men truly Christian, incessantly depicting in the most sombre
colours society as it now exists, and representing it as only a
prey to political and moral diseases now acute, now indolent, as
deprived thereby of all title to respect, and of all hope of
amelioration, incapacitated at one time for orderly life, at
another for Liberty. As for straightforward attacks upon our
vices and failings, our errors and shortcomings, I complain not
of them however violent: nations as well as individuals require
to be often admonished frankly and with severity; the rudeness
which shakes them is more salutary than the indulgence which
cradles them to sleep. But what I regret and deplore in the
attitude and in the language of these worthy Christian Censors,
is not that they scrupulously and unsparingly expose prevalent
evils, our bad propensities, and our foolish pretensions; but
that they ignore what good there is in us, the progress which we
make, and the just and salutary results to which we are tending.
{15}
The simultaneous presence, the profound intermixture, of good and
evil, of virtue and vice, of wisdom and folly, is the chronic
sore of man and of human societies; this is no new fact, no evil
which we are the first to endure and for which we are the first
to be responsible; it is the old condition of the world as it
appears from the constant testimony of History; each of its ages
has incurred and has merited reproaches, not the same, but at
least as serious as those laid to the charge of our age; and if
we were suddenly transported to any other epoch of the past, it
matters not to which, I do not hesitate to affirm that we would
not willingly accept that epoch in exchange for our own, nor
should we even very much like to contemplate the spectacle.
Severity is well, but justice is due to different periods and
different conditions of society. In the last hundred years we
have gained more, both in morality and in common sense, than we
have ever forgotten.
{16}
And here I am met by a question respecting which I will explain
my view unreservedly and at once. Society in France has reached
its actual condition only by a progressive effort, an advance
more or less perceptible, more or less rapid, but not without
numerous interruptions and vicissitudes; it has sought to escape
in turn from the feudal system, from the pretensions and the
selfish contests of the great nobles, from the predominance of
the Court, from arbitrariness, from the improvidence and caprices
of absolute power. National unity, civil equality, and political
liberty have been, throughout the whole course of our history,
the objects of our aim and desire. Our greatest thinkers, the
actors on the stage of our Politics, the nation itself, with its
tendency dimly marked, yet powerful, have constantly proceeded in
this direction and towards this object. The Revolution of 1789
was the most violent and most serious explosion of this incessant
travail of France. Was it pregnant with fruitful consequences, or
is the issue to be now deplored? France believed that she had
then gained a great victory, not only for herself, but for all
mankind. Did she deceive herself?
{17}
Have we been for so many centuries proceeding in a good road or
in a bad road, towards success or towards delusion? Are we
progressing, or are we declining? It is a question upon which
eminent men, and men whose opinions are entitled to every
respect, are, at the present day, not all of the same opinion;
for whereas some persist in a cry of triumph, others give but
utterance to gloomy and alarming prognostics.
I have some right to say that no one is more struck, more shocked
than I am by the crimes, faults, errors, and follies both of
opinion and action generated by this French Revolution; I never
hesitated openly to characterise them as, in my opinion, they
deserved; indeed the severe contests through which I have had to
pass in my public career may, perhaps, in some degree have
originated in my sincerity upon this subject. I had to confront
many prejudices, and to wound much self-love. I regret no
sentiment which I felt, and I retract no language which I used.
{18}
But in spite of the strong anti-revolutionary opinions which have
been attributed to me, I was and still am convinced that, upon
the whole, whatever the evil which that Revolution occasioned,
and is occasioning, it nevertheless, served the good cause both
of the nation and of Humanity; I believe that France and the
world will gain by it more than they suffered, or are suffering,
and that we are, in the midst of all our trials, still in an æra
of progress, and not at the commencement of a decline. I derive
motives for my Optimism upon this subject in the sphere of ideas
as well as in that of facts. Theoretically the principles of 1789
contain a large share of truth, truth pregnant of consequence,
truth superior to the share of error which they contain, and
which is, nevertheless, large. Historically the tendency and the
travail of opinion which have been for centuries a source to
France of incontestable progress in the way of justice, liberty,
and social happiness, cannot have become, all of a sudden, a
cause of decline.
{19}
Practically, in spite of all its ills and all its shortcomings,
the present century has no cause to dread a comparison with past
centuries. There never has been any epoch in the history of
French society in which it would have bettered its condition by
halting, or to which it should wish to return.
I revert to my question; what perils, what obstacles, do our
social institutions and our manners oppose to the establishment
of Liberty with effect and upon a lasting footing? Is
Christianity of a nature to stand us in good stead, or to hurt us
in such a work?
All earnest men, all clear-sighted men, at the present day,
whether they are Conservatives or Liberals, Christians or
Free-thinkers, Catholics or Protestants, are unanimous in
deploring the preponderance of material interests, the thirst for
physical and vulgar pleasures, and the habits of selfishness and
effeminacy which they generate.
{20}
They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we
consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even
those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said,
in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his
habitual language:--"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten
o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt."
[Footnote 13]
[Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se
lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une
chemise blanche."]
There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be
vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should
be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether
individuals or nations, is that they should not have their
attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely
their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they
have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and
Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the
Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort
or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is
permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose.
{21}
Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and
sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating
and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of
more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a
state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and
disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can
supply modern society with that of which it stands in need.
Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich
and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things;
she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she
inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer
hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be
powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can
never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive
motive to action, even in that principle of interest which
politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to
be a panacea.
{22}
Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account,
has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other
sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an
Epicurean nor an Egotist.
This is the first and the greatest of the services which
Christianity can and does render in our days to every society
which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.
There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are
dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without
incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the
other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever
be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or
measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it
is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free
country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of
society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments
and nations, to enable them to support that license which they
cannot suppress.
{23}
Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the
most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license
for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity
maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without
humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the
rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in
fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which
authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the
most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority
suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely
to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority,
that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves
with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious,
turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as
such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and
Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great
mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to
order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom
licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify,
and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims
and the arms of Liberty.
{24}
History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The
nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has
not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,--the
only nations which, although they have on different occasions and
by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and
of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and
politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of
the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials;
these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory;
but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once
come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their
subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less
rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.
{25}
It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it
that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as
individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it
generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already
more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and
sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses,
as well as strength to recover lost ground.
It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the
friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary
admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than
any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no
longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the
encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and
transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the
normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and
with the regular action and permanence of Liberty.
{26}
Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed,
has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the
conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong
enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously
the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the
Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and
independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when
Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power
and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no
distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a
similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the
Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail
wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and
indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the
permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more
or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which
fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly
modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the
exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these
days free institutions can be founded.
{27}
That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses
and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with
the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason,
that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of
the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all
other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which
are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease.
Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every
human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error
press so very closely upon each other in this system, that
Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is
entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself,
nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to
another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes
to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to
abrogate as it was to create.
{28}
The law paramount is the moral law,--the law laid down by God, to
which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to
submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is
always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights
of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of
government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily
forgets God--easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort
of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross,
material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is
incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with
which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that
the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only
principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic
of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two
principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour
and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended.
{29}
A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning
with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent
admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and
it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by
Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a
history, which does not come from man, but which, without
offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief,
no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same
time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic
a society is, the more it is important that this double effect
shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.
I am aware of the capital objection made to its empire. "The
Physic without the Physicians," exclaimed Rousseau, in a sally
against medical men, but the expression shows nevertheless how
little he was disposed to forget that it is possible for medicine
to be good and salutary.
{30}
How often have I heard men of intelligence and men in all other
respects very worthy of consideration, exclaim, "Let me have
Religion without the priests: I am a Christian, but no friend of
the clergy." I am far from seeking to leave this difficulty
unnoticed, or to elude it. It is a difficulty of the gravest
nature, not in essence, but in the actual circumstances and state
of opinions at the present day.
As a Protestant it does not concern me. The clergy is not amongst
Protestants the object of any such uneasiness. One of the best
results, in my opinion, of the Reformation of the 16th century,
whether regarded as Lutheran or Calvinistic, as Anglican, or as
the work of other Dissidents in religion, is that it strongly
cemented the union between the ecclesiastics and the general
religious community--between the spiritual and the lay members of
the Church. The Reformation produced this effect, first, by
authorising the clergy to marry and to enter into the relations
which a life of family brings with it; and, secondly, by giving
to the laity a share in the government of the Church.
{31}
The partition was not always judicious or equitable. At one time
the clergy, at another the laity, have been transported from
their natural places, and injured in their legitimate rights; but
the relations between the two classes ceased to present the
appearance of either absolutism on the one hand, or of entire
subordination on the other; the laity obtained a voice and
influence in the affairs of the flock; the priests, although
remaining religious pastors and religious magistrates, ceased to
be spiritual masters. This organisation has led to the two social
institutions combining themselves in a variety of ways. At one
time the civil power has invaded the government of the religious
society, and deprived the clergy, not merely of empire, but of
independence; at another time the two forms of society, the State
and the Church, have regulated by treaty the terms of their
mutual relations; whereas, in the United States of America, the
two forms of society have been entirely separated, and have
mutually recovered their independence;
{32}
elsewhere, as amongst the Quakers and the Moravians, all
ecclesiastical authority and orders of priesthood have been
abolished, and laymen have lived in the isolation each of his
individual conscience, obedient only to its spontaneous impulses.
But amidst all this diversity, it is the fundamental
characteristic of the churches and of the sects which issued from
the Reform of the 16th century, that priests do not in themselves
constitute the necessary and sovereign mediators between God and
man's soul, nor the sole rulers of religious society. It is
particularly by virtue of this principle that the distinction
between civil life and religious life has become an efficacious
and a consecrated doctrine, and that Liberty has resumed its
right and become an active influence in religious society itself.
{33}
But amongst Roman Catholic nations, priests are the objects of a
persistent distrust which has been the fruitful source of much
calamity to Christianity. History forbids surprise. The Roman
Catholic clergy has often presented the spectacle of ambition and
passion, of mundane and selfish interests, strangely intermixed
with faith and with earnest zeal for the furtherance of their
religious mission. Serious ills and grave abuses have resulted
therefrom in the relation of Church to State, and of priests to
their flocks, and even in the bosom of the Church itself. These
are facts almost as undisputed as they are indisputable; in proof
of them the testimony, not only of its adversaries, but of the
holiest members of the Church of Rome itself, may be invoked.
Nothing is more natural, and indeed more inevitable, than that
this should have led and should still lead, not only to ill-will
towards priests, but to their being regarded as proper subjects
for attack. It is not, however, on that account less certain that
such an attack is, in our days, and as society is at present
constituted, unjust, silly, and inopportune, as injurious to
State as to Church, to Liberty as to Religion. There may be
injustice and ingratitude to institutions as well as to
individuals.
{34}
From the fall of the Roman Empire, and during the rudest and most
sombre ages of modern history, the Catholic clergy, whether as
Popes, Bishops, monastic orders, or simple priests, in the midst
of their selfish pretensions and ambitious usurpations, displayed
and expended treasures of intellect, courage, and perseverance in
order to affirm and protect the immaterial and moral interests of
humanity. They did not on all occasions accept their mission to
its full extent; they did not maintain the Christian Religion in
all its breadth, and in all its evangelical disinterestedness;
they had their share in the acts of violence, iniquity, and
tyranny of the different masters of society for the time being;
they often made Liberty pay dearly for the services which they
rendered to civilization; but when Liberty has become one of the
conquests of that very civilization, the proof as well as the
guarantee for its further progress, there is injustice and
ingratitude in forgetting what part the Roman Catholic clergy
effected towards the constitution of that society, the ultimate
result of which has been so glorious.
{35}
The injustice is the greater that it is now inopportune and
useless. From the acrimony, the anger, and alarm which
characterise the attacks directed at Roman Catholicism and its
Priests, we might suppose that the Inquisition was at our gates,
that Rome was making a perilous onslaught upon our civil and
religious liberties, and that we need to deploy all our force and
all our passions to repulse the domination of the Court of Rome
and of its army. Was there ever so strange a perversion of facts?
For a century past, on which side has been the movement and the
aggression? Is it not evidently the spirit of religious and
political liberty which has now the initiative, the impulsive,
onward movement? The defensive is the natural and enforced
situation of the Roman Catholic Church; Romanism is much more
menaced, much more attacked by public opinion in these days than
our liberties are menaced or attacked by her. The supreme power
in the Church of Rome, the Papacy, does indeed maintain, in
principle, certain maxims and certain traditions irreconcileable
with, the actual state of opinion and society; it continues to
condemn authoritatively some of the essential principles of
modern civilization.
{36}
In all earnestness, yet with every feeling of respect, I shall
here make at once use of my right, both as a Protestant and as
the citizen of a free country, to declare my profound conviction
that this systematic persistence, however conscientious and
dignified it may be, shows a great want of religious foresight as
well as of political prudence. I think that Romanism, without
abdication and without renouncing anything that is vitally
essential to itself, might assume a position in harmony with the
moral and social state in these days, and with the conditions
also vitally essential to the existence of such state. I may add,
that so long as the government of the Romish Church shall not
have accepted and accomplished this work of
conciliation--conciliation real and profound--the friends of
Liberty will be justified in keeping themselves on the alert, and
in maintaining a reserve towards it, as representing, themselves,
those moral and liberal principles which it disavows.
{37}
But let them not attribute to this disavowal a greater importance
than it deserves; let them watch the ecclesiastical power which
utters it, without alarm; it has in it nothing very menacing,
nothing that opposes any effectual barrier to the march of
events; Liberalism is not the less victorious in these days, and
not the less advancing. Many faults have been committed, and many
probably will continue to be committed; as has already been the
case, we shall have perhaps many a barrier opposed in our path,
many a reactionary movement to endure, but the general onward
impulse will nevertheless be the same, and the final result, the
conquest of Liberty, religious, civil and political, not the less
a certainty.