[Transcriber's note: This production is based on https://archive.org/details/christianityview00guiz/page/n6]

Christianity Viewed In Relation To
The Present State Of Society And Opinion.

By M. Guizot.

Translated Under The Superintendence Of The Author.
London:
John Murray, Albemarle Street.
1871.

By The Same Author.

The Essence Of Christianity.
Post 8vo, 9s. 6d.

"No one can open this book, and recollect the circumstances which produced it, without feeling that it is a valuable contribution to the literature of the present controversy."
—Edinburgh Review.

The Present State Of Christianity.
Post 8vo, 10s. 6d.

"A remarkable series of religious meditations. They form a sequel to a similar volume on the Essence of Christianity, published two years ago, and an introduction to a further series, in which M. Guizot proposes to treat the great questions of the history of Christianity, and the future destiny of the Christian religion. The book is one of great interest."—Pall Mall Gazette.

Preface.

In the First Series of these Meditations, I gave a summary of the facts and dogmas which constitute, as I think, the foundation and the essence of the Christian Religion. In the next series I retraced the Reawakening of Faith and of Christian Life during the nineteenth century in France, both amongst Romanists and Protestants. With Christianity thus reanimated and resuscitated amongst us, after having passed through one of its most violent trials, I confronted the principal philosophical systems which in these days reject and combat it: Rationalism, Positivism, Pantheism, Materialism, Scepticism. I essayed to determine the fundamental error which seems to me to characterize each of those systems, and to have always rendered them inadequate to the office either of satisfying or explaining man's nature and destiny. That series of my Meditations I concluded with these words: "Why is it that Christianity, in spite of all the attacks which it has had to undergo, and all the ordeals through which it has been made to pass, has for eighteen centuries satisfied infinitely better the spontaneous instincts and invincible cravings of humanity? Is it not because it is pure from the errors which vitiate the different systems of philosophy just passed in review? because it fills up the void that those systems either create or leave in the human soul? because, in short, it conducts man nigher to the fountain of light?" [Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: Meditations on the Actual State of Christianity. Eighth Meditation: Impiety, Recklessness, Perplexity, p. 336.]

Far from wishing to elude any of the difficulties of this question, I would now set Christianity in contact with the ideas and forces that seem most contrary to it, and with three of them more especially: Liberty, Independent Morality, and Science. Assertions are running the tour of the world that Christianity can accommodate itself neither to liberty nor science; that morality is essentially distinct and separate from Religious Faith. All this I hold to be false and highly prejudicial to the very cause of Liberty, of Morality, and of Science, which those who give utterance to such assertions affect to serve. I believe Christianity and Liberty to be not only compatible with each other, but necessary to each other. I regard Morality as naturally and intimately united to Religion. I am convinced that Christianity and Science need not make any mutual sacrifices, that neither has anything to fear from the other. This I establish in the first three Meditations of the present series. I then enter into the peculiar domain of Christianity, and determine what, in the presence of Liberty, of Philosophical Morality, and of Human Science, is the principle and what the bearing of "Christian Ignorance" and of Christian Faith. I finally apply to ideas their natural and inevitable law, the law which obliges them to express themselves in facts; I interrogate theory thus transformed into practice, and I show that Christianity alone supports this test victoriously. "Christian Life" becomes a forcible demonstration of the Legitimacy of Christian Faith. With these three Meditations the present series concludes.

But to complete my undertaking, a final and capital question, the historical question, remains to be treated. Not that I think of retracing the History of Christianity throughout the whole of its course; such a design is far from my thoughts. I neither can nor wish to do more than to demonstrate the grand historical facts which, in my opinion, are in Christianity the stamp of a divine origin, and of a divine influence upon the development and destiny of the human race. Of these facts the following is a summary:—

1. The authority of the sacred books.
2. The primitive foundation of Christianity.
3. The Christian Faith persistent from age to age.

4. The Church of Christ persistent also from age to age.
5. Romanism and Protestantism.
6. The different Antichristian crises, their character and their issue.

It is upon these grand facts, and the questions which they suggest, that Historical Criticism has in our days exercised itself with ardour, as it is continuing to do; science, severe and daring, no invention of our epoch, but beyond all doubt one of its glories! If, after concluding this final series of my Meditations, I shall have succeeded in appreciating at their real value the exigencies made and the results obtained by Historical Criticism, where it has applied itself to the History of Christianity, I shall have realised the object which I proposed to myself on voluntarily entering upon this solemn and laborious study, where I meet with so much that is obscure, and so many quicksands.

But as I draw near the close, a scruple seizes me. What have I been thinking of to persist obstinately in casting such a work into the midst of the events and the practical problems which are agitating the whole civilized world, and which are demanding their instant solution? What good result can I expect from studying the past history of the Christian Religion in my country, or even speculating upon its future prospects, when the actual condition of the present generation and the lot of that which is to succeed it on the stage, are subject to so many troubles and plunged in such darkness? The more narrowly I scrutinize generations—the honour and the destiny of which I have so much at heart, for my children form part of them—the more am I struck and disquieted by two facts: on the one side the general sentiment of fatigue and incertitude manifesting itself in society and in individuals: on the other side not merely the grandeur but the unusual complexity of the questions agitated. I fear that, in her lassitude and in her sceptical vacillations, France may not render an exact account to herself of the problems and perils scattered over her path, of their number, their gravity, and their intimate connexion. I fear that, from not having an accurate conception of what her burthen is, and from not having the courage at once to weigh it well, the moment when she will have to bear it will come upon her with the necessary forces unmustered, and the necessary resolutions unformed.

Almost every great epoch in history has been devoted to some question, if not an exclusive one, at least one dominant both in events and opinions, and around which the varying opinions and the efforts of men were concentrated. Not to go farther back than the era of modern history—in the sixteenth century the question of the unity of Religion and of its Reform; in the seventeenth century the question of pure monarchy, with its conquests abroad and administration at home; in the eighteenth century that of the operation of civil and religious liberty: such have been in France the different points on which ideas have culminated, the different objects which each social movement had specially in view. The systems of the day, although opposed, were clear; the struggles ardent but well defined. Men walked in those days on high roads; they did not wander about in the infinite complications of a labyrinth.

And it is in a very labyrinth of questions and of ideas, of essays and events, diverse in character, confused, incoherent, contradictory, in which in these days the civilized world is plunged. I do not pretend to seize the clue to the labyrinth; I propose but to throw some light upon the chaos.

First I turn my eyes to the external situation and relations of the States of Christendom, and consider the questions which concern the boundaries of territories and the distribution of populations between distinct and independent nations. Formerly these questions were all reducible to one—the aggrandizement or the weakening of these different States, and the maintenance or the disturbance of that balance of forces which was called the balance of power in Europe. War and Diplomacy, Conquests and Treaties, discussed and settled this supreme question, of which Grotius expounded the theory, and Ancillon wrote the history. Now we are no longer in a situation so simple. What a complication of ideas: what ideas, novel and ill-defined, start up in these days to embarrass the course and entangle the relations of States! The question of races, the question of nationalities, the question of little states and of great political unities, the question of popular sovereignty and of its rights beyond the limits of nations as well as in their midst,—all these problems arise and cast into the shade, as a routine which has served its turn, the old public right and the maxims of the equilibrium of Europe, in their place seeking themselves to impose rules for regulating the territorial organizations and the external relations of States.

Not that the old traditional policy of Europe does not mingle itself with, and exercise a powerful influence upon, the new ideas and questions which invade us; however intellectual theories and ambitions may change, the passions and interests of men are permanent. War and the right of conquest have made good their old pretensions, and this before our very eyes, without any respect for the principle of Nationalities and of Races, a principle nevertheless inscribed upon the very standards which the conquerors bore. Prussia has aggrandized herself in the name of German Unity, and at the very moment excluded from participating in the common affairs of Germany, the seven or eight millions of Germans who form part of the Empire of Austria. Prussia seized the petty German Republic of Frankfort, evidently against the will of its sovereign people, and Danish Schleswick does not yet form part of the political group, to the class of which she belongs by similarity of national origin and of language. Even while sheltering themselves under the Ægis of some general idea, selfish interests and rude violence have not ceased to play a great part in the events which are passing before us, and if the ambition of Frederick the Second was not more legitimate, it was at least more logical than that of his successors.

I am far from meaning to deny that the new ideas which men follow, and the desires which they evince, contain a certain part of truth, or to affirm that they have not a right to a certain share of influence. The identity of origin and of race, the possession in common of a single name and of one language, have a moral value very capable of becoming itself a political force; of this fair and prudent statesmanship is bound to hold account. But policy becomes chimerical and dangerous when it attributes to these new ideas and these aspirations a supreme authority and right to dominion; and what shocks all experience and common sense is to reject, as out of date, and no longer applicable, maxims which were the foundation of the public law of nations, and which, up to the present time, have presided over the relations of States. The equilibrium of Europe, the long duration of territorial agglomerations, the right of small states to exist and be independent, the ancient titles to government, and the respect for ancient treaties,—all these elements of European order have not succumbed, neither were they bound to succumb, to the theory of nationalities, and the fashionable doctrine of great political unities. What would not be said, and what would not be said with justice, if France had proclaimed that, as Belgium and Western Switzerland speak French, that, as their populations have, both in origin and manners, great affinities with our fellow countrymen in French Flanders and in Franche-Comté, the principal of National Unity requires their incorporation with France? Prince Metternich was wrong to say that Italy was a mere Geographical expression; there are certainly between the nations of Italy historical bonds, both intellectual and moral, which draw them towards one another, and repel from their territories all foreign domination. But this relationship, which may, and ought to be, a principle of union, did not impose upon Italy the form of political unity; and the régime of a confederation of States might have been established in the peninsula and yet its liberation from the foreigner might have been secured, and a satisfaction might have been procured along our own frontier of the Alps, in the interests of our own security, and of that of Europe, for the preservation of the equilibrium of power. As soon as we look at the question with serious attention, we are forced to admit that any general application of the principle of nationalities, or of that of the great political unities, would throw the civilized world into such a confusion and fermentation as would be equally compromising to the internal liberties of nations, and to the preservation of peace between the different States.

What if I had to sound the consequences of another principle, the sovereign authority which men also seek in these days to set up, the right, I mean, of populations, or of some part of a population, to dissolve the State with which they are connected, and to range themselves under another State, or to constitute themselves into new and independent States? What would become of the existence, or even of the very name of country, if it also were thus left to be dealt with according to the fluctuating wills of men, and the special interests of such or such of its members? There is in the destiny of men, whether of generations or individuals, a great part which they have no share in deciding or disposing of; a man does not choose his family, neither does he select his country; it is the natural state of man to live in the place where he is born, in the society where is his cradle. The cases are infinitely rare which can permit of the bonds being rent asunder by which man is attached to the soil, the citizen to the state; which can justify his leaving the bosom of his country, to order to separate himself from it absolutely, and to strive to lay the foundation of a new country. We have just been spectators of such an attempt; we have seen some of the States which form the nation of the United States of America, abjure this union, and erect themselves into an independent confederation. Wherefore? In order to maintain in their bosom the institution of slavery. By what right? By the right, it is said, of every people, or portion of a people, to change its government at discretion. The States which remained faithful to the ancient American Confederation denied the principle and combatted the attempt. They succeeded in maintaining the federal Union, and in abolishing slavery. I am one of those who think that they had both right and reason on their side. Many years before the struggle commenced, one of the most eminent men in the United States, eminent by his character as well as his talents, a faithful representative of the interests of the States of the South, and an avowed apologist for negro slavery, Mr. Calhoun, did me the honour of transmitting to me all that he had written and said upon the subject. I was struck by the frank and earnest language with which he expressed his convictions, but no less by the futility of the efforts which he made to justify, upon general considerations and by historical necessities, the fact of slavery in his country. He would never have dared to paint it in its actual and living reality, as Mrs. Beecher Stowe has done in her romances of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and of "Dred," which have everywhere excited so much sympathy and emotion. I became every day more and more convinced that there was here a radical iniquity and a social wound, of which it was at last time to efface the shame and to conjure the danger. It was with the motive of maintaining the system of slavery that the States of the South undertook to break up the great American State which was their country. Motive detestable for a deplorable act! Our epoch, so unfortunate in many respects, has, in my opinion, been fortunate in this, that it produced a Republic, the greatest of all Republics of ancient or of modern times, which has afforded us the example of an uncompromising resistance to an illegitimate popular desire, and of an unflinching respect for the tutelary principles of the life of States.

So far of the territorial questions, and those which concern the external relations of nations. Let me now speculate upon what the future has in store for those which involve domestic order and the organization of government. I meet here with the same confusion, the same complications, the same fluctuations between ideas and essays incoherent or inconsistent. At the base as at the summit of society, the monarchy and the republic are in collision: the monarchy reigns in events; the republic ferments in opinions.

The proposition is now universally received that society has the right not only to see clearly and to intervene in its own government, but to see so clearly and to intervene in such a manner as to justify the expression that it governs itself. The Constitutional Monarchy and the Republic profess each to attain this object: the one by a national representation, by the monarch's inviolability and his ministry's responsibility; the other by universal suffrage and the periodical elections of the great representatives of public power. But neither the constitutional monarchy nor the republic has as yet succeeded amongst us in obtaining firm possession of opinions and of events, of public confidence and of durable power. After and in spite of thirty-four years of prosperity, of peace, and of liberty, the constitutional power fell. The republic, accepted on its sudden appearance as the form of government which, as was affirmed, divided us least, after a few months of turbulent and sterile anarchy, fell also. In the place of the constitutional monarchy and of the republic there arose another form of government, a mixture of Dictatorship and of Republic, a sort of personal government combined with, universal suffrage. Will the essay have greater success? Events will decide. In the meantime let us be sincere with ourselves; the cause of so many painful and abortive attempts resides rather in the disposition of the people of France than in the acts of its governments: our revolutionary existence since 1789, our ambitious aspirings and disappointments, both equally immense, have left us at once very excited and very fatigued, full of impatience at the same time as of incertitude; we know not very well what we think or what we would have; our ideas are perplexed and confused; our wills vacillating and feeble; our minds have no fixed points, our conduct no determined objects; we often yield ourselves up readily against our better judgment, nay against our very wish, to whatever power extends its hand to seize us; but soon, very soon, we evince towards that power not a whit less exigency or unfairness; as soon as we feel ourselves rid of our most urgent cause for disquietude, our discontent is as precipitate as was our submission in the hour of peril. We are again disposed to be quarrelsome, and demand instant action in the midst even of our doubts and hesitation. Our revolutions have taught us the lesson neither of resistance nor of patience. Yet these are virtues without which it is idle to propose to found any free government.

I pass from political questions to social questions, and from the state of our political institutions to that of the relations existent between the different parts of society. I say the different parts to avoid saying different classes, for we cannot hear the word class pronounced without thinking that we are threatened with the re-establishment of privileges and exclusions, of that entire régime with its narrow compartments and inseparable barriers within which men were formerly enclosed, and ranked according to their origin, their name, their religion, or whatever other factitious or accidental qualification they might possess. In effect, this régime has fallen—fallen completely and definitively; all legal barriers have disappeared; all careers are open; all labour free: by individual merit and by labour every man may aspire to everything, and examples abound in confirmation of the principle. This was the great work, the great conquest of 1789; we celebrate it unceasingly, and we have often the air of forgetting that it ever occurred. The different ancient classes are still full of jealousy, of distrust, and of restless irritation; because they have to struggle for influence in the midst of liberty, they persuade themselves that they are still risking life and limb in defence of their situation and of their right. The Restoration was attacked and undermined on account, it was said, of the evils that the bourgeoisie had to endure, and the risks which it had to run at the hands of the nobles. Under the government of July, the working classes were told incessantly that they were the victims of the privileges and of the tyranny of the middle classes. Facts and actual events gave singularly the lie to such assertions. With what effect? In the hurry of passions and the intoxication of thought, men appealed to theories which had been already often produced on the stage of the world,—theories which have only served to agitate, never to satisfy it. Landed property and capital, labour and wages, the artificial distribution of the means of material happiness amongst men, have served sometimes as the subjects of unjust recrimination, sometimes of chimerical expectations. Attacks were made upon things which the assailants had no right to take; and promises were made to give things which the promisers had not the power to give.

I have heard it remarked by clear-sighted men who are good observers, that this malady of the mind is decreasing, and that even amongst the labouring classes themselves, false notions as to the conflict of capital and labour, as to the artificial settlement of wages, and the intervention of the State in the distribution of the material means of existence, are in discredit, and that the ambitious aspirings of the people, although continuing to be very democratic, have ceased to assume the form of Socialism. I ardently wish it were so: the passionate feelings which find their field in facts affecting the sphere of material subsistence, are the rudest, the most rebellious, and the most recalcitrant to the principles of the moral order: it is easier to deal with the aspirings of political ambition than with the ardent cravings for physical advantages. But I fear, I confess, that errors such as those which presented themselves under the names of Socialism and Communism, and which recently made so much noise, are not so discarded as we might hope them to be; that they are actually without a mouthpiece is not a sufficient proof of their defeat; materialism, and the evil instincts to which it leads or from which it springs, have penetrated very far amongst us, and a long period of social and moral progress in the midst of a society which has been well ordered will be necessary in order to surmount this danger.

Several years ago I put to a great manufacturer of Manchester, who had been Mayor of that immense centre of industry, the following question: "What amongst you is the proportion between the laborious and well-conducted workmen, who live respectably in their homes, set aside money in the savings' bank, and apply for books at the people's library, and the idle and disorderly workmen who pass their time at taverns, and only work so much as is necessary to furnish them with the means of subsistence?" After a moment's reflection, he replied: "The former are two-thirds of the whole number." After congratulating him, I added, "Allow me to put one more question. If you had amongst you great disorders, seditious assemblages, and riots, what would be the result?" "With us, sir," he said without hesitation, "the honest men are braver than the ill-conditioned ones." I congratulated him this time still more.

In these questions I had touched the root of the evil which afflicts us. It is to their shortcomings in morality, to their disorderly lives, that we must attribute the favour with which the working classes receive the fallacious theories that menace social order. The condition of these classes is hard and full of distressing accidents; whoever regards it closely, and with a little fairness and sympathy, cannot fail to be deeply moved by all the sufferings which they have to support, the privations from which they have no chance of escape, and the efforts which they must make to ensure themselves a living at best monotonous and full of hazard. The happy ones of the earth feel sometimes alarm and irritation, when they hear from the pulpit descriptions purer and more true to the life than are to be met with in philanthropical novels, of the precarious state and distresses of the lower orders. Beyond doubt, from pictures of this nature should be scrupulously excluded everything that would seem to excite sentiments of hostility, or that would set one class against another; still as the upper classes must resign themselves to the spectacle, it devolves more especially upon Christian Painters to place it before them. Nothing but strong moral convictions, and the habits of well living amongst the labouring classes, can furnish them with efficacious means of struggling against the temptations and resisting the ambitious yearnings, suggested to them by the spectacle of the world which surrounds them,—a world now at length transparent to all, a world of which the stir, the noise, the accidents, the adventures, penetrate with rapidity even to the workshops of our cities and the remotest recesses of our villages. What influence shall protect the masses of the people from the irritating and demoralizing effect of such a sight, unless it be the influence of religious principles, the moral discipline which religion maintains, and the moral serenity which religion diffuses over the rudest existences and the lives subjected to the greatest privations? And it is precisely religious belief and religious discipline, Christian faith and Christian law, which are now being attacked and undermined, and this far more in the obscurer classes, than in the brilliant regions of society!

These attacks are of a general although of diverse nature, and of unequal violence; they occur in the bosom of Roman Catholicism, of Protestantism, and of scientific philosophy; some are direct, open, impetuous; others indirect and full of reserves, and of a tenderness sometimes affected, sometimes sincere. Christianity counts amongst its enemies fanatics who persecute it in the name of reason and of liberty, as well as adversaries who criticise it with moderation and prudence; the latter admit its practical deservings, are distressed by the wounds which they inflict, and, in the very act of dealing their blows, seek to lessen their force. This diversity of attack is a proof of the trouble, of the incertitude, and of the incoherence which reign in men's opinions, both upon religious questions and upon questions which are only simply political and social; many they are who would be inclined to save such or such a portion of the edifice which they are battering and seeking to destroy. But the upshot is, that all these blows are telling upon the same point, and are concurring to produce the same effect; it is the Christian Religion which receives them all; it is the right and the empire of Christ which, in the world learned and unlearned, is subjected to doubt and exposed to peril.

I have touched upon all the great questions which are agitating the human mind and human societies: questions of public right, questions of political organization, questions of social institutions, questions of religious belief. Everywhere I encounter two facts, facts everywhere the same: a great complication and a great incertitude in man's opinions and in his efforts. Nothing is simple, no one decided. Problems of every kind—doubts of every kind weigh upon the thoughts of men, and oppress their wills; their ambitious aspirings are varied, immense, but everywhere they hesitate. They may be likened to travellers already exhausted with fatigue, yet feebly driving to feel their way through a labyrinth.

Are we then to infer that we are living in an era of decay and impotence? that we have nothing ourselves to do, nothing to hope for, in this situation so complicated and so obscure? that we have only to wait until our lot is decided by that sovereign power called by some Providence, by others Fate?

I am far from thinking so.

Of the men distinguished by singleness of views and strength of convictions whom I have known, I consider the Marshal Gouvion Saint-Cyr in these respects the most remarkable. He was one day detailing his reasons for disapproving of the system of a royal or imperial guard, or of privileged corps, in an army: "Few," said he, "are really brave: the best thing to be done is to disseminate them in the ranks, where each singly, by his presence and example, will make eight or ten more brave men around him." I am no judge as to the value of the Marshal's maxim in a military sense; I do not believe it to be invariably true, or always applicable in the political sense; there are epochs at which, in order to further the progress of which a nation stands in need, to withdraw it from its embarrassments or to rouse it from its apathy, the most urgent thing to be done, and the plan the most efficacious, is to form in its bosom picked bodies of men (the number is immaterial), and then to incorporate with them others possessing distinguished qualities, and animated by the same spirit, decided in their opinions, and resolute in their action, single of purpose, and full of confidence: these would soon attract to themselves as associates many others who would never, without such impulse, begin to move in the same path. We are, I believe, at an era which calls for such a mode of influencing society, and which authorises us to expect success if we adopt it.

I can never be accused of ignoring or extenuating the evil which torments us upon all the points which I have just indicated, the rights of nations, the civil organization of society and its economy, moral and religious belief. In all these directions an evil wind is blowing, an evil current is hurrying away a part of French society, and it is my constant design so to arouse the moral sense of the people, and its good sense, as to make them attentive to the existence of the ill, and solicitous for its removal. But at the side of this fact, so deplorable and so full of peril, a fact of contrary and salutary nature is occurring and developing itself: a good wind there also is which is blowing, a good current which is impelling us forwards;—at the same time that violent and revolutionary theories are being diffused, the principles of legal order, and of liberties, serving mutually to control and check one another, are proclaimed and maintained; the maxims and the sentiments of the spirit of peace are heard at least as loudly pronounced, as the souvenirs and the traditions of the spirit of adventure and conquest; the sound principles of political economy have defenders no less zealous than the presumptuous and dreamy theories of Socialism; Spiritualism raises its voice high at the side of Materialism; Christianity is advancing at the same time as Incredulity, and with a progress also distinguished by its scientific method and its practical applications. Following respectively their different objects, there are on both sides groups of men of strong convictions, activity, and influence, who hope for and pursue the triumph of their several causes. Like the ardent huntsman of Bürgers ballad, France is solicited by two Genii, ever at her side, ever present, urgent, contrary. Since the commencement of the nineteenth century, our history is made up of this great struggle and of its vicissitudes, of the series of victories gained and defeats sustained by these two forces, which are disputing the future of our country.

They find a field of action in a people of quick, various, and keen feelings, prone to generous impulses, full of human sympathies and mobility, at this moment chilled and intimidated by the checks imposed upon their ambitious yearnings, by the disappointments which have befallen their hopes, and so brought back by actual experience to confine their aspirations within the modest limits of good sense; more occupied with the perils of their situation than with the rights of thought, but always remarkable for intelligence and sagacity; friendly to liberty even when they dread its abuse, and to order although they only defend it at the last extremity; more touched by virtue than shocked by vice; honest in their instincts and moral judgments in spite of the weakness of their moral belief and their complacent indulgence of men whom they do not esteem; and always ready, in spite of their doubts and their alarms, to recur to the noble desires which they have the air of no longer entertaining.

We have in all this evidently matter to encourage the good genius of France. The life of nations is neither easier nor less mixed with good and evil, with successes and reverses, than the life of individuals; but assuredly, in spite of what is wanting to it, and in spite of its sorrows, the actual state of our country, as well as its long history, open a wide field to the efforts and the hopes of the men of elevated, resolute, and honest minds, who are occupying themselves in earnest with its destiny.

What, in order to attain their object, can be, ought to be, the conduct of the men engaged in this patriotic design, men who have it at heart to second the good current and to stem the evil current, which have both set in amongst us? Upon what conditions and by what means can we hope to pass through the sieve of good sense and of moral sense the confused ideas which plague us, and to find an issue for the public out of the doubts and hesitation which are a source of languor and enervation to the soul?

Political Liberty and Belief in Religion, the movement of society in advance and the impulse of the soul towards eternity, Free Government and Christianity, these are the two forces to which we should recur, and the only ones capable of remedying this disease of trouble and doubt which afflict both our thoughts and our conduct, and which at one time impairs, at another paralyses, our understanding.

I have no intention here to speak of political liberties in the abstract, and of their necessity either to a country in order to guarantee to it a good administration at home and abroad, or to individuals in order to secure their interests, moral and material. The right of France to these liberties, and their opportuneness to her at this moment, have recently been set in their clearest light, and established in all their force on their highest stage, in the bosom of the legislative body. [Footnote 2] It is solely because of its influence upon that ill of our epoch, the complication of questions and the hesitations of opinion, that I speak here of political liberty; I regard it as one of the two great remedies against this ill.

[Footnote 2: Discourse of M. Thiers, Sur les libertés nécessaires et sur la liberté de la presse, in the séances of the 11th January, 1864, 13th February, 1866, 30th January, 7th, 8th, 15th, 21st, and 22nd February, 1868.]

When all questions are agitated pell mell, and all minds are perplexed, the first salutary result consequent upon liberty is that it sets all opinions and all intentions in contact and in conflict. At first, and for a time, this simultaneous invasion of so many complex facts, and of so many diverse and contrary ideas, does but add to the perplexity of the questions and to the confusion of minds; but little by little, and quickly too, provided liberty endures, the winnowing process produces its effect upon the questions, and light penetrates into the understandings: the different facts, and problems which these facts suggest, are set in turn in their place, and valued only for as much as they are worth; actors and spectators grow accustomed to them all, and begin to form more precise conceptions of them.

Little by little order takes the place of confusion; opinions define and classify themselves; and instead of the fermentation of opinions in a chaotic confusion, we have a contest in regular form, and upon intelligible issues, I repeat that a result so salutary cannot be obtained unless upon the condition of a liberty universal, real, and durable; partial or transitory, it would serve only to aggravate the perturbation, and to unsettle opinions still more.

Political liberty has a second effect, one, perhaps, still more important: it forces all questions to submit to the test of practical experiment. As long as the liberty is only in the thought, it is vain and intemperate; everything seems permitted, and everything possible to those who are not responsible for the effects of an act: man's thought, intoxicated with itself, runs riot in the vagueness of infinite space and time. But when to liberty of thought is superadded political liberty,—when, instead of treating questions speculatively, they have to be virtually solved,—when men are charged as real actors to transform into facts their own opinions or those of the spectators who are looking on,—then it is that the human mind, making its own strength the object of its reflection and examination, is driven to the admission that it does not dispose at its own will of the world, and that even in order to satisfy itself, it must confine itself to the limits imposed by good sense, by justice, and by possibility,—then it is that it learns to govern itself, and to hold itself responsible for its acts. Responsibility engenders discretion, but is itself engendered by liberty alone.

Our own times have furnished us with three great examples of the salutary empire exercised by political liberty in furnishing an escape from the embarrassment of situations, and in solving questions the most different—I might say the most contrary—in their nature. We have only to cast our eyes over the contemporary histories of England, of the United States of America, and of France herself, to discover their examples and their authority as precedents.

From 1792 to 1818, England was engaged in struggles first against the spirit of Revolution, and then against that termed by M. Benjamin Constant the spirit of usurpation and of conquest. With what forces and with what arms did England support these two formidable struggles? With the forces and the arms of political liberty. It was by the elections, by publicity, by discussions continued in the midst of the energetic manifestations of all the parties, —it was by appeals to public sentiments and opinions,—it was by setting in action all the springs of a free and representative government, that England succeeded in her resistance to the most potent revolutionary and military movement which ever agitated Europe. That struggle over, after the lapse of a few years, during which the presiding policy prolonged its tenure of office by pursuing a pacific course, England entered upon quite a different path; sometimes under the Government of Liberals, sometimes of Conservatives, the policy of Reform took the place of the policy of resistance; and since 1828, it is in this path that England is progressing; it is in favour of innovations, sometimes prudent, sometimes daring, and sometimes, perhaps, improvident, that she is exerting to the utmost all the forces of the country, all the strength of its government. Political Liberty has in turn, and with similar efficacy, served the cause and assured the success, at one time of a policy of resistance, at another of that of progress.

The United States of America have been subjected to a still ruder trial. Their government has had to struggle against the insurrection of a notable portion of their people, and against a civil war entered upon in the name of a principle, popular independence. The central power of the Confederation has resisted an insurrection radically illegitimate, which was entered upon to maintain the slavery of a part of the human race; it defended the national existence of the State against the attempts which were made to dislocate it, and which were founded upon the same motive; and after a civil war which endured four years, in the course of which each side was prodigal of efforts and sacrifices, and displayed an equal energy, the policy of resistance triumphed by the medium of a republican power, and the liberal idea of the abolition of slavery vanquished the revolutionary idea of the right of insurrection. It is to political liberty, and to the potent force of the institutions and manners founded under her influence, that this victory of the great right of humanity was due; and, the war once over, the civil régime of American society resumed its action, still stormy and perilous, but free from every anarchical usurpation or military tyranny.

Newer to France, its principles less understood by it, and not so well applied, Political Liberty has not on these accounts remained without producing there some fruits. In 1830 and in 1848 France passed through two revolutions, one of which had been preceded by sixteen the other by eighteen years of civil liberty. Neither of the régimes in operation immediately previous to each revolution sufficed to prevent it, but they greatly changed its character and weakened its effects. In 1830, thanks to the instantaneous intervention of the public authorities which owed their existence to the previous régime, a regular government was promptly established, and a new constitutional monarchy succeeded to that which had just fallen. On the instant it set itself in opposition to the revolutionary movement which had given it birth; but the principle of respect for the Law and for Liberty exercised, as yet, so incomplete and feeble an empire upon men's minds, that the anarchical fermentation of opinions prolonged themselves even after the victory. The doctrine of Religious Liberty, in particular, was more than once lost sight of and violated: in February, 1831, the funeral ceremonies in the church of Saint Germain l'Auxerrois, celebrated in commemoration of the Duke de Berri, who had been assassinated eleven years previously, was not allowed to be tranquilly celebrated; a violent and riotous mob sacked the archiepiscopal palace of Paris, and was the cause of the church, which had furnished them with a pretext for violence, being closed for many months. In 1848, on the contrary, during a revolutionary crisis which set men's passions far more furiously in movement, and which was more profound than that of 1830, neither the liberty of Religion nor the peace of the churches was disturbed; the ruling authorities were exposed to anarchy for a longer period, but the rights of the individual were respected, and he might affirm himself free even in the midst of the public troubles and perils. Thirty-four years of civil Liberty have not disappeared with the governments which were then in force without leaving their traces; their traditions and their examples have evidently exercised a salutary influence both upon the last Revolution, and upon the Reaction which put an end to it.

That this influence may still surmount the great trials through which governments and people may have both to pass, two things are necessary: the one is, that civil liberty should form real citizens, that nations as well as governments should learn to make use of their rights, and to submit to the limits imposed by their laws; the other is, that each country and ruling power, at the same time that they are culling the fruits of civil liberty, should accept its inconveniences and its perils. A free government is not exempt from either vices or dangers; it does not dispense men from the necessity of contemplating with resignation the imperfection of every work of man as well as of every human situation.

Free institutions are not of themselves enough: they leave room to nations for—what do I say? they demand from them—great activity and much responsibility. If nations strive to elude their part of responsibility and omit to exercise their share of action, free institutions become idle words; they are no longer anything but a picture-frame without the picture—a drama written, not represented—in which the actors fail to assume their parts or to co-operate to produce the dénouement.

It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public in the life of free government which gives so capital an importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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? 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.

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. 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.]

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.

"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. 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.

"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. 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.

"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."

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; 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?

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. 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.

"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.

"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.'

"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. 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.

"But although we have all this to deplore, how many subjects have we for hope and encouragement! Moments of crisis are the most painful, but they are not the least fruitful. Sow we do, indeed, with tears; what matters, after all, that no hymn of triumph attends our harvest. The thing essential is that we sow. Behold, how magnificently the ground is in many respects prepared for the Christian preacher. The mere fact that religious questions are the fashion of the day gives us an immense advantage, and one by which we may profit. Is it not very encouraging to know that in discussing such subjects we are answering to serious demands of general interest? The contest which divides our churches has been certainly hurtful to the growth of piety; but has it not also shaken many a soul from its torpor? Has it not impelled many persons to search after the truth who were before indifferent? Is it not better to have to address ourselves to souls troubled if only by doubt, than to souls plunged in the heavy torpor of indifference?

"After all, our age has its grandeur. Let us not underrate it: we are not to imitate that ready and vulgar pessimism, which sees everything dressed in the livery of woe, and which delights to note the vices and shortcomings of an epoch, without admitting the virtue to which it can lay just claim, or its generous aspirations. It is certain that, even where rejecting the dogmas of Christianity, our age has made immense progress in the social application of Christianity, and especially in philanthropy. The age passionately loves liberty, equality, tolerance, and peace; it insists upon respect for all consciences; it dreams of the union of all nations; it occupies itself with the material happiness and the amelioration of all classes in society. Not so rich as other ages in men of a high temper of character, men really original, our age has nevertheless contributed, more than others, perhaps, to the general awakening of men to their rights as individuals, and of self-government, and consequently, to the sentiment of personal responsibility. Here assuredly we have noble tendencies; precious points d'appui for the preachers of the Gospel. Let us feel no dread for this breath of Liberalism which is passing over nations. Liberty rightly understood leads to the Gospel, as the Gospel leads to Liberty.

"And now what have we to say to this age so tormented? What ought we to say to these souls who have confidence in us, and who demand from us Light and Peace? How often has this question overwhelmed the Gospel preacher with the sentiment of his weakness and insufficiency? How often has it made him prostrate himself in his agony at the feet of the Lord? How often torn from him the cry of the prophet—'Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a child!'

"Let Christian Science proceed with its work! She has, assuredly, much to do in these days. In the teeth of the affirmations of Positivism and of Materialism let her make her own affirmation. Hers the task to show that the biblical dogmas respecting the origin of the world and of man are infinitely more rational and more scientific than all that in these days men seek to substitute in their place. Hers the task to prove that the supernatural, far from being antagonistic to the science of Nature, is as much called for by Nature as by the sentiment of Religion itself.

"Let Christian Philosophy also accomplish her task. Hers it is to establish the profound harmony which exists between Reason and Faith; hers to show that the systems by which men seek to replace Christianity present to the thought as many difficulties, if not more, than any which follow from the evangelical dogmas. Hers the task to lay the foundation of a new philosophy with the materials furnished by Revelation, and by the Christian Conscience.

"Let Christian Literature equally accomplish her mission! Let her spread the truth by the means, infinitely diverse, which the progress of the press has placed at her disposal! Let her make herself popular; let her put on all forms to combat error; let her oppose Journal to Journal, Review to Review; and, if it must be so, Novel to Novel! Let her make herself everything to everybody; and follow the adversary upon every field, and seize all his arms.

"And for us Preachers, what have we to do? What this day is our special mission in the special position in which God has placed us?"

Having come to this, the particular object of his study and of his Report, made by him to the Evangelical Conference of Nérac, M. Decoppel enters, as to the Mission and actual work of the preachers, into details which although they are full of life, and evince the greatest practical knowledge, apply more especially to the Protestant Churches of France. Finally, he reverts to the general question of Christianity by a concluding remark of general application, but announcing a truth of both practical and urgent importance for all the Christian Churches.

"What is most essential," says he, "is not so much to defend Christianity, as to present it to our age, not as an enemy that comes to anathematize and to combat it, but as a friend that comes to raise it and save it. Beyond a doubt, we must not fear to lay stress upon Christian Truth, and to present it with its most salient angles and its austerest face in advance; but with anathemas and declamations we must have done. What most is necessary is, that we address a word of sympathy to the Age; we must show to it Christianity, I do not say so much in the aspect fitted to inspire love as in the aspect in which it is loving. Regard St. Paul at Athens. He does not consider himself bound to confound the idolatry of his auditors; he does quite the contrary; he knows how to find in their idolatry itself a point d'appui for the Gospel. Let us do as he did; let us strive, we also, to find these points d'appui, those keystones upon which the edifice of faith may in these days be made safely repose. It is more especially true in our country that Christianity is not known for what it is, and the remark applies not only to the lower classes of society, but even to the educated classes, so that when they attack Christianity it is, as it were, an attack upon a thing unknown. The Age is liberal: let us show it that the Gospel is still more liberal, and that its liberality is of the genuine kind. The Age loves science, and demands a rational faith: let us show it that faith is sovereign reason, and cannot but profit by every conquest achieved by science. The Age aspires to make progress in every branch of human activity: let us show it that all genuine progress is contained in the principles of the Gospel."

I make no more citations. I neither examine nor discuss any of the particular ideas, or phrases, or words which these two documents contain: I would solely draw attention to their main and common characteristic. These writings are not only Christian, but uncompromisingly Christian; at the same time, they aim at leading Christianity and Modern Society to understand each other, to accept each other mutually and freely, and to exercise, the one upon the other, such an action as shall be salutary to both. The authors are not authors, or orators, or amateurs in religion, or in philosophy; they are ecclesiastics by profession, belonging to different churches who are entering upon this war, regarded by each both as legitimate and necessary; who are labouring to draw to it the populations placed naturally under their influence; and are hoping, without doubt, that their efforts will be successful.

I think that they are right both in their hope and their endeavours, and knowing that outside of the groups of persons pledged to particular opinions or sides in the contests of religion and politics, there exists a vast population, uncertain and vacillating, now indifferent, now anxious upon the subject of religious questions and the relations of Christianity to Modern Society, I think that this population, which is, in effect, France, is capable of feeling religious emotions, of being informed and brought back to the great beliefs of Christianity as well as to a sentiment of the natural and necessary agreement between Christian faith and the principles of public Liberty. The profound desire which I feel, and the hope from which I will not part, of this great result, have induced me to give still greater development to these Meditations, and to risk them amidst the events, the issue of which is obscure, which are now crowding upon each other, and amidst questions, passions, and interests, to which such subjects are all very strange. The more I consider the matter, the more I feel persuaded that France is not so little busied as she would appear to be with religious questions, and that in the midst of her languor and fluctuations she has a secret sentiment of their imperishable grandeur and their practical importance. If this, as I think, is, at bottom, the public disposition, I may consider myself well entitled to command attentive listeners. In the course of my long life, I have seen much and have done somewhat. I have taken part in the world's affairs. I have quitted it, and am no longer anything more than a spectator. For twenty years I have been essaying my tomb. I have gone down into it living, and have made no effort to issue forth again. Not only have I experience of the world, but nothing attaches me to it. Could I be still of some service to the two great causes, in my eyes but one, the cause of Christian Faith in men's souls, and the cause of Political Liberty in my country, I should await with thankfulness, in the bosom of my seclusion, the dawn of that eternal day which "fools call death," says Petrarch:—

Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.
Guizot.
Paris, April, 1868.

Contents.

Meditations On Christianity
in its
Relation To The Actual State
Of Society And Opinion.

First Meditation.
Christianity And Liberty.

The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and ill-regulated impulse. Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away, and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it is bound to perform.

But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest enemy. In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded? Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that other question is not solved.

I meet at every step in the Gospels words such as these—"What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" [Footnote 5]

[Footnote 5: Mark viii. 36, 37.]

"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell." [Footnote 6] "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." [Footnote 7]

[Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]
[Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]

The dominant idea in the Gospels is the infinite worth of the human soul, of every human soul. Jesus came to influence and to save souls, all souls without exception,—souls of the powerful and of the obscure, of the rich and poor, learned and ignorant, happy or afflicted. The condition and the salvation of souls is the foundation of the Christian Religion.

The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts, who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an object of present solicitude. To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What have they to do with the words of the Gospel—with the immense value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not, that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime a destiny. Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in every command that she gives to humanity.

Christianity, then, is essentially liberal, in favour of all men, and of them as men; by her elementary and fundamental idea of man's nature, she founds his liberty upon the most solid basis and the broadest right that human thought can conceive. The most daring of the writers on public law never carried to so high a point as the Gospel has done either the native universal dignity of man's nature or the consequences derivable from this fact.

Christianity does not confine itself to this;—after having laid down the principle of Liberty, it gives to it the practical sanction which Liberty requires: it establishes the right of resistance to oppression. The priests and the chiefs of the synagogue at Jerusalem "commanded them (Peter and John) not to speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus;" but Peter and John answered them and said unto them, "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye." [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 8: Acts iv. 18,19.]

Having been again summoned before the high priest, who says to them, "Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name?" Peter replies, "We ought to obey God rather than men." [Footnote 9]

[Footnote 9: Acts v. 28, 29.]

The multitude joins its acts of violence to the injunctions of the authorities. Stephen, the first Christian Deacon, avows his faith before the multitude, and falls the first martyr to the principle of Christian resistance. [Footnote 10]

[Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]

The most zealous of the persecutors of Stephen, Paul of Tarsus, who had become Christian, is, in his turn, stoned and left for dead by the multitude of Lystra and Iconium; in his turn he resists the multitude, and returns again to Lystra and Iconium, "confirming the souls of the disciples, and exhorting them to continue in the faith," and representing to them that it is by much tribulation that we must enter into the kingdom of God. [Footnote 11] Resistance to oppression is an essential principle of Christianity, and the definitive guarantee of Liberty.

[Footnote 11: Acts xiv. 19, 22.]

It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of Authority. I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's," he established in principle the distinction between the religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State. Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force, between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes. [Footnote 12]

[Footnote 12: Meditations upon the Essence of Christianity, p. 278. London: 1864.]

It was by affirming and defending religious liberty, the highest and proudest of all liberties, that modern civilization commenced. The principle and right of liberty once deeply rooted in the soul, the flower and the fruit of this potent germ have strongly developed themselves in the course of ages, and expanded with more or less of promptitude and fecundity, according as the seasons were favourable or unfavourable; but upon the whole, history has confirmed the Gospel.

Of all the Religions which have appeared in the world, Christianity is the only one which conquered by means of Liberty, and which was founded upon Liberty; the only one which has been able to assume and keep her place amidst the greatest diversity of social institutions, and which in them all, as exigencies required, accepted and supported at one time authority, at another liberty.

Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls in the name of truth and by the arms of truth. If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious establishments—Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism—have held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress, attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power. Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it she awakened it.

Let me not be accused of forgetting that since the triumph of Christianity, oppressive tyrannies and odious persecutions have occurred in, different Christian societies in the name of the Christian faith. No one more than I deplores and detests such facts. They were the work of the sins of men, not of the principles of Christianity, which, far from authorising them, condemns them. Water from the purest source is changed and polluted in its course over the surface of the earth, after it has been exposed to the stormy atmospheric influences. In creating man free, God left him a part and a share in his own destiny and in the events which determine it. Christianity, emanating from God, marks out and combats uncompromisingly all evil desires and bad motives, all the excesses and all the weaknesses of man's selfishness: she has not destroyed them; she did not at once restore innocence to man nor make him a present of virtue: he is bound to labour in the work of his own control and of his own reformation; the Gospel is a Mirror in which, if he looks at himself, he may, it is true, behold the stains upon his soul and upon his life, but those stains proceed from himself, and not from the mirror, which only enables him to see them. When we lay to the charge of the Christian Religion the fatal errors, the unlawful passions and actions which have appeared under its name in the history of Christian Societies, we acquit without reason men, whether princes or nations, learned or ignorant, of the responsibility that weighs upon them; we ignore what Christianity commands and what she forbids; we demand from her that which she has not promised.

Of history thus far. I now confine myself to the present epoch and to the problems which the actual relations of Christianity to Liberty present. What are the principal obstacles at the present day in the way of the establishment of a real and lasting Liberty, and what are the means within our reach to surmount them? In other terms, which express my meaning more exactly, What are our infirmities to retard, what our strength to accelerate, the establishment of a free government? Is Christianity an obstacle to us in this work or a help, an ill or a remedy?

It is with a profound feeling of sadness that I see eminent men, 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. 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.

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? 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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; 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

This is no mere philosophical aspiration. It is already history. There have been many vicissitudes in France, and many a crisis of different kinds during the last hundred years in the struggle between Liberalism and Roman Catholicism; the former has often committed errors, made mistakes, by which Romanism has adroitly profited; but at every reverse Romanism has recognised her own defeat, and accepted some part of its consequences. The Constituent Assembly by the civil organisation of the clergy, the National Convention by its proscriptions, had endeavoured, the one to enslave, the other to abolish the Catholic Church; the great master of the revolution, Napoleon, raised it up again by the Concordat of 1802; but the Concordat at the same time consecrated many of the fundamental principles of the liberal regime, and the Catholic Church of Rome consecrated Napoleon and signed the Concordat, even whilst protesting against some of its consequences. At the Restoration some wished to discuss again the question of the Concordat, and to re-establish the relation between Church and State upon their ancient foundations; but the attempt encountered, in the ranks of the Royalists themselves, a decisive resistance, and totally failed. Under the Government of 1830, Roman Catholicism regained its ground and resumed fresh vigour by both using the name of Liberty and claiming its right. When the Republic again appeared in 1848, Roman Catholicism treated it with as much tenderness as it experienced itself from the Republic. I pause before the actual relations of the Church of Rome to the new Empire; Rome has paid a dear price for all that she has received from the Empire; but even here she showed, and appears disposed still to show, a large measure of patience and resignation. She is right.

One fact particularly arrests my attention in the course of this stormy history. In the midst of her reverses and her concessions, Roman Catholicism has displayed rare and energetic virtues of fidelity and independence. She has opposed to the bloody persecution of Terrorism, the inexhaustible blood of her martyrs, bishops, priests, monks, men and women; that Clergy of France, once so vacillating in faith and so mundane in morals, bore their cross with an indomitable sentiment of Christian honour. The despotism of the Emperor Napoleon encountered in the person of Pope Pius VII., in some Cardinals, and some Bishops, a passive but firm resistance, which neither the power of the Despot, nor the contagious servility of their contemporaries, could surmount. And again, in these days, who can fail to perceive with what activity and devotedness, with what sacrifices and efficacy, Roman Catholicism, by the mere force of its native energy, upholds the cause of its chief and of itself? If civil society had defended its liberties and its dignities as the Church of Rome defends hers, Liberalism in France would be farther advanced on its road and towards its object.

But let not Romanists deceive themselves: one cannot make use of Liberty without being forced to enter into an engagement and compromise with Liberty; one cannot appeal to Liberty without doing homage to her; she lays her hand upon those to whom she lends her aid. The great fact which I before invoked, the work of reconciliation between modern society and Roman Catholicism, is more advanced than those believe who still stand aloof from it and oppose it. This is proved by two facts. In the very bosom of Roman Catholicism, and from amongst its most zealous defenders, that group of liberal Catholics was formed which has played and which continues to play so active a part in struggling for the Liberties of their church, and for the rights of their chief: these are at once the ornaments of then church, and its intellectual sword; and the publication which supports their views, the "Correspondant," is, next to the "Revue des deux Mondes," the periodical which meets with most success and has the greatest circulation. Passing from this brilliant group to the more modest ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy, I ask what is the disposition, the attitude, the conduct of those faithful and humble priests who exercise the Christian ministry in our provinces and in the inferior quarters of our cities; they have not always all the science, all the mental culture, which one might desire; but whilst adhering to Catholic faith and giving the example of Christian lives, they live in the midst of the people; they know it, they understand it; they are aware what the conditions are which permit them to live with and to exercise an influence upon the people; they enter by degrees into its sentiments and its instincts; without premeditation, almost without perceiving it, they become each day more and more men of their time and country, more familiar with the ideas and liberal tendencies of modern society. Thus at the two poles of Roman Catholicism, in its most elevated ranks and in its popular militia, the same result is obtained, in the one case by men of enlightened views and of superior ability, and in the other case by men of good sense and honesty of purpose; and thus in the Roman Church those moral and political principles of 1789 make their way, which form the basis of the new social edifice, of its laws, and of its liberties.

I do not dispute, neither do I attack; I record facts as I observe and appreciate them. And in my opinion, with reference to French institutions,—for I speak only of France,—the essential consequences from these facts, as far as they bear upon the relations of Christianity to Liberty, are as follows.

I have here not a word to say respecting the Protestant Church in France; the questions which have agitated her for some time past are questions of faith and internal discipline, entirely aloof from any incertitude or differences of opinion as to the rights of conscience or of religious society in their relations to civil society. Protestantism in France, whether orthodox or not, adopts and upholds the largest maxims as to religious liberty, and as to the guarantee for it, in the separation of religious life from civil life. The most zealous Liberals have nothing more in this respect to demand from even the most orthodox Protestants; these are indeed of their church the most urgent in claiming for religious society the right to have its internal autonomy, and to stand independently of the state. It is, on the contrary, Roman Catholics, and the advocates of the essential principles of modern society, who most dispute about the general question of liberty.

The more I reflect, the more I am convinced that henceforth this question can only be seriously and efficaciously dealt with in one of two ways: the one is by the alliance of Church and State, on conditions which, whilst distinguishing civil life from religious life, shall guarantee to individuals religious liberty in civil society, and to the church itself its internal autonomy in matters of faith and of religious discipline. The other solution is the complete separation of Church and State, and their mutual independence.

That the Church prefers the system of an Alliance with the State to that of the Church's Liberty and isolation from the State, I well understand.

She is right. Alliance with the State is to her a sign of strength, a means of influence, a pledge for her dignity and her stability. The complete separation of the two societies leaves religious institutions, and particularly their clergy, in a fluctuating and precarious situation: a system essentially democratic, it rather places the ecclesiastical magistracy under the opinions and wills of its lay members, than these under the influence of the religious authorities. This system is especially alien to the origin, the fundamental principle, and the Hierarchy, of the Roman Catholic Church; it is impossible for this Church to accept it unless urgently demanded by the interests of moral authority, independence, and liberty. But let not the Roman Catholic Church misapprehend; an alliance of Church with State has also conditions without which a Church would vainly expect any advantage; for the alliance to be serious and effectual, there must be between Church and State a large measure of harmony as to the essential principles of the religious society and of the civil society which the Church and the State respectively represent: if the two societies and those who govern them, do not mutually admit their respective principles, if they disavow each other incessantly, and carry on in the bosom of their alliance, a war, open or secret, all the good effect of such alliance disappears, and the alliance itself is soon compromised. The treaties concluded at different epochs, under the name of Concordats, between Chambers and States in different countries of Christendom, have only been possible and efficacious, because there was a great basis of harmony in the fundamental institutions of the two contracting parties; they differed upon some points; they had reciprocally to make concessions and grant guarantees; but taken altogether they approved of each other and were sincere in supporting each other; peace was the point from which their alliance started, and the dissentiments which existed on each side had no reference to any vital questions. It suffices for us to cast a glance at the history of Catholicism in France, of the Anglican Church in England, of the Lutheran Church in Germany and in Sweden, to acknowledge this truth; and what is occurring and forming matter of negotiation in our days in Italy and in Austria, upon the subject of the relations of the Church with the State, furnishes a further striking confirmation. In an age of liberty, of publicity, and of continual discussion, when it is possible for anything to be thought or said, and for any opinion to be maintained or attacked, it is more than ever indispensable that any treaty between Church and State should be serious and sincere; that is to say, that the two contracting parties should recognise and accept in each other, without equivocation and without subterfuge, the character which each really possesses. This is the only condition upon which an alliance can be real, becoming, and advantageous. In presence of the undisguised movements and the ever recurring and daring ventures of Liberty, a policy of reticence and procrastination, obscure and dim reservations, inconsistent expedients, and secret warfare, is no longer practicable; such policy, far from lending any help, discredits and weakens the power which places its trust in it. As for me, I believe that the Catholic Church, if not without endangering her habits, at least without endangering her essential principles, has it in her power to set herself at peace with the fundamental principles of modern society and of actual civil governments; but should she either not wish or not know how to march towards this object and to obtain it, let her not give way to any illusion; alliance with the State would be rather a source of weakness and of peril to her than an advantage, and she would only eventually be driven to seek a refuge in the system of separation and complete independence.

As for the State, the system which separates the two societies would free it from many a burthen and much embarrassment; but it would cause her other embarrassments, and lead to the loss of many advantages. It is convenient to discourse of the principle of a "Free church in a free country," but after the long alliance which has existed between them, it is easier to proclaim such principle than to apply it: not only is it impossible to divorce Church from State without violently wrenching asunder previous bonds, but more lasting consequences ensue; once disengaged from every connection with the civil power, ministers of religion busy themselves no longer about the interests of civil society; their thoughts are exclusively absorbed by questions of religion and its affairs. Governments have long been accustomed to derive, and derive at the present day, a moral influence of great value from an alliance with the Church: but this influence supposes one condition which is not only especially important in our days, but of capital importance: in the actual state of opinion and of manners, no good results can be politically looked for from the alliance, if the civil power do not abstain from all interference in questions purely religious; the complete independence of the church and of its chiefs, in matters of faith and of religious discipline, is the only condition which can justify their giving their indirect support to the state government, and which can purge their support of all impure motives. The alliance of the two powers could formerly, in a certain degree, co-exist with no inconsiderable confusion in their respective attributes, and a somewhat earnest claim on the part of each to domineer over the other; nothing similar can occur at the present day; neither Church nor State can any longer be the master or the servant of the other. Let neither princes nor priests deceive themselves; their reciprocal independence, and their uncontested empire, each in its own province, can alone give to their alliance the dignity which the alliance requires, if it is to be real, efficacious, and lasting.

Every road leads me to the same point; to every question the facts give me the same answer. Liberty has need of Christianity, Christianity has need of Liberty. As modern society demands to be free, the religion of Christ is its most necessary ally. Christianity and civil society have mutually, I admit it, a grave feeling of disquietude and distrust; but this disquietude and distrust are not natural and inevitable results of principles essential to civil society and religious society, of any compulsory relations existing between them; they spring from the faults which the two institutions have committed towards each other, and from the contest which each has forced upon the other. Liberty alone can effectually combat such sentiments which have become habitual and traditional. To dissipate them entirely, something besides Liberty is requisite; but without Liberty neither religious society nor civil society will obtain their legitimate objects, these objects being peace in their relations to each other, and the moral progress of man, and of the State, whether allied with or independent of the Church.

Second Meditation.
Christianity And Morality.

Two attempts are now being simultaneously made, of different characters, although, of the same origin and tendency. Seriously minded men, who persist in believing and calling themselves Christians, are labouring to separate Christian morals from Christian dogmas, and although they make Jesus their moral idea of humanity, are stripping him of his miracles and divinity. Others, who declare openly that they are no Christians, endeavour to separate morality in the abstract from religion in the abstract, and place the source of morality, as well as its authority, in human nature, and in it alone. On the one side we find a Christian morality independent of Christian faith; on the other a Morality independent of all religious belief, either natural or revealed: these two doctrines are in our days proclaimed and propagated with ardour.

I frankly admit that their defenders are sincere in adopting and upholding them, and that they do so in the name of truth alone. In philosophy, as in politics, I believe error and honest intentions to be more general than falsehood and evil design. Moreover, who would discuss convictions, unless himself convinced that they are serious and earnest? Opinions founded on interested or hypocritical motives are not worth the honour of a discussion; they merit only to be attacked and unmasked. In the name of truth alone I combat the two doctrines to which I have alluded, and which some now strive to accredit.

The true cause of this twofold attempt is the incredulity and the scepticism which prevail with regard to religion. Non-Christians are numerous; few Deists are quite sure of their belief and of its efficacy. A necessity for morality is felt to exist; its right to regulate the actions of man is acknowledged; it is in order to preserve to it its integrity and its force that efforts are made to separate it from religion, from all religious creeds, all of which, it is here assumed, are either ruined or tottering. Thus, Independent Morality is, as it were, a raft, offered to the human soul, and to human society, to save their time-worn vessel from being wrecked.

The idea is false, the attempt of evil consequence. They who flatter themselves that they can leave Christian morality standing, after wrenching it from Christian dogmas,—and they who believe it possible to preserve morality, after detaching it from religion,—err alike, for they fail to recognise the essential facts of human nature and of human society.

Both doctrines are derived from an inexact and incomplete observation of these facts. I have already stated in these Meditations what I think of the isolation of Christian morality from Christianity, and the reason why I reject it. At present I apply myself to the idea of independent morality, and in the name of a psychology, pure at once and severe, I affirm that there exists an intimate, legitimate, and necessary union between morality and religion.

A preliminary observation occurs to me. Those who adopt the theory of an independent morality, start from the idea that there is a moral law, strange to and superior to all interested motives, to all selfish passions; these rank duty above, and treat it as independent of, every other motive of action.

I am far from contesting this principle with them, but they forget that it has been, and still is, strongly contested: contested by both ancient and modern philosophers. Some have considered the pursuit of happiness, and the satisfaction of individual interests, as the right and legitimate aims of human life. Others have placed the rule of man's conduct, not in personal interests, but in general utility, in the common welfare of all mankind. Others have thought that they could perceive the origin and the guarantee for morals in the sympathy of human sentiments. The moral and obligatory law, or duty, is far from being the recognised and generally accepted basis of morality; systems the most varied have arisen, and are incessantly forming themselves, with respect to the principles of morals, as with respect to other great questions of our nature; and the human understanding fluctuates no less in this corner of the philosophic arena than in the others. Let the moralists of the new school not deceive themselves; in proclaiming morality to be independent of religion, they mean to give it one fixed basis, the same for all, and they believe that they succeed in the attempt. They deceive themselves: morality, thus isolated, remains as much as ever a prey to the disputes of man.

I pass over this grave misconception on the part of the defenders of the system, and I examine the system itself. Let us see if it is the faithful and full expression of human morality, if it contains all the facts which constitute its natural and essential elements.

These facts I sum up as follows: the distinction between moral good and evil; the obligation of doing good and avoiding evil; the faculty of accomplishing or not this obligation. In brief and philosophic terms the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty. These are the natural, primitive, and universal facts which constitute human morality; it is by reason and by virtue of these facts that man is a moral being.

I have not here to enter into a discussion of these same facts; I do not occupy myself at this moment with systems which disregard or deny them, in whole or in part; all the three facts, or any one of the three. The partisans of the system of independent morality admit them all, as I do; the question between them and myself is this, whether or not, whilst rendering homage to the true principle of morality, they fully comprehend its signification, and accept its results.

It is the characteristic and the honour of man that he is not satisfied with merely gathering facts which relate either to himself or to the external world, but that he seeks to know their origin and object, their import and bearing.

In morals, as in physics, statistics are only the point from which science sets out; it is only after having well observed facts, and having verified them, that we have to discuss the questions which they raise, and the further ultimate facts which the facts already ascertained contain and reveal. The fact of human morality, such as I have just described it in its three constituent elements, the Moral Law, Duty, and Liberty, cannot fail to suggest these two questions: Whence proceeds the moral law, and whence is its authority? What is the sense, and what the ultimate result to the moral being himself, of the fulfilment or violation of his duty; that is to say, of the use which he makes of his liberty? No philosophical system can either suppress or elude these questions; they present themselves to the mind of man as soon as he directs his attention to the moral character of man's nature. I propose to consider in succession the three constituent elements of this great truth, so as to determine rightly its source and bearing.

Moral law has neither been invented by man, nor does it spring from any human convention; man, by acknowledging it, admits that he has not created it, that he cannot abolish or change it. Political and civil laws are diverse and ever varying; they depend in a great measure upon time, place, social circumstances, or human will; when men adopt or reject them, they do so with the feeling that they are the masters of them, to deal with them accordingly as their interests or their fancies suggest.

But when a law presents itself to them in the form of a moral law, they feel that this is not dependent on them, that it takes its source and derives its authority elsewhere than from their own opinion or volition. They may mistake in rendering or in refusing homage to a particular precept of conduct; they may attach to laws a moral value which they do not intrinsically possess, or pass unnoticed the really moral character of another law, and the obligations which it imposes upon them; but wherever they believe that they perceive the character of a moral law, they bow before it as before something which does not emanate from them, and before a power of a different nature from man's.

The moral law no more belongs to the general mechanism of the world, than to the invention of man; it has none of the characteristics that mark the laws of physical order; none of the results which follow from them; it is by no means inherent in the forms or combinations of matter; it does not govern the relations or movements of bodies; obligatory, and fixed as fate, it addresses itself solely to that intelligent and free being, of whom Pascal said, in his grand language, "If the universe were to crush him, still man would be more noble than that which destroyed him, because he knows that he dies; and of the advantage that the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing." Man does much more than know that he dies; it happens, sometimes, that he encounters death voluntarily—that he chooses to die in obedience to the moral law. It is the law of Liberty.

What mean these words, Law of Liberty? How does this law, called Duty, come to establish itself in the human mind, and command man's Liberty to respect it?

Some essay to found Duty upon Right, and to derive its authority solely from the independence and dignity of humanity. Man, it is said, feels and knows that he is a free agent; as such it is his right that no human being shall attack his independence or his dignity. He finds in every other human being the same nature, and therefore the same right as he possesses himself. Thus mutual right is derived from individual right, and "Duty is nothing but the right which it is recognised that another possesses." [Footnote 14]

[Footnote 14: La Morale Independante, a weekly journal, No. 1, 6th August, 1865.]

There is here a profound mistake, and a strange forgetfulness.

Why, when a man finds himself in relation with his fellow-men, does he attribute to them the same right which he recognises himself as possessing, and which he calls upon them to see and admit there? If this is a prudent calculation, the wisdom which arises from a correct appreciation of his interest, let us have done with it, it is not morality. If, prudence and interest apart, man regards himself as bound to pay, to the independence and personal dignity of his fellow-men, the same respect, and to attribute to them the same right, as he lays claim to for himself; if reciprocity becomes in this manner the fundamental principle of morality, what becomes of the obligation where there is no reciprocity? Will man be bound to respect in others the right which will not be respected in himself? If he is bound to it in all cases, and in spite of everything, then Duty has another source than the mutual respect of persons. If he is, on the other hand, not bound to it in all cases, what becomes of the paramount and absolute character of Duty; in other words, of the moral law? It is no longer anything but law upon condition.

Not merely the religion of Christ, but all the great doctrines of the world, religious or philosophical, peremptorily refuse to attach this conditional character of reciprocity to the moral law; all maintain that duty is in every case absolute and imperative, independently of the conduct of others. "If ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same." "Love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil." [Footnote 15]

[Footnote 15: Luke vi. 32, 33, 35.]

"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.

It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the relations of men with one another. Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust, as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the social bond;—the means of peace and of Union amongst mankind;—the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the man who has a right has absolutely nothing. Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes, l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan," (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]

This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean, the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law, sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle, and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it: their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.

I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.

Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms, for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove that it may be always reawakened. Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced. Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.

As Liberty supposes responsibility, so Responsibility supposes an idea of merit or of demerit attaching naturally to the use made of liberty. I set aside here all the questions, in my opinion, ill put and wrongly solved by Theologians, upon this subject of merit or demerit. According to the general sentiment and common sense of all mankind, there is merit for a man in the accomplishment of Moral Law, there is demerit in its violation. It is a fact recognised and proclaimed even in the simplest and most ordinary incidents of human life, as well as in the political organisation of society, and in the problems which concern the eternal future. However the recompense or the punishment may be accelerated or delayed; whatever its nature or its measure; the moral career of a man is not complete, nor the moral order established, until the responsibility inherent in his Liberty has received its complement and arrived at its end in the just appreciation and equitable return made to him for his merits or demerits.

Thus far I have spoken of Independent Morality; I have scrupulously confined myself to studying moral facts as man's nature, and man's nature alone, presents them to us. I have considered and described them as they are in themselves, entirely apart from every other element and every other consideration. Those moral facts are briefly as follows:—

The distinction between moral good and moral evil.
The Moral Law, the duty of doing good and avoiding evil.
Moral Liberty.
Moral Responsibility.
Moral merit and demerit.

These are, I admit, facts which man recognises in himself as the proper and intimate characteristics of his own nature. But these truths once recognised and determined, what is their import? Are they facts isolated in human nature, as they are in Psychology, or have they anterior causes and necessary consequences! Are they self-sufficing, or do they contain and reveal other truths which form their complement and their sanction? The human mind cannot elude this question.

I have established that the moral law is not of human invention; that it does not exist merely by man's agreement; that it is not one of those laws of fate by which the material world is governed. It is the law of the intellectual world, of the free world; a law superior to that world which, by recognising it as law, recognises itself at the same time both as free and subject. Who is the author of that law? Who imposes it upon man—upon man of whom it is not the work, and whom it governs without enslaving? Who placed it above this world where the present life is passed? Evidently there must be a superior power from which the moral law emanates, and of which it is a revelation. With the good sense which his frivolity and his cynicism made him so oft forget, Voltaire said, speaking of the material world and the order reigning in it:—

"Je ne puis songer
Que cette horloge existe et n'ait point d'horloger."
I cannot think
This clock exists and never had a maker.

In the moral world we have to do with something far different from a clock; nor are we in the presence of a machine constructed, regulated, once for all; the law of Order, that is to say, the moral law, is incessantly in contact with man's free agency; man does homage to the law which he is yet at liberty to accomplish or to violate; the law is a manifestation of the supreme legislator, of whose thought and will it is the expression. God moral sovereign, and man free subject, are both contained in the fact of the moral law. In this fact alone Kant found God; he erred in not also finding God elsewhere; but it is nevertheless true that it is in the moral law, the rule of human Liberty, that God shows himself to man most directly, most clearly, most undeniably.

Just as the moral law, without a sovereign legislator to impose it upon man, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a river without source, just so the moral responsibility of the free agent man, without a supreme judge to apply it, is an incomplete and inexplicable fact, a source without outlet, which runs and loses itself no one can tell whither. Just as the moral law reveals the moral legislator, just so does moral Responsibility reveal the moral judge. Just as the moral law is no law of human invention, just so human judgments, rendered in the name of moral responsibility, are hardly ever the judgments perfectly true and just which such responsibility expects and calls for. God is contained in the moral law as its primal author, and in moral responsibility as its definitive judge. The moral system, that is, the empire of the moral law, is incomprehensible and impossible if there is no God there, not only to establish it in a region above and paramount to man's free agency, but to establish it when troubled by man's conduct as a free agent.

Thus the moral truths, inherent in and proper to the human nature—that is, the distinction between moral good and moral evil, moral obligation, moral responsibility, moral merit and demerit,—are necessarily and intimately connected with the truths of Religion; for instance, with God moral legislator, God moral spectator, God moral judge. Thus morality is naturally and essentially connected with religion. Morality is, it is true, a thing special and distinct in the ensemble of man's nature and of man's life, but it is in no respect independent of the ensemble to which it belongs. It has its particular place in that ensemble, but it is only in that ensemble that its existence is reasonable, thence only that it derives its source and its authority.

Morals may, in the order of science, be separately observed and described; but in the order of actuality morality is inseparable from Religion.

What would be said of a physiologist if he maintained that the heart is independent of the brain, because those two organs are distinct, organs which are closely united and indispensable to each other in the unity of the human being?

The spectacle of the world leads us to the same result as the study of man, and reads us the same lesson. History confirms Psychology. What is the great action which makes itself most remarkable upon the stage of human societies? The constant struggle of good with evil, of just with unjust. In this struggle what shocking disorders! What iniquity perpetrated! How frequent an interregnum in the empire of the moral law and of justice, and what vicissitudes there! At one time the moral decree is expected in vain, and the human conscience remains painfully troubled by the successes of vice and of crime: at another time, contrary to all expectation, and after the most deplorable infractions of the moral law, the moral judgment comes. "In vain," said Chateaubriand fifty years ago, "does Nero prosper; Tacitus already lives in the empire; he grows up unnoticed near the ashes of Germanicus, and already a just providence has left in the hands of an obscure child the fame of the master of the world." Chateaubriand was right: Tacitus was the avenger of the moral law outraged by the masters of the Roman Empire; he was the judge of their triumphs; but in that very Empire the most victorious of its masters, Marcus Aurelius, after having consecrated his life to the search after and the practice of the moral law, dies in profound sadness beneath his tent on the banks of the Danube; sad on account of his wife, sad on account of his son, and of the future of that world which he had governed, and which was only to be renewed, and regenerated, by those Christians whom he had persecuted. Everything is incomplete, imperfect, incoherent, obscure, contradictory, in this vast conflict of men and actions called History; and Providence, the personification of eternal wisdom and justice, sometimes manifests itself there with éclat, and sometimes remains there, inert and veiled, beneath the most sombre mysteries. Is such the normal, definitive state of the universe? Shall truth, shall justice, never assume there more space than they now occupy? When shall light dawn upon the darkness? Who restore order to this chaos? Man evidently is insufficient to the task; in the world, as in individual man, the moral principle is still mutilated, and too infirm for its mission, unless it is intimately united to the religious principle. Morality can as little dispense with God in the life of the human race, as in that of the individual man.

In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to events of the most contradictory character: everything in the world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering. Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more than feeble convictions—dim hopes? On the other side, in the midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt; intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!

Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate, natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the moral being.

The first and the incomparable characteristic of Christianity, is the extent, I should rather say the immensity, of her moral ambition. The moral system established by Christ has often been contrasted with the reforms aimed at by great men whose endeavour it also was to fix moral laws for man's conduct, and to secure their empire over him. Jesus has been compared to Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cakia-mouni, Mahomet. The comparison is singularly inappropriate and superficial. The wisest, the most illustrious, of these moral reformers, even the most powerful, understood and accomplished at best but a very limited and incomplete work; sometimes they only sought to place in a clear light the rational principles of morality; sometimes they gave to their disciples, addressing themselves to these alone, rules for conduct in conformity with rational principles of morality; they taught a doctrine or established rules for discipline; they founded schools or sects. The Christian work was something quite different. Jesus was not a philosopher who entered into discussions with his disciples, and instructed them in moral science; nor a chief who grouped around him a certain number of adepts, and subjected them to certain special rules which distinguish, nay sever, them from the mass of mankind: Jesus expounds no doctrine, sets up no system of discipline, and organises no particular society: he penetrates to the bottom of the human soul, of every soul; he lays bare the moral disease of humanity, and of every man; and he commands his disciples with authority to apply the cure, first to themselves, and then to all men:—"Save your soul, for what would it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul?" "Go and preach to all nations."

What philosopher, what reformer, ever conceived an idea so ambitious, so vast? ever undertook to solve so completely, so universally, the moral problem of man's nature and man's destiny?

And this was no chimerical ambition; the mission of Christ has been pursued, and is still being pursued in the world, its onward movement often crossed, interrupted, altered, never hopelessly arrested. And during the first three centuries of Christianity, it was in the name and solely with the arms of Faith and of Liberty, that she commenced her enterprise of vanquishing man and the world. And in these days, after the lapse of nineteen centuries, in spite of the intermixture of error, of crime, and evil, it is with the same arms, and with them alone, that Christianity, in the name of Faith and of Liberty, and exposed to fresh and violent attacks, resumes in the moral world the same task, and promises herself fresh success.

Without attempting, indeed, to sound them to their depths, let me at least indicate the causes of this indomitable vitality of the Christian Religion, and show why the hope is well founded which she entertains in the midst of her trials.

Of the moral philosophers, almost all are either bitter censors, cold observers, or flatterers of human nature. Some of them proclaim that man is naturally good, and that his vices are solely due to the bad institutions of society. Some, again, regard self-interest and self-esteem as the only springs of human actions. Others describe the errors and foibles of man with a careful sagacity, and yet a sagacity that does not indispose them to jeer and mock at them, as if they were actors in a drama, both amused themselves and amusing the spectators. How different the regard and the sentiment of Jesus when contemplating man: how serious that regard! how profound, how pregnant with effect that sentiment! No illusion, no indifference with respect to the nature of man; full, he knows it to be, of evil and at the same time of good; inclined to revolt against the moral law, at the same time that it is not incapable of obeying it; he sees in man the original sin, source of the troubles and of the perils of his soul: he does not regard the evil as incurable; he contemplates it with an emotion at once severe and tender, and he attacks it with a resolution superior to every discouragement, and prepared for every sacrifice. Why should I not simply employ Christian terms, the most genuine of any, as well as the most impressive? Jesus lays bare the sin without reserve, and without reserve devotes himself to the sinner's salvation. What philosopher ever comprehended man so well, and loved him so well, even whilst judging him so freely and so austerely?

Jesus does not occupy himself less with man's futurity than with man's nature. At the same time that he lays down, in all its rigour, the principle of the moral law, the pure accomplishment of duty, he forgets not that man has need of happiness, and thirsts after happiness, after a happiness pure and lasting; he opens to virtue the prospect of its attainment, he holds out a hope, foreign to all worldly objects, hope of an ideal happiness inaccessible to the curiosity of man's mind, but apt to satisfy the aspirations of his soul, and not, as it were, a conquest to be effected by merit, nor the acquittal of a debt, but a recompense to be accorded to the virtuous efforts of man by the equitable benevolence of God. The Christian Religion, at the same time that it compels man during this life to constant and laborious exertion, has in store for him, if only he labour in accordance to the law, "the kingdom of God" and "the promises of eternal life."

Thus, Jesus knows human nature entirely, and satisfies it; he keeps simultaneously in view man's duties and his necessities, his weaknesses and his merits. He does not allow the curtain to fall upon the rude scenes of life, and the sad spectacles of the world, without any dénouement. He has a prospect, and a futurity, and a satisfaction for man, superior to his trials, and superior to his disappointments. In what manner does Jesus attain this result? How does he touch all the chords of man's soul, and respond to all its appeals? By the intimate union of morality with religion, of the moral law with moral responsibility: sole view, complete at once and definitive, of the nature and destiny of humanity; sole efficacious solution of the problems which weigh upon the thought and life of man!

I say the sole efficacious solution. Efficacy is, in truth, the peculiar, the essential characteristic of Christianity. However high-reaching the ambition of philosophy is, it is infinitely less so than that of religion. The ambition of philosophers is purely scientific. They study, observe, discuss; their labours produce systems, schools. The Christian Religion is a practical work, not a scientific study. At the base of its dogmas and of its precepts there is certainly a philosophy, and, in my opinion, the true philosophy; but this philosophy is only the point from which Christianity departs, not its object. The object is to induce the human soul to govern itself according to the divine law; and to attain this object it deals with man's nature as it is, in its entirety, with all its different elements, all its sublime aspirations. There, to borrow the language of strategy, we see the basis of operation of Christianity; the basis upon which it enters upon its moral struggle, and upon which it undertakes to ensure the triumph in man of good over evil, and to procure the salvation of man by his reformation.

When I published, two years ago, the Second Series of these Meditations—the subject of which is the actual state of the Christian Religion—I essayed to characterise therein the fundamental errors of the different philosophical systems which combat it. I sent, according to my custom, the volume to my companion in life, and my confrère at the Institute, M. Cousin, with whom, notwithstanding our differences of opinion, I maintained always very friendly relations. On the 1st June, 1866, he wrote to me from the Sorbonne the following letter:—

"My dear Friend,
"As soon as I received your book I hastened to read it, and I tell you very sincerely that I am very content with it. The little difference between our opinions, which you have not pretended to conceal, are inevitable, because they are the consequence of a general dissimilarity in the manner in which we form our conceptions of the nature of philosophy and of the nature of religion. These two great powers may and ought to be in accord, still they are different. To Religion belongs an influence of an elevated and universal kind; to philosophy an influence more restricted, and still very elevated. The one addresses itself to the entire soul, comprising in it the imagination; the other only addresses itself to the reason. The first sets out from mysteries, without which there is no religion; the second sets out from clear and distinct ideas, as has been said both by Descartes and by Bossuet. This distinction is the foundation of my philosophy and of my religion; and this distinction is also, in my view, the principle of their harmony. To confound them is, I think, an infallible mode of confusing them each by the other, as Malebranche has done. To absorb philosophy in religion gave, in Pascal, the result of a faith full of contradiction and of anguish; to absorb religion in philosophy is an extravagant enterprise, of which sound philosophy must disapprove. To admit them both, each in its place, is truth, grandeur, and peace.

"Hence you perceive the reason of our differences of opinion, which are no more hurtful to our union, than they are to our old and sincere friendship."

I replied to him on the 13th of June:—

"I count, as well as you, my dear friend, upon our dissentiments not being hurtful to our old and sincere friendship; and I feel the more pleasure in so counting, because, independently of our particular and petty dissentiments, there is, as you say, between us a general, a profound difference of opinion. I think, as you do, that philosophy is not to be confounded or absorbed in religion, nor religion in philosophy. I regard them both as free in their manifestations and in their influence; but I do not found their distinction or their accord upon the same grounds as you do. To me, philosophy is but a science, that is the work of man, limited in its sphere and reach, as is man's mind itself. Religion, in its principle and its history, is of divine origin and institution. The one springs from man's avidity of knowledge; the other is the light coming from God, 'which shines upon every man that comes into the world,' and which God continues to maintain and to shed over the world, according to his impenetrable designs, by the act, general or special, of his free will.
"I will not say more. We know, both of us, how far our opinions are in the same road, and where is the point of divergence."

I had left Paris when I received M. Cousin's letter. He was at Cannes when I returned to Paris. We never saw each other afterwards. He has preceded me to that region where light is shed upon the mysteries of this life. But in our last correspondence we had each touched in a few words upon the knot of the whole question. It is this—What are the points of resemblance, and what of difference, between Religion and science, between Christianity and philosophy? Although M. Cousin and I agreed as to the reciprocal rights of these two influences to liberty of action, we entertained different sentiments as to their origin and their nature, and consequently as to the boundaries of their empire, and the character of their mission.

Third Meditation.
Christianity And Science.

It is the faith of Christians, and the point from which Christianity starts, that the Scriptures, which render an account of its origin, its dogmas, and its precepts, are divinely inspired. Not that Christians understand by these words that divine action upon the mind of man so often called inspiration, and of which Cicero said, "No one has ever been a great man without some divine inspiration;" [Footnote 17] and of which Plato was thinking when he said, "It is not by art that they make these noble poems, but because a God is in them, by whom they are possessed. … They do not speak so by art, but by divine power." [Footnote 18]

[Footnote 17: Pro Archià, c. 8.]
[Footnote 18: I have translated the Greek text literally, which M. Cousin has rendered with his accustomed elegance. (Jon., vol. iv. p. 249, et passim.) Note of author.]

The inspiration of the holy book of Christianity is quite a different thing: it is special and supernatural. There is divine inspiration in all the great works of man; these books are a work directly and personally inspired by God: they affirm this themselves. The language used by Jesus in the Gospels incessantly implies it; and, in numerous passages, the epistles of St. Peter and St. Paul, as well as the Acts of the Apostles, declare it positively. [Footnote 19]

[Footnote 19: In his History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age, M. Reuss acknowledges it: "This inspiration," says he, "was regarded as something unlike any other, and reserved to a few individuals chosen by Providence, and only to them upon special and solemn occasions;" and he refers to the different texts of the New Testament which prove his assertion. (Vol. i. p. 411, ed. 1860.)]

This Christian principle of the special and divine inspiration of the Scriptures was not originally taken in so narrow an acceptation as in later times. In the first ages of the Christian era, the Christians of the school of Plato, whilst carefully distinguishing the inspiration of the sacred volumes from the inspiration of the great poets, strove to determine the process common to these two kinds of inspiration, and to explain one by the other—"It is not by any effect of nature nor by any human faculty," says St. Justin, "that it is in the power of men to know things so grand and so divine; it is by the grace which descends from on high upon the saints. They have no need for any art to be revealed to them; pure themselves, they must offer themselves to the action of the divine spirit, in order that the divine bow, descending itself from heaven and making use of the just, in the same way as the musician does of the chords of a harp or lyre, may unfold to us the knowledge of things divine." "I think," says Athenagoras, "that you are not ignorant of Moses, or of Isaiah, or of the other prophets, who, being turned aside from any process of individual reasoning, and moved by the spirit of God, proclaimed aloud that which echoed within them, the holy spirit employing them and attaching itself to them as the player adds to his flute the breath which makes it discourse its music."

Questions soon began to be agitated in Christendom as to which of the religious books in circulation were really inspired, and as to which did not possess this divine characteristic. Hence proceeded disputes in respect to the Apocryphal books, and the formation of the Canon, or collection of the Holy Scriptures. But even in the very books, received by all as divinely inspired, great Christian doctors, not merely Origen, but St. Jerome and St. Augustin, discovered grammatical errors and faults which it was impossible to attribute to divine inspiration; and they distinguished, with greater or less exactness, the inspiration of God from the imperfection of man. St. Jerome points out solecisms in the Epistles of St. Paul; and St. Augustin says, in speaking of St. John, "I venture to say that John perhaps has not spoken of the thing as it really was, but only as it was in his power to speak; for he is a man, and he speaks of God. Inspired, no doubt, by God, but still a man. … When we meet with such diversity of expressions—although not in themselves contradictory—used by the Evangelists, we should regard, in the words of each, only the intent with which the words are pronounced, and not, like wretched cavillers, attach an idea of truth to the external form of the letter; for we must seek the very spirit, not only in all the words, but in everything else which serve as symptoms of the manifestation of the spirit."

It was in the presence and in spite of these discussions, of this explanation and of this free criticism, that the divine inspiration of the Scriptures was nevertheless upheld in the fourth century as the common and positive faith of Christians.

I pass by the twelve following centuries: a long period; full of darkness, but yet with flashes of light; silent yet full of uproar, full of liberty and oppression: period beginning with the invasion of the Barbarians and terminating with the Renaissance; that period in short which, taken together, is called the Middle Age.

I transport myself at once to the sixteenth century, that epoch of political struggles, when men reduced to systems, and reasoned upon, the different elements of moral and social institutions; for they had, ever since the fall of the Roman Empire, been fermenting pell-mell in Europe, which, although so small, was yet destined to conquer and civilize that globe, termed by us the world.

Striving to discover what, after the lapse of so many years and events, had become of the principle of the divine inspiration of the sacred books, that base of the religious faith and rule of Christian societies, I find that this question had received two solutions: one in the name of the Church of Rome, by its representative the Council of Trent; the other in the name of the Protestant churches, by their great founders and teachers. The Council of Trent "receives all the books both of the old and of the new Testament, since the same God is the author of each; surrounds them with the same respect, and with an equally pious reverence;" inserts in its decree the complete catalogue of these books, and "anathematises whoever does not accept as sacred and canonical those books, with all that they contain, just as they are in use in the Catholic Church, and as they exist in the ancient Latin edition known as the Vulgate." [Footnote 20]

[Footnote 20: Le Saint Concile de Trente, translated by the Abbé Chanut, pp. 10—13. Paris, 1686.]

The founders of the great Protestant Churches, although they began to apply the right of historical criticism to both texts and manuscripts, proclaimed nevertheless the absolute and complete inspiration of the holy volumes, in form and sense, narrative, precepts, and words. The Bible, all the Bible, the old, the new Testament, were, according to them, written at God's dictation to serve as the law of Christian Faith.

The Decree of the Council of Trent remains the Rule of the Church of Rome in the nineteenth century as much as it was in the sixteenth century; and in our days a Protestant Divine, justly respected for elevation of thought as much as for the energetic sincerity of his Faith, in maintaining the principle of the complete and divine inspiration, and of the absolute infallibility, of the Bible, has been driven so far as to make this strange assertion: "All the expressions and all the letters of the ten commandments were certainly written by the finger of God, from the Aleph with which they begin, to the Caph with which they end;" a few pages further on he says: "The Decalogue, we repeat, was written entirely by the finger of Jehovah upon the two stone slabs." [Footnote 21]

[Footnote 21: Théopneustie. By M. Gaussen. 2nd ed., 1842, pp. 225, 242.]

"Be on your guard," said Bossuet, "you assign to God arms and hands; unless you strip these expressions of all that savours of humanity, so as to leave nothing of arms and hands but their action and their force, you err. … God does everything by command; he has no lips to move, neither does he strike the air with his tongue to draw forth sounds from it; he has only to will, and his will is accomplished." [Footnote 22]

[Footnote 22: Elévations sur les Mystères, vol. ix. pp. 66-68, 85, 109; and the Sixiéme Avertissement sur les lettres de Jurieu, vol. xxx. pp. 57, 134.]

The empire of circumstances, both in the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, has had much to do with the adoption of these two doctrines, thus conceived and expressed. The Council of Trent, in order to cut short all controversies with the Reformers, took the Scriptures, and the interpretation of the Scriptures, under the guardianship of the supreme and infallible authority of the Church of Rome. The Reformers, in their turn, found their fixed point and a basis, firm in the midst of the movement to which they were giving the impulse, in the infallibility of the Bible, itself divinely inspired. And at the present time, on the one side the Church of Rome in its new dangers, and on the other side the Protestants, sincere in their ardent zeal to awaken that Christian Faith which is languishing, have pushed the two doctrines,—the former of ecclesiastical authority, the latter of biblical infallibility,—to their extremest verge: in my opinion each beyond the limits of right and of truth. History explains errors, it does not justify them. I resume, briefly: those with which I reproach the two doctrines referred to,—they severally infringe, the one the rights of religious liberty, the other those of human science. In both cases they greatly endanger that Christian Religion which they have, in these respects, severally ill understood.

I have already expressed my views upon this subject. [Footnote 23]

[Footnote 23: Meditations on the Essence of Christianity. Sixth Meditation. Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp. 145-146. London, 1864.]

Fervent and learned men maintain "that all, absolutely all, in the Scriptures is divinely inspired—the words as well as the ideas, all the words used upon all subjects—the material of language, as well as the doctrine which lies at its base. In this assertion I see but deplorable confusion, leading to profound misapprehension both of the meaning and the object of the sacred books. It was not God's purpose to give instruction to men in grammar, and if not in grammar neither was it his purpose to give instruction in geology, astronomy, geography, or chronology. It is on their relations with their Creator, upon duties of men towards Him and towards each other, upon the rule of faith and of conduct in life, that God has lighted them by light from heaven. It is to the subject of religion and morals, and to these alone, that the inspiration of the Scriptures is directed."

I have read the Holy Scriptures scrupulously, and over and over again, with a view neither to criticise nor defend, with the sole object of familiarising myself with their character and sense. The more I advanced in this study, the longer I had lived in the Bible, the more did the two facts seem clear to me, the Divine truths and the human faults at once profoundly distinct and in intimate contact. I meet at each step in the Bible with God and with man: God, Being real and personal, to whom nothing happens, in whom nothing changes, Being identical and immovable in the midst of the universal movement, who gives of himself the unparalleled definition, "I am that I am:" on the other side man, Being incomplete, imperfect, variable, full of deficiencies and of contradictions, of sublime instincts and gross desires, of curiosity and ignorance, capable of good and of evil, and perfectible in the midst of his imperfection. What the Bible is incessantly showing us is, God and Man, their points of connection and their contests,—God watching over and acting upon man; man at one time accepting, at another rejecting, God's influence. The divine person and the human person, if the expression is permissible, are in each other's presence, each acting upon the other and upon events. It is the education of man after his Creation: his education as a religious and moral being, nothing less and nothing more. God does not, in thus educating man, change him: he created him intelligent and free: he enlightens him as to the religious and moral law with light from heaven; in other respects he leaves him absorbed in the laborious and perilous exercise of his intelligence and of his liberty as a free agent. At each epoch, in every circumstance, during his continuous action upon man, God takes him as he finds him, with his passions, vices, defects, errors, ignorance; just such a being as he has made himself; nay, every day is making himself, by the good or bad use of his intelligence and of his freedom of action. This is the Biblical account, and the Biblical history of the relations of Man with God.

What a strange contrast, and still what an intimate and powerful connection exists, in this history, between those whom—how shall I dare to permit myself to call the two actors! God does not appear so elevated, so pure, so strange to imperfection, so untroubled by any human nature, so immutable and serene in the plenitude of the divine nature, so really God, in any tradition, invention of poetry, or in any mythology, as he is presented to us in the Bible. On the other hand, in no nation, in no historical narrative or document, does man show himself more violent and ruder, more brutal, more cruel, more prompt to ingratitude, and more rebellious to his God, than he is amongst the Hebrews. Nowhere else, and in no history, is the distance so great between the divine sphere and the human region, between the sovereign and the subject. Still, Israel never entirely separates itself from God; and, in spite of vices and excesses, Israel returns to God, and recognises his law and empire, even whilst incessantly violating them. Nowhere, on the other hand, does God appear, in his turn, so occupied with man, does he at once exact so much from him and yet evince so much sympathy for him: he does not change him suddenly, by any act of his sovereign will; he is a witness to all his imperfections, all his weaknesses, and all his errors; nevertheless, he abandons him not; he holds ever steadily before him the torch of Heavenly Light, and never omits to interest himself in his destiny. The religious and moral idea is ever present and dominant; nowhere else have the business and labour of human science held so small a place in man's thoughts and man's society. God, and the relations of God and man, are the only subjects which fill the Holy volumes.