{vi}
{vii}
Preface.
During the last nineteen centuries, Christianity has been often
assailed, and has successfully resisted every attack. Of these
attacks, some have been more violent, but none more serious than
that of which it is, in _these_ days, the object.
For eighteen hundred years Christians were in turn persecutors
and persecuted; Christians persecuted as Christians, Christians
persecutors of every one who was not Christian--Christians
mutually persecuting each other. This persecution varied, it is
true, in degree of cruelty with the age and the country, as it
also did in the degree of inflexibility evinced and success
attained in the prosecution of its object; but whatever the
diversity of state, church, or punishment, whatever the degree of
severity or laxity in the application of the principle, this
principle was ever the same.
{viii}
After having had to endure proscription and martyrdom under the
imperial government of Paganism, the Christian religion lived, in
its turn, under the guard of the civil law, defended by the arms
of secular power.
In these days it exists in the very presence of Liberty. It has
to deal with free thought,--with free discussion. It is called
upon to defend, to guard itself, to prove incessantly and against
every comer its moral and historical veracity, to vindicate its
claims upon man's intelligence and man's soul. Roman Catholics,
Protestants, or Jews, Christians or philosophers, all, at least
in our country, are sheltered from every persecution; for no one
without incurring the risk of ridicule could characterise as
persecution the sacrifices or the inconveniences to which the
expression of his opinion may occasionally subject him. To every
man such expression of opinion is permitted, and can never lead
to the forfeiture, on the part of any single individual, of any
of his political rights or privileges.
{ix}
Religious Liberty--that is to say, the liberty of believing; of
believing differently or of disbelieving--may be but imperfectly
accepted and guaranteed as a principle in certain states; but it
still is evident that it is becoming so every day more and more,
and that it will eventually become the Common Law of the
civilised world.
One of the circumstances that render this fact pregnant with
importance is that it does not stand isolated; but holds its
place in the great Intellectual and Social Revolution, which,
after the fermentation and the preparation of centuries, has
broken out and is in course of accomplishment in our own days.
The scientific spirit, the preponderance of the democratic
principle, and that of political liberty, are the essential
characteristics and invincible tendencies of this revolution.
These new forces may fall into enormous errors and commit
enormous faults, the penalty for which they will ever dearly pay;
still they are definitively installed in modern society; the
sciences will continue to develop themselves in its bosom in the
full independence of their methods and of their results; the
democracy will establish itself in the positions which it has
conquered, and on the ground which has been opened to it;
political liberty in the midst of its storms and its
disappointments will still, sooner or later, cause itself to be
accepted as the necessary guarantee for all the acquisitions and
all the progress possible in society.
{x}
These are the grand predominant facts to which all public
institutions will now have to adapt themselves, and with which
all authority whose action is upon the mind requires to live at
peace.
Christianity also must submit to the same tests and trials. As it
has surmounted all others, so also will it surmount this; its
essence and origin would not be divine did they not permit it to
adapt itself to all the different forms of human institutions, to
serve them now as a guide, now as a support in their vicissitudes
whether of adversity or prosperity.
{xi}
It is, however, of the most serious importance for Christians not
to deceive themselves, either as to the nature of the struggle
which they will have to sustain, or as to its perils and the
legitimate arms which they may use to combat them. The attack
directed against the Christian religion is one hotly carried on,
now with a brutal fanaticism, now with a dexterous learning; at
one time with the appeal to sincere convictions, and at another
invoking the worst passions; some contest Christianity as false,
others reject it as too exacting and imposing too much restraint;
the greater part apprehend it as a tyranny. Injustice and
suffering are not so soon forgotten; nor does one readily recover
from the effect of terror. The memory of religious persecutions
still lives, and this it is that maintains, in multitudes, whose
opinions vacillate, aversion, prejudice, and a lively sentiment
of alarm. Christians on their side are loth to recognise and
accommodate themselves to the new order of society; every moment
they are shocked, irritated, terrified by the ideas and language
to which that society gives utterance.
{xii}
Men do not so readily pass from a state of privilege to one of
community of rights--from a state of dominion to one of liberty;
they do not resign themselves without a struggle to the audacious
obstinacy of contradiction, to the daily necessity of resisting
and conquering. Government according to principles of liberty is
still more influenced by passion, and entails a necessity of
still more exertion in the sphere of religion than of civil
politics: believers find it still more difficult to support
incredulity than governments to bear with oppositions; and,
nevertheless, these themselves are forced to do so, and can only
find in free discussion and in the full exercise of their
peculiar liberties the force which they require to rise above
their perilous condition, and reduce--not to silence, for that
is impossible, but to an idle warfare--their inveterate enemies.
To leave that civil society, in which the different sects of
religion are now-a-days compelled to live in peace and side by
side, and to enter religious society itself, the Christian Church
of our days:--what is its actual position with respect to these
grand questions which it has to discuss with the spirit of human
liberty and audacity?
{xiii}
Does it comprehend properly, does it suitably carry on the
warfare in which it is engaged? Does it tend in its proceedings
to a re-establishment of a real peace, and active harmonious
relations between itself and that general society in the midst of
which it is living?
I say _Christian Church_. It is, in effect, the whole Church
of Christ, and not such or such a church that is in these days
attacked, and vitally attacked. When men deny the Supernatural
World, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and the Divinity of
Jesus Christ, they really assail the whole body of
Christians--Romanists, Protestants or Greeks: they are virtually
destroying the foundations of faith in all the belief of
Christians, what ever their particular difference of religious
opinion or forms of ecclesiastical government..
{xiv}
It is by faith that all Christian Churches live; there is no form
of government, monarchical or republican, concentrated or
diffused, that suffices to maintain a church; there is no
authority so strong, no liberty so broad, as to be able in a
religious society to dispense with the necessity of faith. For
what is it that unites in a church if it is not faith? Faith is
the bond of souls. When then the foundations of their common
faith are attacked, the differences existing between Christian
Churches upon special questions, or the diversities of their
organization or government, become secondary interests; it is
from a common peril that they have to defend themselves; or they
must reconcile themselves to see dried up the common source from
which they all derive sustenance and life.
I fear that the sentiment of this common peril is not, in all the
Christian Churches, as clear and well defined, as deep and
predominant, as their common safety requires. In presence of
similar questions everywhere varied, of identical attacks
everywhere directed against the vital facts and dogmas of
Christianity, I dread Christians of the different communions not
concentrating all their forces upon the mighty struggles in which
they are, all, to engage.
{xv}
My dread, however, is unattended by astonishment. Although the
danger is the same for all, the traditional opinions and habits,
and consequently the actual dispositions, are very different.
Many Romanists feel the persuasion that Faith would be saved were
they only delivered from liberty of thought. Many Protestants
believe that they are but employing their right of free
examination, and do not lose their title to be regarded as
Christians, when they are in effect abandoning the foundations
and withdrawing from the source of Faith. Roman Catholicism has
not sufficient reliance on its roots, and respects too much its
branches; no tree exists that does not need culture and clearing
in accordance with climate and season, if it is to be expected to
continue to bear always good fruit; but the roots should be
especially defended from every attack. Protestantism is too
forgetful that it also has roots from which it cannot be
separated without perishing, and that religion is not what an
annual is in vegetation: a plant that men cultivate and renew at
their pleasure.
{xvi}
Whilst the Romanists dread freedom of thought too much, the
Protestants on their side have too great a fear of authority.
Some believe that inasmuch as religious Faith has firm and fixed
points, movement and progress are incompatible with religious
society; others affirm that a religious society can never have
fixed points, and that religion consists in religious sentiment
and individual belief. What would have become of Christianity,
had it from its birth been condemned to the immobility which the
former recommend; and what would become of it at the present day,
were it surrendered, as the latter would have it, to the caprice
of every mind, and the wind of every day?
Happily, God permits not that, at this crisis, the true
principles and the true interests of the Christian Religion
should remain without sufficient defenders.
{xvii}
Romanists there are who understand their age and the new
constitution of society, who accept frankly its liberty,
religious and politic: it is precisely they who have most boldly
testified their attachment to the faith of Rome, who have claimed
with most ardor the essential liberties of their church, and
defended with most energy the rights of its chief. Nor are
Protestants wanting who have used with the most untiring zeal all
the liberty acquired in our days by Protestantism; they have
founded all those associations and originated all those
undertakings which have manifested the vital energy and extended
the action of the Protestant Church; they have demanded and they
continue to demand, for this church, the reestablishment of its
Synods, that is to say, its religious autonomy. Amongst these
Protestants, where men have appeared who have not found in the
Protestant Church as by law established the entire satisfaction
of their convictions, they have felt no hesitation to separate
from it and to found, with their own means alone, independent
churches.
{xviii}
It may be affirmed also of the Protestants that they have most
largely put in practice all the rights and all the liberties of
Protestantism, in the internal ordeal through which Christianity
is at present passing; it is precisely they who assert most
loudly the dogmas of the Christian Faith and maintain most
inflexibly the authoritative rights established by law in the
bosom of their church. The Liberal Romanists of the present day
are the most zealous defenders of the fundamental traditions and
institutions of Catholicism. The Protestants who have been the
most active during the last half-century in the exercise of the
liberties of Protestantism are the firmest maintainers of its
doctrines and of its vital rules.
Humanly speaking, it is upon the influence exercised and to be
exercised in their respective churches and on the public, by
these two classes of Christians, that depends the peaceable issue
of the crisis through which Christianity is in these days
passing.
{xix}
Our society is, doubtless, far from meriting the title of a
Christian one; still it cannot be characterised as
anti-Christian; considered as one vast whole, it has no hostile
or general prejudice against the Christian religion: it maintains
the habits, the instincts, I would willingly add the longings, of
Christians; it is conscious that Christian Faith and Ordinance
serve powerfully its interests with respect to order and peace;
the fanatical opponents of Christianity exercise upon it far more
disquieting than seductive influences, for it has already had
experience of their empire; and where society appears to offer a
silent acquiescence or even to pride itself upon them, still at
bottom it dreads their progress.
Such being the state of the case, and such the constitution of
society, how are we to draw men away from their apathy and their
ignorance in matters of religion? How lead them back to
Christianity? They alone can accomplish this object, who, in
their defence and propagation of the religion of Jesus, shall not
wound society itself in the ideas, sentiments, rights and
interests which have at present rooted themselves in its very
life and energies.
{xx}
Like religion, modern society has also its fixed points and its
invincible tendencies: it can never be set on terms of harmony
with the former unless by the concurring action of men who have
with each of them a genuine and deep sentiment of sympathy. Since
the Christian Religion lives in these times confronting civil
liberty, those alone can be efficient champions of religion who
at the same time profess fully the Christian Faith and accept
with sincerity the tests of Liberty.
But in pursuing their pious and salutary enterprise, let not
these liberal Christians flatter themselves with the probability
of any prompt or complete success: maintain and propagate the
Christian faith they may, but they will never be able in the
bosom of society to get rid either of incredulity or doubt; even
while combating them they must learn to endure their presence; in
institutions of freedom there is essentially an intermixture of
good and evil, of truth and error; contrary ideas and
dispositions produce and develop themselves in it simultaneously.
{xxi}
"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not,"
said Jesus to his apostles, "to send peace, but a sword."
[Footnote 1] The sword of Jesus Christ, that is, Christianity, at
war with human error and shortcomings; a victory, still a victory
ever incomplete in an incessant struggle,--_that_ is the
condition to which those must submit with resignation who, in the
bosom of liberty, defend the truth of Christianity.
[Footnote 1: Matthew x. 34.]
Were these valiant and intelligent champions of the faith of
Jesus not adopted and accredited as such in the churches to which
they belong; did the Church of Rome furnish ground for thinking
her essentially hostile to the fundamental principles and rights
of modern society, and that she only tolerates them as Moses
tolerated divorce amongst the Jews, "because of the hardness of
their heart"; and, on the other hand, did the rejectors of the
Supernatural, of the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and of the
Divinity of Jesus Christ, predominate in the bosom of
Protestantism; and finally, did the latter then become nought but
a hesitating system of philosophy;
{xxii}
if all these deplorable things were to be realised, I am far from
thinking that, owing to such faults, such disasters, the religion
of Christ would vanish from the world and definitively withdraw
from men its light and its support: the destinies of religion are
far above human errors; but still, beyond all doubt, for mankind
to be turned back from them, and for the light to return to their
soul and harmony to modern society, there would have again to
burst out in the human soul and in society one of those immense
troubles, one of those revolutionary whirlwinds, whose evils man
is compelled actually to undergo before he can derive benefit
from its lessons.
On the point of addressing myself to questions more profound and
of a less transitory nature, I content myself with having merely
indicated what I think of the crisis that agitates Christendom at
the present day, as also of its main cause, its perils, and the
chances, good or bad, that it holds out for the future.
{xxiii}
In the work of which the first part is now before the public, I
omit all the circumstantial facts and details as well as the
discussions that grow out of them, and it is only with the
Christian Religion as it is in itself, with its fundamental
belief and its reasonableness, that I occupy myself; it has been
my purpose to illustrate the truth of Christianity by contrasting
it with the systems and the doubts that men set in array against
it. It is my intention to avoid all direct and personal polemics;
express reference to individuals embarrasses and envenoms all
questions in controversy, and gives rise to ill-judged deference
or unjust invective, two descriptions of falsity for which alike
I feel no sympathy: let me have then for adversaries ideas alone;
and whatever these may be, I admit beforehand the possibility of
sincerity on the part of those that prefer them. Without this
admission all serious discussion is out of the question; and
neither the intellectual enormity of the error, nor its awful
practical consequences, positively precludes sincerity on the
part of him that promulgates it.
{xxiv}
The mind of man is still more easily led astray than his heart,
and is still more egotistical; after having once conceived and
expressed an idea, it attaches itself to it as to its own
offspring, takes a pride in imprisoning itself in it, as if it
were so taking possession of the pure and entire truth.
These _Meditations_ will be divided into four series. In the
first, which forms this volume, I explain and establish what
constitutes, in my opinion, the essence of the Christian
religion; that is to say, what those natural problems are, that
correspond with the fundamental dogmas that offer their solution,
the supernatural facts upon which these same dogmas
repose--Creation, Revelation, the Inspiration of the Scriptures,
God according to the Biblical account, and Jesus according to the
Gospel narrative.
{xxv}
Next to the Essence of the Christian religion comes its history;
and this will be the subject of a second series of
_Meditations_, in which I shall examine the authenticity of
the Scriptures, the primary causes of the foundation of
Christianity, Christian Faith, as it has always existed
throughout its different ages and in spite of all its
vicissitudes; the great religious crisis in the sixteenth century
which divided the Church and Europe between Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism; finally those different anti-Christian crises,
which at different epochs and in different countries have set in
question and imperilled Christianity itself, but which dangers it
has ever surmounted. The third _Meditation_ will be
consecrated to the study of the actual state of the Christian
religion, its internal and external condition: I shall retrace
the regeneration of Christianity which occurred amongst us at the
commencement of the nineteenth century, both in the Church of
Rome and in the Protestant churches; the impulse imparted to it
at the same epoch by the Spiritualistic Philosophy that then
began again to flourish, and the movement in the contrary
direction which showed itself very remarkably soon afterwards in
the resurrection of Materialism, of Pantheism, of Scepticism, and
in works of historical criticism.
{xxvi}
I shall attempt to determine the idea, and consequently, in my
opinion, the fundamental error of these different systems, the
avowed and active enemies of Christianity. Finally, in the fourth
series of these _Meditations_ I shall endeavour to
discriminate and to characterise the future destiny of the
Christian religion, and to indicate by what course it is called
upon to conquer completely and to sway morally this little corner
of the universe termed by us our earth, in which unfold
themselves the designs and power of God, just as, doubtless, they
do in an infinity of worlds unknown to us.
I have passed thirty-five years of my life in struggling, on a
bustling arena, for the establishment of political liberty and
the maintenance of order as established by law. I have learnt, in
the labours and trials of this struggle, the real worth of
Christian Faith and of Christian Liberty.
{xxvii}
God permits me, in the repose of my retreat, to consecrate to
their cause what remains to me of life and of strength. It is the
most salutary favour and the greatest honour that I can receive
from His goodness.
Guizot.
Val-Richer, _June_, 1864.
{xxviii}
{1}