Sunday laws are
enforced. In 1880 a court declined to recognize, even as a
moral obligation, a debt contracted on Sunday, and a traveller,
injured in a railway accident, was refused damages on the
ground that he was travelling on the Lord’s Day. And, finally,
church property and funds are in a considerable degree exempt
from taxation.” (M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Évolution religieuse_,
p. 233.)
Similarly, in Switzerland, in the month of February, 1886, the
criminal court of Glaris, the chief place in a canton of 7000
inhabitants, at 130 kilometers from Bern, rendered a singular
judgment. A mason named Jacques Schiesser, who was obliged to
work in water of an excessively low temperature, shivering
with cold, his hands blue, made a movement of impatience
at the cold, and uttered irreverential words toward God. A
_procès-verbal_ was made out against him. He appeared before
the judges, who condemned him for blasphemy to two days’
imprisonment. It is surprising to see Switzerland carried,
actually by Protestantism, back to the Middle Ages.
[Sidenote: Intellectual and moral superiority of Protestant clergy.]
Finally, to the political superiority of Protestantism must be added
the intellectual and moral superiority of its clergy. The obligation
to read and interpret the Bible has given rise, in the universities of
Protestant theology, to a work of exegesis which has resulted in a new
science, the Science of Religion. The Protestant clergymen are better
educated than our priests, and have moreover families and children,
and lead a life like that of any other citizen; they are national,
because their church is a national church; they do not receive orders
from abroad, and, more than all, they do not possess the terrible power
which the Catholic priest owes to the confessional; a power which
cost France the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and so many other
deplorable measures.[80]
[80] “By means of the confessional,” says M. de Laveleye,
the “priest holds the sovereign, the magistrates, and the
electors, and through the electors the legislative chamber, in
his power; so long as the priest presides over the sacraments,
the separation of Church and State is only a dangerous
illusion. The absolute submission of the entire ecclesiastical
hierarchy to a single will, the celibacy of the clergy, and
the multiplication of monastic orders, constitute a danger in
Catholic countries of which Protestant countries know nothing.”
[Sidenote: But Protestantism is not a necessary step toward
free-thought.]
The several advantages which Protestantism enjoys by comparison
with Catholicism are so incontestable that, if one must absolutely
choose between the two religions, one could not hesitate. But such
a choice is not necessary; one can avoid both horns of the dilemma.
Free-thought is even more intimately dependent upon, and more disposed
to favour, science than Protestantism is, for free-thought absolutely
depends upon science. Free-thought is more intimately dependent upon
practical and civil liberty than Protestantism is, by the very fact
that free-thought is the complete realization of liberty in the sphere
of theory. Finally free-thought renders the clergy superfluous, or
rather to reinstate a mediæval term it tends to replace the priest by
the _clerk_, that is to say by the _savant_, the professor, the man
of letters, the man of culture, to whatever state of society he may
belong. The best thing that has been said about Protestantism in France
is M. de Narbonne’s remark to Napoleon. “There is not enough religion
in France to make two.” Instead of a national religion we possess in
France a national non-religion; that very fact constitutes our claim
to originality among the nations. In France two-thirds at least of the
male population live outside the limits of religious tradition. In the
country, as in the town, there is scarcely one man for every ten women
to be found in church, sometimes not more than one for a hundred, and
sometimes none at all. In the majority of the departments, scarcely
one man can be found fulfilling his religious duties. In the great
cities, the labourer is the avowed enemy of religion, in the country
the peasant is simply indifferent. The peasantry displays a certain
respect for the exterior forms of worship; but the reason is that the
peasantry comes in contact with the priest, its intercourse with him
is constant, it generally fears or esteems him enough not to laugh
at him, except behind his back. The results of the French Revolution
cannot be arrested in this country; sooner or later they will suffice
to give birth to a complete religious, political, and civil liberty:
even to-day in politics it is not in the direction of a lack of liberty
that our failure lies, it is quite the reverse. For the French, it is
useless to talk of adopting Protestantism under the pretext that it is
favourable to civil and political liberty, to diffusion of modern ideas
and science.
[Sidenote: No sufficient evidence that Protestant countries are more
moral than Catholic.]
There remains the consideration of public morality in France. But it
is impossible to demonstrate that the morality of Protestant people
is superior to that of Catholics; nay, in respect to a certain number
of items, statistics tend rather to prove the contrary, if anything
can be proved of morality by statistics. Drunkenness, for example,
is a much less terrible scourge among Catholic peoples who inhabit
climates in which alcohol constitutes a much smaller temptation.
Illegitimate births are much more frequent in Germany than in France;
no doubt because of the laws that regulate marriage. The average of
crimes and offences is not very variable from country to country,
and such variations as there are, are attributable to difference of
climate, of race, of greater or less density of population, and not
to differences of religion. To-day, on account of the increasing
perfection of means of communication, vice tends to find its level.
Vices spread like contagious diseases: everyone whose system is in a
state which is favourable to poison becomes contaminated, to whatsoever
race or whatsoever religion he may belong. The effect of any given
religion upon the morality of any given people is certainly not to
be overlooked, but it is altogether relative to the character of the
people in question, and proves nothing as to the absolute moral quality
of the religion itself. Mohammedanism is of great service to barbarous
tribes, because it prohibits drunkenness, and travellers generally
agree as to the moral superiority of Mohammedan tribes as compared with
tribes converted to Christianity; the first are composed of shepherds
and relatively honest merchants, the second are composed of drunkards,
whom alcohol has transformed into beasts and pillagers. Does it follow
that we must all become converted to Mohammedanism, or even that the
prohibitions of the Koran, all-powerful as they are over the savage
mind, would act with the same force upon a drunkard of Paris or of
London? Alas, no! and in the absence of any such possibility one may
take refuge in this means: sobriety is even more important for the
masses of the people than continence, its absence borders more nearly
on bestiality; moreover the labouring man and especially the peasant
possesses less opportunity to run to excesses of incontinence than of
drink, for the simple reason that women cost more than drink. Even
among the followers of Mohammed, the poor are obliged to restrict
themselves to one wife.
[Sidenote: And religion is not the sole factor that determines
morality.]
And finally religion does not constitute the sole cause of morality;
still less is it capable of re-establishing a morality which is on a
decline; the utmost it can do is to maintain morality somewhat longer
in existence than it otherwise would be, to confirm custom and habit by
a backing of faith. The power of custom and of the accomplished fact
is so considerable that even religion can scarcely make head against
it. When a new religion takes possession of a people it never destroys
the mass of the beliefs which have taken root in their hearts; it
fortifies them rather by adapting itself to them. To conquer paganism,
Christianity was obliged to transform itself: it became Latin in Latin
countries, German in German countries. Mohammedanism in Persia, in
Hindustan, in the island of Java serves simply as a vestment and a veil
for the old Zoroastrian, or Brahman, or Buddhistic beliefs. Manners,
national characters, and superstitions are more durable than dogmas.
The character of northern peoples is always hard and all of a piece, to
an extent that produces a certain external regularity in their lives, a
certain submission to discipline, sometimes also a certain savageness
and brutality. The men of southern Europe, on the contrary, are mobile,
malleable, open to temptation. The explanation is to be looked for
in their climate, not in their religion. The rigid fir-tree grows in
the north; flexible, tall reeds in the south. The discipline of the
Prussian army and administration does not result from the religion
of Prussia, but from the worship of discipline. Throughout the whole
life of the north there runs a certain stiffness which shows itself
in the smallest details, in the manner of walking, of speaking, of
directing the eyes; and the northern conscience is brusque and rough,
it commands, and one must obey or disobey; in the south of Europe it
argues. If Italy were Protestant, there would probably be few Quakers.
We believe therefore that the effect is often taken for the cause,
where a preponderant influence is attributed to the Protestant or
Catholic religion on public or private morality, and, that is to say,
on the vital power of a people. This influence formerly was enormous,
it is diminishing day by day, and it is science to-day which tends to
become the principal arbiter of the destinies of a nation.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Is the possession of a religion indispensable for the best
interests of humanity.]
If it be so, what must one think of the doubts, as to the future
of France, which seem to be entertained in certain quarters? Those
who regard religion as the condition _sine qua non_ of life and of
superiority in the struggle for existence among nations, must naturally
consider France as in danger of disappearing. But is this criterion of
national vitality admissible?
[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold’s theory.]
We find ourselves here once more in the presence of Mr. Matthew
Arnold. In his judgment, the modern world has been made what it is by
the influence of two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, representing
respectively two distinct and almost opposed ideas, which are
contending with each other for the possession of the modern mind. For
Greece—the brilliant, but in spite of its subtlety of spirit, somewhat
superficial Greece—art and science fill the measure of life. For the
Hebrews life might be summed up in one word, justice. And by justice
must not be understood a rigid respect for the rights of others, but
a willingness to renounce one’s own interest, one’s own pleasure,
a self-effacement in the presence of the eternal law of sacrifice
personified in Javeh. Greece and Judea are dead; Greece faithful to the
last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of art and science,
Judea faithless at the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency
of justice, and falling by reason of that very infidelity. Mr. Matthew
Arnold finds the two nations symbolized in an Old Testament story. It
was before the birth of Isaac, the veritable inheritor of the divine
promise, who was humble but elect. Abraham looked upon his first son
Ishmael, who was young, vigorous, brilliant, and daring, and implored
God: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” But it could not be.
Greece, the Ishmael among nations, has perished. Later the Renaissance
appeared as its successor; the Renaissance was full of vitality, of
future; the dream, the sombre nightmare had passed away, there was
to be no more religious asceticism, we were to return to nature. The
Renaissance held in horror the tonsured and hooded Dark Ages, whose
spirit was renouncement and mortification. For the Renaissance itself
the ideal was fulness of life, growth of the individual, the free and
joyous satisfaction of all our instincts, of art and science; Rabelais
was the personification of it. Alas! the Renaissance fell, as Greece
fell, and the natural successor of the Renaissance, in Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s judgment, is George Fox, the first Quaker, the open contemner
of arts and sciences. Finally, in our days, a people in Europe has
taken up the succession; the modern Greece, dear to the enlightenment
of all nations, the friend of art and science, is France. How often,
and with what ardour, has this prayer in its favour been raised to God
in heaven: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” France is the
average sensual man, and Paris is his city, and who of us does not feel
himself attracted? The French possess this element of superiority over
the Renaissance, that they are more balanced than other peoples, and
though France has aimed to liberate mankind and to enfranchise them
from the austere rule of sacrifice, she has not conceived man as a
monster, nor liberty as a species of madness. Her ideas are formulated
in a system of education which lies in the regular, complete, and
harmonious development of all the faculties. Accordingly the French
ideal does not shock other nations, it seduces them; France is for
them the land of tact, of measure, of good sense, of logic. We aim in
perfect confidence at developing the whole human being without violence
to any part of it. It is in this ideal that we have found our famous
gospel of the rights of man. The rights of man consist simply in a
systematization of Greek and French ideas, in a consecration of the
supremacy of self, as against abnegation and religious sacrifice. In
France, Mr. Matthew Arnold says, the desires of the flesh, and current
ideas, are mistaken for the rights of man. While we are pursuing one
ideal, other peoples, more tightly chained to Hebraism, continue to
cultivate that justice which is founded on renouncement. From time
to time they look with envy out of their own austere and dull life,
and with admiration upon the French ideal which is so positive, so
clear, so satisfying; they are half inclined at times to make a trial
of it. France has exerted a charm on the entire world. Everyone at
some period or other of his life has thirsted for the French ideal,
has desired to make a trial of it. The French wear the guise of the
people to whom has been intrusted the beautiful, the charming ideal
of the future, and other nations cry: “Oh, that Ishmael might live
before Thee!” And Ishmael seems to grow more and more brilliant each
day, seems certain of success, is on the point of making the conquest
of the world. But at this moment a disaster occurs, the Crisis, the
Biblical judgment arrives at the moment of triumph; behold the judgment
of the world! The world, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, was judged
in 1870: the Prussians were Javeh’s substitute. And once more Ishmael,
the spirit of Greece, the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of
France, free-thought, and free conduct were conquered by Israel, by
the spirit of the Bible, by the spirit of the Middle Ages. A brilliant
but superficial civilization was crushed beneath the weight of the
barbarous and unyielding asceticism of a more or less naïve faith.
Javeh is even in the present century the god of battles, and woe to the
individuals who do not believe, with the ancient Jew, that abnegation
constitutes three-fourths of life, and that art and science together
barely fill the other fourth.
[Sidenote: Victorious superiority of Hellenism.]
Rightly to estimate this philosophy of history let us occupy Matthew
Arnold’s point of view, which is not without some shade of truth.
Assuredly Greece and Judea, although their ideas dissolved into and
became a part of Christianity, are, so to speak, two antithetical
nations representing respectively two opposed conceptions of life and
of the world. These two nations have unceasingly struggled against each
other in intellectual battle, and one may accept as most honourable
for France the rôle that Mr. Arnold has assigned to her, that of being
the modern Greece, of representing the struggle of art and science
against mystical and ascetic faith. Greece and France were conquered,
it is true, but it does not follow from that fact that the spirit of
Greece and France, of art and science, has been conquered by faith.
The battle is on the definitive issue still uncertain. If one must
trust to a calculation of probabilities, all the probabilities are in
favour of science; if the French were conquered in 1870, it was not by
German religion but by German science. In general it is very difficult
to say that a doctrine is inferior because the people who maintained
it have been vanquished in history. History is a succession of events
whose causes are so complex that we never can affirm that we know
absolutely all of the reasons which produced any given historical fact.
There are, moreover, in the life of any people a number of currents
of thought running side by side, and sometimes in opposite directions.
The land of Rabelais is also that of Calvin. More than that, in other
nations we see a species of official doctrine professed by a series
of remarkable thinkers, which seems more or less in opposition to the
more unconscious doctrine of the people, in which the conduct and
thoughts of the great multitude may be regarded as summarized. What,
for example, is to be considered as the true doctrine of the Jewish
people? Is it the passionate faith of Moses, of Elijah, or of Isaiah;
is it the scepticism of the Ecclesiast, already foreshadowed in the
book of Job; is it the explosion of sensuality in the Song of Songs? It
is difficult to decide; it may be affirmed with some show of truth that
the temperament of the Jewish people as a whole is rather more sensual
than mystic. The official doctrine handed down to us in the Bible
may be regarded as a reaction against popular tendencies; a reaction
whose violence is the measure of the strength and stubbornness of the
tendencies against which it was directed. The great days of the Hebrew
people were rather those when, under the reign of Solomon, the arts
of ease and life were flourishing than those when the prophets were
bewailing the disappearance of so much splendour. Or what was really
the spirit of the people in the Middle Ages? Is it to be found in the
mystical books of the monks of the times? And are the Middle Ages,
apart from the Renaissance, to be regarded as constituting a great
and completed epoch? Even if we supposed, with Mr. Matthew Arnold,
that every brilliant age, such as the Renaissance, every age of art
and science, harbours in its own bosom the germs of death, does that
fact constitute a reason for lowering one’s estimate of such epochs of
intense life, and is it not better for a people to have lived, even
though but for a few years, than to have slept through centuries?
[Sidenote: Analogy between life of nation and that of individual.]
Nothing is eternal. When a nation has enjoyed a brilliant life
during a certain number of years or centuries, when it has produced
great artists or great scholars, there necessarily comes a period of
comparative exhaustion. Religions also are subject to the law of birth,
maturity, and decay. Where does the responsibility lie? On the very
laws of life, which do not permit plants to blossom eternally, and
which in general provide, in all the kingdoms of the natural world,
that there shall be nothing so fragile as a flower. But if all human
things are transitory, to labour for the efflorescence of intelligence,
to regard art and science as the supreme aim of life, is precisely
to pursue that which is least perishable. Art, science, the last
achievements of the human mind do not decay; man alone, the individual
disappears, and the ancient adage is eternally true: “Art is long, and
life is short.” As to true justice, it also is surely eternal; but if
by true justice be understood the hard law of Jehovah, the worship of
this law has always fallen upon the insignificant epochs of history,
and precisely upon the epochs of injustice and barbarism. Therein lies
the explanation of the fact that that cult has flourished at periods
when nations were the most robust and difficult to subdue. The manners
of such nations are ferocious, their life at bottom is quite contrary
to the ideal of justice, and their religious faith resembles their
manners, and is violent and savage, and inclines them to intolerance,
to fanaticism, to massacre; but all these elements of injustice none
the less constitute, in the people that unites them all, so many
additional chances of victory over other people. Later, when manners
become more civilized, when faith diminishes and art and science are
born, a nation often becomes weaker, directly as it becomes nobler; the
finer an organism is, the more delicate it becomes, the easier it is to
break. Renouncement of self, submission of the weak to the strong, and
of the strongest to an all-powerful priest, the species of hierarchy
that obtained in Judea, in India, and Europe during the Middle Ages,
formerly gave a people a superiority in the struggle for existence,
like that of a rock over a vegetable, of an oak over a sensitive
plant, of a bull or an elephant over man; but is precisely that kind
of effectiveness the ideal of humanity, and the aim to be proposed
to human effort? To raise art and science to their highest possible
development exacts a considerable expense of force; art and science
fatigue and exhaust the people who give them birth. After epochs of
effervescence, follow epochs of repose and of recuperation, epochs, so
to speak, of intellectual lying fallow. These alternations of repose
and productivity, of sterility and fecundity will continue to recur
until some means be found of maintaining the human mind continuously
in its state of highest vitality, as one fertilizes the earth, and,
so to speak, thus secures a constant flow of sap and a perpetual
efflorescence. The day perhaps will come when the psychic analogue
of the rotation of crops may be discovered. However that may be, the
greatness of a people has in the past too often exhausted it. But it
does not follow, from that fact, that history must be read backward,
and that periods of mere preparation and barbarism and despotism must
be regarded as those which are the incarnation of the law of justice
and have saved the race of mankind.
[Sidenote: Hellenism contains the cure of its own evils.]
If greatness kills it is beautiful to die for greatness; but when it is
the death of a nation that is in question, mortality is never complete.
Which is the more completely alive to-day, whatever Mr. Matthew Arnold
may say, Greece or Judea? Which will be more alive to-morrow, France,
which to-day seems trampled underfoot, or the nations which seem to
be France’s superiors? If we were perfectly sure that France, better
than any other nation, represents art and science, we might affirm
with perfect certitude that she will possess the future, and say with
confidence that Ishmael will live. It is true that, in Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s opinion, Ishmael represents not only the man of intellect
but the man of the senses, of the desires of the flesh. Of a truth
it is strange to see anyone regarding the conquerors of France as
Quakers, and Paris can lay no better claim than London or Berlin to
being dubbed the modern Babylon. Mr. Matthew Arnold’s mystic terrors
in this connection are really deserving of raillery. What is just in
his position is that the French, even in the pursuit of pleasure,
display a certain moderation and measure, display a degree of art that
is unknown to other people; and by that very fact they achieve, if not
the substance, at least the form of morality, which is, as Aristotle
has said, a just mean between two vicious extremes. In Mr. Matthew
Arnold’s judgment, however, this specious morality serves simply as
a cloak for the lowest degree of immorality, that namely of seeking
one’s rule of life not in God but in human nature, with all its diverse
tendencies, high and low. This immorality constitutes in its turn a
sort of social danger, that of a softening or enfeeblement of the
national character of a people. This danger appears to us illusory,
or rather, if one may so speak, it is a question which belongs rather
to hygiene than to morals; what is really wanted is that science
itself should discover in the matter a rule of conduct. In reality,
genuine men of science actually are those who know best how to direct
themselves in life, and a whole people of men of science could leave
little to desire on the score of conduct; and that fact shows that
science itself contains an element of practical wisdom and morality.
Note also that there exists an antagonism between cerebral labour and
the violence of the physical appetites. The prohibitions which are
based upon a mystical law too often season desire simply, as it is
easy to prove by examples drawn from the clergy of the Middle Ages.
A much more certain method may be employed, namely, to extinguish
desire, to substitute a sort of intellectual disdain in place of
religious terror. The Mohammedan religion prohibits the use of wine;
but it is very easy to distinguish between wine and alcohol, which
Mohammed did not formerly forbid for the sufficient reason that he was
unacquainted with its existence. Moreover, religious faith is not only
subject to subtleties of interpretation, it is subject to periods of
weakness; but if, on the contrary, you issue no mystical prohibition
but cultivate a man to a certain degree of intellectual development,
he will simply not desire to drink; education will have transformed
him more perfectly than religion could have done. Far from diminishing
the value that individuals set upon pleasure, religions in reality
frequently augment it considerably, because, over and against such and
such a pleasure, and, as it were, holding the balance level against it,
they establish an eternity of pain. When a religious devotee yields
to temptation, he conceives the desired indulgence as, in some sort,
of an infinite value, as condensing into an instant such an eternity
of joy as may compensate an eternity of suffering. This conception,
which unconsciously dominates the entire conduct of the believer, is
fundamentally immoral. Fear of chastisement, as psychologists have
frequently remarked, lends a certain additional charm to the forbidden
pleasure; magnify the chastisement, you heighten the charm. Therein
lies the explanation of the fact that, if a devotee is immoral at all,
he is infinitely more so than a sceptic; he will indulge in monstrous
refinements in his pleasures, analogous to the monstrous refinements
in which his god indulges, in the item of punishments; and his virtue,
consisting largely in fear, is itself fundamentally immoral. In epochs
of scientific development this mystical and diabolical heightening of
pleasure will disappear. The man of science is acquainted with the
causes of pleasure, they fall into place in his scheme of things, in
the general network of causes and effects; a pleasure is a desirable
effect, but only in so far as it does not exclude such and such another
equally desirable effect. The pleasures of the senses take their
legitimate rank in the classified and subordinated list of human aims.
A man of large intelligence holds desire in check by means of its
natural and sole all-powerful antagonist—disdain.
[Sidenote: Hellenism more just than justice.]
To sum it all up, Ishmael is quite capable of regulating his own
conduct without Jehovah’s help. Justice is salvation, said the Hebrew
people; but science also is salvation, and justice too, and justice
not infrequently more just and more certain than any other kind. If
Ishmael sometimes strays into the desert, sometimes loses his way and
falls, he knows how to get up again; he has strength enough in his own
heart to help himself, and to make him independent of Jehovah, who
left him alone in infinite space without even sending to his aid the
angel mentioned in the Bible. If France has really, as Mr. Arnold says,
formulated the new gospel of Ishmael, this profoundly human gospel is
indubitably destined to outlive the other, for there is often nothing
more provisional, more unlasting, more fragile, than what men have
crowned with the adjective divine. The surest method of finding what
is really eternal is to look for the best and most universal elements
in the human character. But the gospel of the rights of man, Mr. Arnold
objects, is the ideal of the average, sensual man only. One wonders
what the meaning of the word “sensual” in this place can be, and what
sensuality can have to do with an unwillingness to disregard the rights
of other people or to have one’s own rights disregarded by other
people. As if the rights of man had anything to do with sensuality!
Mr. Arnold forgets that the word “right” always implies some measure
of sacrifice. But the sacrifice is precisely proportionate—it is not
the sacrifice of all for the benefit of one or of the few; it is not a
sterile sacrifice, it is not a vain expense of force, it is the partial
sacrifice of all for the benefit of all, it is the renunciation in
our own conduct of everything which might interfere with like conduct
on the part of other people; so that, instead of being a waste of
social power, it is in the best sense an organization and an increase
of social power. The people who first truly realize the gospel of
the rights of man will not only be the most brilliant, the most
enviable, the happiest of peoples, but also the justest of peoples,
with a justice which will be not only national and passing, but, so
to speak, universal and indestructible; not even the hand of Jehovah
will be able to shiver its power, for what is really divine in power
will dwell in its own heart. The French Revolution was not so purely
sensual and earthly as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms. It was an uprising
not in the name of the senses but of the reason. The Declaration of
Rights is a series of formulæ _a priori_, constituting a sort of
metaphysics or religion of civil government, founded upon a revelation
by the human conscience. It is easily comprehensible that positive
and empirical thinkers, such as Bentham and John Stuart Mill and
Taine, should have a word of blame for this novel species of religious
Utopia; but a person like Mr. Matthew Arnold, who prides himself on
being religious, ought not to draw back from it, ought even to admire
it. Theodore Parker, a Christian not less liberal than Mr. Matthew
Arnold, did so. Writing on the subject of the French Revolution,
Theodore Parker said: that the French were more transcendental than
the Americans. To the intellectual conception of liberty and to the
moral conception of equality they joined the religious conception of
fraternity, and thus supplied politics as well as legislation with a
divine foundation as incontestable as the truths of mathematics. They
declare that rights and duties precede and dominate human law. America
says: “The Constitution of the United States is above the President;
the Supreme Court is above Congress.” France says: “The constitution of
the universe is above the Constitution of France!” That is what forty
millions of men declare. It is the greatest proclamation that a nation
has ever made in history.
[Sidenote: Good and evil sides of French gaiety.]
What we may reasonably be reproached with is not our love for art and
science, but our love for a facile art and a superficial science. We
may rightfully be reproached also with a somewhat Attic lightness,
a lack of perseverance and of seriousness. Naturally, one does not
mean that we should imitate the superstitious Slave who attributes
an involuntary burst of laughter to the devil, and who, after having
laughed, expectorates indignantly to exorcise the sweet spirit of
gaiety whom he regards as a spirit of evil. If French gaiety is one
of our weaknesses it is also one of the elements of our national
strength; but let us be quite clear about the sense to be put upon
the word. The gaiety which is genuine and charming consists simply in
high-heartedness and vivacity of mind. One’s courage is strong enough,
confident enough, to be able to afford not to look at things on their
painful side. Everything has two handles, says the Greek sage; and by
one handle it is light and easy to manage; it is by that handle that
the French are fond of taking destiny and fortune. Gaiety of that
kind is simply a form of hope; thoughts which come from the heart,
great thoughts are often the most smiling. What one calls _aptness_,
that swift fitness and appropriateness in which the French delight,
is itself an evidence of mental detachment, an affirmation to the
effect that things which appeared at first so enormous really possess
slight importance, a mark of high courage in the face of disaster; it
is simply a less theatrical rendering of the ancient _non dolet_. A
French officer, in a guerilla war (in New Caledonia, I think), felt
himself struck in the breast by a bullet; “Well aimed, for a savage,”
he said, as he fell. That is French heroism; not going the length of
ignoring the fact, but maintaining a just appreciation of it as it is.
But there is a gaiety that cannot be too much blamed or too steadily
repressed, a gaiety undistinguished by subtlety or high courage, and
one to which other peoples are quite as inclined as the French, the
gross laugh which follows horse-play like an echo, and inhabits taverns
and _cafés chantants_. That species of gaiety is the vicious gaiety
of peasants out for a holiday, of commercial travellers at dinner. It
is undeniable that the Gaul has a weakness for _gaudriole_. I know a
promising young physician who was obliged to leave Paris, where he had
won a name as a hospital surgeon, obliged to quit work and to go to a
distant country for his health; in a moment of expansion he confided
to me that what he regretted most were the jolly evenings at the
Palais-Royal. There are thousands of distinguished young men subjected
to this species of education, of discipline in “chaff,” and it is
inevitable that it should result in a loss, for them, of something
that is fine. The Palais-Royal, the vaudeville, _cafés-concerts_ are
places which corrupt the taste as the palate is corrupted by drinking
wood eau-de-vie. It is difficult to be a really remarkable man and
at the same time to possess a serious taste for the gross pleasantry
of second-class theatres. The two are irreconcilable. And it is a
melancholy thing to think that the pick of the young men of France
should be exposed to precisely that influence, should pass a number of
years in such an environment and lose their taste as surely as their
ear for music. Whatever is anti-æsthetic in laughter is degrading;
witticisms must be spiritual, must really expand the heart with healthy
mirth; laughter should positively embellish the face. _Nihil inepto
risu ineptius est_; the reason is that in such cases laughter is simply
an explosion of silliness. The wise man, says the Bible, laughs with an
inner laugh. Laughter should illuminate and not disfigure the visage,
because it reveals the soul, and the soul should be beautiful, should
resemble an outburst of frankness, of sincerity. The charm of laughter
lies, in a great measure, in the sincerity of the joy which renders
us, for the time being, transparent to those about us. Human thought
and the human heart, with the entire world that they contain, may be
embodied in a tear.
[Sidenote: Parisian wit an epitome of all that is evil in French
gaiety.]
Parisian wit, which in some quarters is regarded as the very type and
ideal of French wit, is in some respects no more than an epitome of
its defects; among the working classes it consists in chaff, what they
call _blague_; among the upper classes it consists in a superficial
varnish, an inability to fix the mind on a logical succession of ideas.
In the salon frivolity is a convention, it has positively attained
the height of being good manners. My attention was attracted a minute
ago by a fly buzzing about my window, its transparent wings described
curve after curve on the luminous surface that arrested its flight. Its
graceful and futile progress reminded me of the conversation of a lady
to whom I had just been listening in the salon, and who for an hour
had described a series of scarcely larger circles, upon the surfaces
of everything, and beneath the surface of nothing. The whole world of
Parisian frivolity was typefied by the shimmering flight of the fly on
the window-pane, ignorant of the open air, playing with stray rays of
the great sun toward which it was unable to mount.
[Sidenote: True inwardness.]
But must one be serious to the point of ennui? Certainly not, it
is not necessary. It does not belong to our temperament. Let us
recognize, however, that to be enduring of ennui is a great power;
it is the secret of slow, patient, painstaking labour, which spares
no detail, which guarantees solidity in the foundations and remote
and hidden elements of knowledge; it is the secret of the superiority
of men of northern race over men of southern. In the south, owing to
an impatience of what is tedious, there is manifested an inability
to stick to one thing, to follow one pursuit, to venture into the
darkness beyond where the light stops. Tasks pursued with obstinacy
in the certitude of an ultimate success, indefatigable labour at the
desk, reading understood as the absolute appropriation of every word
and thought between the covers of the book in hand, are unknown to
those superficial intelligences which are quick to take a birds-eye
view of a subject in its entirety, but are impatient of details and
of course among others of essential details. There are races of men
who are incapable of anything exacting more attention than “skimming”;
they skim their books, they skim the world, they turn the leaves of
life. Neither true art nor true science is within their reach. “Live
inwardly,” says the “Imitation.” It is an ideal which Frenchmen, who
are particularly inclined to lose themselves in external details,
might well pursue. But true inwardness does not necessarily consist
in sterile meditation on a dogma. “Live inwardly” should signify, be
serious, be yourself, be original, independent, and free; bestir your
own powers of thought, take a pleasure in developing them and yourself;
bloom inwardly like certain plants which lock up within themselves
their pollen, their perfume, their beauty; but give out your fruit. The
natural expansiveness which leads a Frenchman to be so communicative
is one of his good qualities; the bad side of it, where there is a bad
side, consists simply in not having anything serious to communicate.
[Sidenote: Remedy for French levity.]
Our defects are curable, and their remedy does not lie in a sort of
religious asceticism, but in a more profound and complete understanding
of the great objects of love that have always attracted the French
mind—science, art, law, liberty, universal fraternity. There is a
Japanese legend of a young girl who procured some flower seeds and was
surprised to find them nothing but little black prickly grains; she
offered them to her playmates, who would not accept them; then she
sowed them, in some anxiety as to the results, and by and by a superb
flower sprang from every grain and all her playmates begged for the
seeds that they had refused. Philosophic and scientific truths are just
such seeds; they are unattractive at first, but the day will come when
mankind will prize them at their just worth.