in the life of free government which gives so capital an
importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious.
{xlix}
When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a
sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may
have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am
not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily
hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of
private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What
is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled
moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and
religious--beliefs which recognize and attest that man is
naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something
essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the
midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by
such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free
_régime_ a large share both of its responsibility and of its
active duties: it is only when so animated that they give
consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it
stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe
in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than
once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty
when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a
tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral
combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of
the material forces which assail them.
{l}
Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free
country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who
profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all
which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in
favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete
misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human
society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove
incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in
tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man
isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a
falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the
supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this
is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated
individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his
silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon
the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the
falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of
respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their
opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of
humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in
such manifestation their natural and logical consequences.
{li}
To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to
refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice,
moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe,
is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very
impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society
calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the
intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and
practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether
moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to
be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the
people.
{lii}
I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in
all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious,
it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on
the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil
Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable
with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I
have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I
am now publishing.
I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task
to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day
to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of
which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order,
stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only
here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two
contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as
well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups
profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals
and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and
Disbelievers.
{liii}
No one of these groups really represents a dominant party
in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and
hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious,
vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions,
wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing
clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of
truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's
thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused
and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of
thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to
appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in
reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a
vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a
field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and
incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to
bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French
society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and
under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here
described it.
{liv}
Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful
and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find
everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes
devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the
most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in
search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most
different directions. Upon this population it is that we must
act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive
conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious
instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are
by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to
transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must
accommodate ourselves to the general character of this
population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an
adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence
must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious
to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should
give in return its soul.
{lv}
It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is
not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of
Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should
know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the
society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they
should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under
their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under
their blows.
Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it
prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such
success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different
epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did
Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their
times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so
extraordinary an influence?
{lvi}
First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked
was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also
because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they
were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different
processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with
the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that
they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political
transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it
on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They
more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country,
the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal;
still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one
by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern
literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having
re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this
is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against
them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France
felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their
glory, because it believed in their sympathy.
{lvii}
Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are
rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of
their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with
them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion
and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church
of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more
liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father
Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice
of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already
more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different
origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same
cause and to the same work.
{lviii}
At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations,
two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I
have the honour to know, men very different in position and in
ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a
great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his;
both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts,
the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent
in the present state of French society; both having the
resolution and the ability required in order to present
Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most
proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur
Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor
at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his
diocese, (Lent, 1868,) _A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of
Christianity_. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th
of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical
Conference assembled at Nérac, _A Report as to the Actual
Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches_.
[Footnote 4]
[Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length
in the _Gazette de France_, on the 25th and 26th of
February, 1868.]
[Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the
Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]
{lix}
I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially
analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here
because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each
reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being
prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony
between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the
present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far
as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch
is Christian.
"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was
contemporary with primitive man--a fact present in all ages, ever
paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same
degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind
man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent
of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the
Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and
upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet
raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate,
constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His
creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty
lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses
more or less unanimous.
{lx}
"Heathen nations--their history proves it--have preserved
something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected
with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of
Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions
which they received from their grandsire, and which are the
common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions
are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of
fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East
and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the
multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and
its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily
distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of
Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original
fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality
of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all
these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the
depths of the conscience of the people.
{lxi}
Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify
in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be
condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but
for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.
"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful
work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious
wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too
much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and
Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained
Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political
charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits,
breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism
remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.
{lxii}
"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many
generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner
and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred
and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and
in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations--this fact, what
is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that
it is purely natural--the spontaneous production of our habits,
the simple result of our instincts--and, so to say, an
irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is
divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly
created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as
a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common
sense which tells us this.
"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact,
as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely
the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its
own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it
and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with
a force which renews itself every day.
{lxiii}
It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious
effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and
nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to
its effects a supernatural character. ... Supernatural means were
necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in
relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the
constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of
the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no
longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions
should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic,
infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary
a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His
envoys by extraordinary facts--facts of a superhuman power,
miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of
the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others,
intervening with supernatural _éclat_ to enable the mission
to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and
more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and
their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their
religious and predestined course.
{lxiv}
"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the
highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies
of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a
prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with
signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive
ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour,
and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His
character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking,
the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished;
finally, the survival and the development of His work through
centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the
direct intervention of God--sole possible means of finding a
satisfactory explanation of such grand results."
{lxv}
The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas
recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited--a
development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to
assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always
faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no
discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of
ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class
of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of
Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of
man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity
in particular; considered as a grand fact--a fact universal and
permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst
the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the
scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst
Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and
Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer,
by the same title, if not in the same degree;
{lxvi}
a fact at once human and divine--human by its accordance with
man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of
God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power
reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of
events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the
accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus
associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle
of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of
Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without
any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage
rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at
the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority
of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not
justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented
under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most
proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect,
on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and
pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian
Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so
many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?
{lxvii}
The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more
vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop
of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he
traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and
requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and
describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated
and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in
search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to
be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there,
he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly
and without compromise.
"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in
insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds
in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its
prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the
preacher encounters more or less in our congregations.
{lxviii}
Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not
live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time,
they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow
its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its
aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are
of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate
and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in
many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In
France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which
have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as
preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every
symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To
neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of
addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who
neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the
objections which we attribute to them.
{lxix}
"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is
easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others--it is that
of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery
or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally
even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons
more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of
the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is
noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our
generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of
its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of
Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant
now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought,
whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is
impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a
fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of
Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of
incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is
definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface
God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an
obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.
{lxx}
"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in
these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt
or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having
for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery
from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are
combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts,
Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a
personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of
the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a
God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten
civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality,
and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long
as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. ... Let nothing
henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the
human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God
than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all
things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'
{lxxi}
"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their
weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is
not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its
lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and
its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated
at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical
which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it
is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in
France, Germany, and Italy.
"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical
Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to
destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former
never will go so far as these.
{lxxii}
But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing
hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it
we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural,
stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when
merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious
life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working,
without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of
destruction.