[Transcriber's note: This production is based on https://archive.org/details/meditationsoness00guiz/page/n6 Additional citations indicated by "USCCB", are based on the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Bible found at http://usccb.org/bible/books-of-the-bible.]

Meditations

Meditations On
The Essence Of Christianity,
And On The Religious Questions Of The Day.

By M. Guizot.

Translated From The French, Under The Superintendence Of The Author.

London:
John Murray, Albemarle Street.
1864.

London:
Bradbury And Evans, Printers, Whitefriars.

Contents.

Preface.

During the last nineteen centuries, Christianity has been often assailed, and has successfully resisted every attack. Of these attacks, some have been more violent, but none more serious than that of which it is, in these days, the object.

For eighteen hundred years Christians were in turn persecutors and persecuted; Christians persecuted as Christians, Christians persecutors of every one who was not Christian—Christians mutually persecuting each other. This persecution varied, it is true, in degree of cruelty with the age and the country, as it also did in the degree of inflexibility evinced and success attained in the prosecution of its object; but whatever the diversity of state, church, or punishment, whatever the degree of severity or laxity in the application of the principle, this principle was ever the same. After having had to endure proscription and martyrdom under the imperial government of Paganism, the Christian religion lived, in its turn, under the guard of the civil law, defended by the arms of secular power.

In these days it exists in the very presence of Liberty. It has to deal with free thought,—with free discussion. It is called upon to defend, to guard itself, to prove incessantly and against every comer its moral and historical veracity, to vindicate its claims upon man's intelligence and man's soul. Roman Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, Christians or philosophers, all, at least in our country, are sheltered from every persecution; for no one without incurring the risk of ridicule could characterise as persecution the sacrifices or the inconveniences to which the expression of his opinion may occasionally subject him. To every man such expression of opinion is permitted, and can never lead to the forfeiture, on the part of any single individual, of any of his political rights or privileges. Religious Liberty—that is to say, the liberty of believing; of believing differently or of disbelieving—may be but imperfectly accepted and guaranteed as a principle in certain states; but it still is evident that it is becoming so every day more and more, and that it will eventually become the Common Law of the civilised world.

One of the circumstances that render this fact pregnant with importance is that it does not stand isolated; but holds its place in the great Intellectual and Social Revolution, which, after the fermentation and the preparation of centuries, has broken out and is in course of accomplishment in our own days. The scientific spirit, the preponderance of the democratic principle, and that of political liberty, are the essential characteristics and invincible tendencies of this revolution. These new forces may fall into enormous errors and commit enormous faults, the penalty for which they will ever dearly pay; still they are definitively installed in modern society; the sciences will continue to develop themselves in its bosom in the full independence of their methods and of their results; the democracy will establish itself in the positions which it has conquered, and on the ground which has been opened to it; political liberty in the midst of its storms and its disappointments will still, sooner or later, cause itself to be accepted as the necessary guarantee for all the acquisitions and all the progress possible in society. These are the grand predominant facts to which all public institutions will now have to adapt themselves, and with which all authority whose action is upon the mind requires to live at peace.

Christianity also must submit to the same tests and trials. As it has surmounted all others, so also will it surmount this; its essence and origin would not be divine did they not permit it to adapt itself to all the different forms of human institutions, to serve them now as a guide, now as a support in their vicissitudes whether of adversity or prosperity. It is, however, of the most serious importance for Christians not to deceive themselves, either as to the nature of the struggle which they will have to sustain, or as to its perils and the legitimate arms which they may use to combat them. The attack directed against the Christian religion is one hotly carried on, now with a brutal fanaticism, now with a dexterous learning; at one time with the appeal to sincere convictions, and at another invoking the worst passions; some contest Christianity as false, others reject it as too exacting and imposing too much restraint; the greater part apprehend it as a tyranny. Injustice and suffering are not so soon forgotten; nor does one readily recover from the effect of terror. The memory of religious persecutions still lives, and this it is that maintains, in multitudes, whose opinions vacillate, aversion, prejudice, and a lively sentiment of alarm. Christians on their side are loth to recognise and accommodate themselves to the new order of society; every moment they are shocked, irritated, terrified by the ideas and language to which that society gives utterance. Men do not so readily pass from a state of privilege to one of community of rights—from a state of dominion to one of liberty; they do not resign themselves without a struggle to the audacious obstinacy of contradiction, to the daily necessity of resisting and conquering. Government according to principles of liberty is still more influenced by passion, and entails a necessity of still more exertion in the sphere of religion than of civil politics: believers find it still more difficult to support incredulity than governments to bear with oppositions; and, nevertheless, these themselves are forced to do so, and can only find in free discussion and in the full exercise of their peculiar liberties the force which they require to rise above their perilous condition, and reduce—not to silence, for that is impossible, but to an idle warfare—their inveterate enemies.

To leave that civil society, in which the different sects of religion are now-a-days compelled to live in peace and side by side, and to enter religious society itself, the Christian Church of our days:—what is its actual position with respect to these grand questions which it has to discuss with the spirit of human liberty and audacity? Does it comprehend properly, does it suitably carry on the warfare in which it is engaged? Does it tend in its proceedings to a re-establishment of a real peace, and active harmonious relations between itself and that general society in the midst of which it is living?

I say Christian Church. It is, in effect, the whole Church of Christ, and not such or such a church that is in these days attacked, and vitally attacked. When men deny the Supernatural World, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and the Divinity of Jesus Christ, they really assail the whole body of Christians—Romanists, Protestants or Greeks: they are virtually destroying the foundations of faith in all the belief of Christians, what ever their particular difference of religious opinion or forms of ecclesiastical government.. It is by faith that all Christian Churches live; there is no form of government, monarchical or republican, concentrated or diffused, that suffices to maintain a church; there is no authority so strong, no liberty so broad, as to be able in a religious society to dispense with the necessity of faith. For what is it that unites in a church if it is not faith? Faith is the bond of souls. When then the foundations of their common faith are attacked, the differences existing between Christian Churches upon special questions, or the diversities of their organization or government, become secondary interests; it is from a common peril that they have to defend themselves; or they must reconcile themselves to see dried up the common source from which they all derive sustenance and life.

I fear that the sentiment of this common peril is not, in all the Christian Churches, as clear and well defined, as deep and predominant, as their common safety requires. In presence of similar questions everywhere varied, of identical attacks everywhere directed against the vital facts and dogmas of Christianity, I dread Christians of the different communions not concentrating all their forces upon the mighty struggles in which they are, all, to engage. My dread, however, is unattended by astonishment. Although the danger is the same for all, the traditional opinions and habits, and consequently the actual dispositions, are very different. Many Romanists feel the persuasion that Faith would be saved were they only delivered from liberty of thought. Many Protestants believe that they are but employing their right of free examination, and do not lose their title to be regarded as Christians, when they are in effect abandoning the foundations and withdrawing from the source of Faith. Roman Catholicism has not sufficient reliance on its roots, and respects too much its branches; no tree exists that does not need culture and clearing in accordance with climate and season, if it is to be expected to continue to bear always good fruit; but the roots should be especially defended from every attack. Protestantism is too forgetful that it also has roots from which it cannot be separated without perishing, and that religion is not what an annual is in vegetation: a plant that men cultivate and renew at their pleasure. Whilst the Romanists dread freedom of thought too much, the Protestants on their side have too great a fear of authority. Some believe that inasmuch as religious Faith has firm and fixed points, movement and progress are incompatible with religious society; others affirm that a religious society can never have fixed points, and that religion consists in religious sentiment and individual belief. What would have become of Christianity, had it from its birth been condemned to the immobility which the former recommend; and what would become of it at the present day, were it surrendered, as the latter would have it, to the caprice of every mind, and the wind of every day?

Happily, God permits not that, at this crisis, the true principles and the true interests of the Christian Religion should remain without sufficient defenders. Romanists there are who understand their age and the new constitution of society, who accept frankly its liberty, religious and politic: it is precisely they who have most boldly testified their attachment to the faith of Rome, who have claimed with most ardor the essential liberties of their church, and defended with most energy the rights of its chief. Nor are Protestants wanting who have used with the most untiring zeal all the liberty acquired in our days by Protestantism; they have founded all those associations and originated all those undertakings which have manifested the vital energy and extended the action of the Protestant Church; they have demanded and they continue to demand, for this church, the reestablishment of its Synods, that is to say, its religious autonomy. Amongst these Protestants, where men have appeared who have not found in the Protestant Church as by law established the entire satisfaction of their convictions, they have felt no hesitation to separate from it and to found, with their own means alone, independent churches. It may be affirmed also of the Protestants that they have most largely put in practice all the rights and all the liberties of Protestantism, in the internal ordeal through which Christianity is at present passing; it is precisely they who assert most loudly the dogmas of the Christian Faith and maintain most inflexibly the authoritative rights established by law in the bosom of their church. The Liberal Romanists of the present day are the most zealous defenders of the fundamental traditions and institutions of Catholicism. The Protestants who have been the most active during the last half-century in the exercise of the liberties of Protestantism are the firmest maintainers of its doctrines and of its vital rules.

Humanly speaking, it is upon the influence exercised and to be exercised in their respective churches and on the public, by these two classes of Christians, that depends the peaceable issue of the crisis through which Christianity is in these days passing. Our society is, doubtless, far from meriting the title of a Christian one; still it cannot be characterised as anti-Christian; considered as one vast whole, it has no hostile or general prejudice against the Christian religion: it maintains the habits, the instincts, I would willingly add the longings, of Christians; it is conscious that Christian Faith and Ordinance serve powerfully its interests with respect to order and peace; the fanatical opponents of Christianity exercise upon it far more disquieting than seductive influences, for it has already had experience of their empire; and where society appears to offer a silent acquiescence or even to pride itself upon them, still at bottom it dreads their progress.

Such being the state of the case, and such the constitution of society, how are we to draw men away from their apathy and their ignorance in matters of religion? How lead them back to Christianity? They alone can accomplish this object, who, in their defence and propagation of the religion of Jesus, shall not wound society itself in the ideas, sentiments, rights and interests which have at present rooted themselves in its very life and energies. Like religion, modern society has also its fixed points and its invincible tendencies: it can never be set on terms of harmony with the former unless by the concurring action of men who have with each of them a genuine and deep sentiment of sympathy. Since the Christian Religion lives in these times confronting civil liberty, those alone can be efficient champions of religion who at the same time profess fully the Christian Faith and accept with sincerity the tests of Liberty.

But in pursuing their pious and salutary enterprise, let not these liberal Christians flatter themselves with the probability of any prompt or complete success: maintain and propagate the Christian faith they may, but they will never be able in the bosom of society to get rid either of incredulity or doubt; even while combating them they must learn to endure their presence; in institutions of freedom there is essentially an intermixture of good and evil, of truth and error; contrary ideas and dispositions produce and develop themselves in it simultaneously. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not," said Jesus to his apostles, "to send peace, but a sword." [Footnote 1] The sword of Jesus Christ, that is, Christianity, at war with human error and shortcomings; a victory, still a victory ever incomplete in an incessant struggle,—that is the condition to which those must submit with resignation who, in the bosom of liberty, defend the truth of Christianity.

[Footnote 1: Matthew x. 34.]

Were these valiant and intelligent champions of the faith of Jesus not adopted and accredited as such in the churches to which they belong; did the Church of Rome furnish ground for thinking her essentially hostile to the fundamental principles and rights of modern society, and that she only tolerates them as Moses tolerated divorce amongst the Jews, "because of the hardness of their heart"; and, on the other hand, did the rejectors of the Supernatural, of the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and of the Divinity of Jesus Christ, predominate in the bosom of Protestantism; and finally, did the latter then become nought but a hesitating system of philosophy; if all these deplorable things were to be realised, I am far from thinking that, owing to such faults, such disasters, the religion of Christ would vanish from the world and definitively withdraw from men its light and its support: the destinies of religion are far above human errors; but still, beyond all doubt, for mankind to be turned back from them, and for the light to return to their soul and harmony to modern society, there would have again to burst out in the human soul and in society one of those immense troubles, one of those revolutionary whirlwinds, whose evils man is compelled actually to undergo before he can derive benefit from its lessons.

On the point of addressing myself to questions more profound and of a less transitory nature, I content myself with having merely indicated what I think of the crisis that agitates Christendom at the present day, as also of its main cause, its perils, and the chances, good or bad, that it holds out for the future. In the work of which the first part is now before the public, I omit all the circumstantial facts and details as well as the discussions that grow out of them, and it is only with the Christian Religion as it is in itself, with its fundamental belief and its reasonableness, that I occupy myself; it has been my purpose to illustrate the truth of Christianity by contrasting it with the systems and the doubts that men set in array against it. It is my intention to avoid all direct and personal polemics; express reference to individuals embarrasses and envenoms all questions in controversy, and gives rise to ill-judged deference or unjust invective, two descriptions of falsity for which alike I feel no sympathy: let me have then for adversaries ideas alone; and whatever these may be, I admit beforehand the possibility of sincerity on the part of those that prefer them. Without this admission all serious discussion is out of the question; and neither the intellectual enormity of the error, nor its awful practical consequences, positively precludes sincerity on the part of him that promulgates it. The mind of man is still more easily led astray than his heart, and is still more egotistical; after having once conceived and expressed an idea, it attaches itself to it as to its own offspring, takes a pride in imprisoning itself in it, as if it were so taking possession of the pure and entire truth.

These Meditations will be divided into four series. In the first, which forms this volume, I explain and establish what constitutes, in my opinion, the essence of the Christian religion; that is to say, what those natural problems are, that correspond with the fundamental dogmas that offer their solution, the supernatural facts upon which these same dogmas repose—Creation, Revelation, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, God according to the Biblical account, and Jesus according to the Gospel narrative. Next to the Essence of the Christian religion comes its history; and this will be the subject of a second series of Meditations, in which I shall examine the authenticity of the Scriptures, the primary causes of the foundation of Christianity, Christian Faith, as it has always existed throughout its different ages and in spite of all its vicissitudes; the great religious crisis in the sixteenth century which divided the Church and Europe between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism; finally those different anti-Christian crises, which at different epochs and in different countries have set in question and imperilled Christianity itself, but which dangers it has ever surmounted. The third Meditation will be consecrated to the study of the actual state of the Christian religion, its internal and external condition: I shall retrace the regeneration of Christianity which occurred amongst us at the commencement of the nineteenth century, both in the Church of Rome and in the Protestant churches; the impulse imparted to it at the same epoch by the Spiritualistic Philosophy that then began again to flourish, and the movement in the contrary direction which showed itself very remarkably soon afterwards in the resurrection of Materialism, of Pantheism, of Scepticism, and in works of historical criticism. I shall attempt to determine the idea, and consequently, in my opinion, the fundamental error of these different systems, the avowed and active enemies of Christianity. Finally, in the fourth series of these Meditations I shall endeavour to discriminate and to characterise the future destiny of the Christian religion, and to indicate by what course it is called upon to conquer completely and to sway morally this little corner of the universe termed by us our earth, in which unfold themselves the designs and power of God, just as, doubtless, they do in an infinity of worlds unknown to us.

I have passed thirty-five years of my life in struggling, on a bustling arena, for the establishment of political liberty and the maintenance of order as established by law. I have learnt, in the labours and trials of this struggle, the real worth of Christian Faith and of Christian Liberty. God permits me, in the repose of my retreat, to consecrate to their cause what remains to me of life and of strength. It is the most salutary favour and the greatest honour that I can receive from His goodness.

Guizot.
Val-Richer, June, 1864.

Meditations
On The Essence Of
The Christian Religion.

First Meditation.
Natural Problems.

From the very origin of the human race, wherever man has existed, or still exists, certain questions have peculiarly and irresistibly fixed his attention, and they continue to do so at the present hour. This arises not alone from a feeling of natural curiosity, or the ardent thirst for knowledge, but from a deeper and more powerful motive: the destiny of man is intimately involved in these questions; they contain the secret not only of all that he sees around him, but of his own being; and when he aspires to solve them, it is not merely because he desires to understand the spectacle of which he is a beholder, but because he feels, and is conscious of being himself an actor in the great drama of existence, and because he seeks to ascertain his own part there, and comprehend his own destiny. His present conduct and his future lot are as much at issue as the satisfaction of his thought. These great problems are, for man, not questions of science, but questions of life: in considering them he feels himself compelled to say, with Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that is the question."

Whence does the world proceed, and whence does man appear in the midst of it? What is the origin of each, and whither does each tend? What are their beginning and their end? Laws there are which govern them;—is there a legislator? Under the empire of these laws, man feels and calls himself free: is he so in reality? How is his liberty compatible with the laws which govern him and the world? Is he a passive instrument of fate, or a responsible agent? What are the ties and relations which connect him with the Legislator of the world?

The world and man himself present a strange and painful spectacle. Good and evil, both moral and physical, order and disorder, joy and sorrow, are here intimately blended and yet in continual antagonism. Whence come this commingling and this strife? Is good or is evil the condition and the law of man and of the world? If good, how then has evil found admission? Wherefore suffering and death? Why this moral disorder?—the calamities which so frequently befall the good, and the prosperity, so abhorrent to our feelings, which attends the wicked? Is this the normal and definitive state of man and of the world?

Man is conscious that he is at the same time great and little, strong and feeble, powerful and impotent. He finds in himself matter for admiration and for love, and yet he suffices not to himself in any respect; he seeks an aid, a support, beyond and above himself: he asks, he invokes, he prays. What mean these inward disquietudes,—these alternate impulses of pride and weakness? Have they, or not, a meaning and an object? Why prayer?

Such are the natural problems, now dimly felt, now clearly defined, which in all ages and among all nations, in every form and in every degree of civilization, by instinct or by reflexion, have arisen, and still arise, in the human mind. I indicate only the greatest, the most apparent: I might recall many others which are connected with them.

Not only are these problems natural to man; they appertain to him alone; they are his peculiar privilege. Man alone, among all creatures known to us, perceives and states them, and feels himself imperiously called upon to solve them. I borrow the following admirable observations from M. de Châteaubriand:—"Why does not the ox as I do? It can lie down upon the grass, raise its head toward heaven, and in its lowings call upon that unknown Being who fills this immensity of space. But no: content with the turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not those suns in the firmament above, which are the grand evidence of the existence of God. Animals are not troubled with those hopes which fill the heart of man; the spot on which they tread yields them all the happiness of which they are susceptible; a little grass satisfies the sheep; a little blood gluts the tiger. The only creature that looks beyond himself, and is not all in all to himself, is man." [Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: Genie du Christianisme, vol. i. p. 208, edit, of 1831.]

From these problems, natural and peculiar to man, all religions have sprung. The object of them all is to satisfy man's thirst for their solution. As these problems are the source of religion, the solutions they receive are its substance and foundation. There prevails in our days a very general tendency to regard religion as consisting essentially—I might say wholly—in religious sentiment, in those lofty and vague aspirations which are termed the poetry of the soul, beyond and above the realities of life. Through the religious sentiment, the soul enters into relation with the Divine order of things; and this relation, of a wholly personal and intimate character, independent of all positive dogma, of any organized Church, is deemed to be all-sufficient for man, the true and needful religion.

Unquestionably the religious sentiment, the intimate and personal relation of the soul with the Divine order, is essential and necessary to religion; but religion is more than this—much more. The human soul is not to be divided and restricted to certain faculties selected and exalted, whilst the rest are condemned to slumber. Man is not a mere sensitive and poetic being, aspiring to rise above the present and material world by love and imagination: he not only feels, but he thinks; he requires to know and believe as well as love; it is not enough that his soul should be capable of emotion and aspiration; he requires that it should be fixed, and rest upon convictions in harmony with his emotions. This it is that man seeks in religion; he requires something more than a pure and noble rapture; he requires enlightenment, as well as sympathy. But if the moral problems that beset his thought are not solved, what he experiences may be poetry,—it is not religion.

I cannot contemplate unmoved the troubles of men of lofty minds, seeking in the religious sentiment alone a refuge against doubt and impiety. It is well to preserve, in the shipwreck of faith and the chaos of thought, the great instincts of our nature, and not to lose sight of the sublime requirements which remain unsatisfied. I know not to what extent, men of eminent minds may thus compensate, by their sincerity and fervour of sentiment, for the void in their belief; but let them not deceive themselves; barren aspirations and specious doubts satisfy a man as little as to his future spiritual interests as with respect to his condition in the present life; the natural problems to which I have alluded will ever be the great weight pressing upon the soul, and religious sentiment will never alone suffice to be the religion of mankind.

Besides this apotheosis of religious sentiment, some at the present day have essayed a different, a more serious and more daring theory. Far from sounding the natural problems to which religions correspond, schools of philosophy, occupying a prominent intellectual position,—the Pantheistic School, and the so-called Positive School,—suppress and deny them altogether. In their view, the world has existed, of itself, from all eternity, as have the laws also by which it is sustained and developed. In their elementary principles, and taken altogether, all things have ever been what they now are, and what they will ever continue to be. There is no mystery in this universe; there exist only facts and laws, naturally and necessarily linked together; and these furnish the field for human science, which, although incomplete, is yet indefinitely progressive, in its power as well as in its operations.

According to these views, Divine Providence and human liberty, the origin of evil, the commingling and the strife of good and evil in the world, and in man, the imperfection of the present order of things, and the destiny of man, the prospect of the re-establishment of order in the future—these are all mere dreams, freaks of man's thought: no such questions indeed exist, inasmuch as the world is eternal, it is in its actual state complete, normal, and definitive, though at the same time progressive. The remedy for the moral and physical evils which afflict mankind, must then be sought, not in any power superior to the world, but simply in the progress of the sciences and the advance of human enlightenment.

I shall not here discuss this system; I do not even qualify it by its true name; I merely recapitulate its tenets. But, at the first and simple aspect, what contempt does it manifest of the spontaneous and universal instincts of man! What heedlessness of the facts which fill and never cease to characterize the universal history of the human race!

Nevertheless to this we are come: not a solution, but the negation of the natural problems, which irresistibly occupy the human soul, is presented to man for his full satisfaction and repose. Let him follow the mathematical or physical sciences; let him be a mechanician, chemist, critic, novelist, or poet; but let him not enter upon what is termed the sphere of religious and theological inquiry: here are no real questions to solve, nought to investigate, nothing to do,—nothing to expect,—absolutely nothing.

Second Meditation.
Christian Dogmas.

The Christian religion knows man better, and treats man better: it has other answers to his questions; and it is between the absolute negation of the problems of religion and the Christian solution of these problems that the discussion lies at the present day.

Some words there are which we now regard with distrust and alarm: we suspect their masking illegitimate pretensions and tyranny. Such, in our days, has been the lot of the word dogma. To many this word imparts an imperious necessity to believe, at once offending and disquieting. Singular contrast! On all sides we seek for principles, and we take alarm at dogmas.

This sentiment, however absurd in itself, is in no way strange; Christian dogmas have served as motive and pretext for so much iniquity, so many acts of oppression and cruelty, that their very name has become tainted and suspected. The word bears the penalty of the reminiscences which it awakens: and justly. All attacks upon the liberty of conscience, all employment of force to extirpate or to impose religious belief, is, and ever has been, an iniquitous and tyrannical act. All powers, all parties, all churches, have held such acts to be not only permissible, but enjoined by the Divine Law: all have deemed it not merely their right, but their duty, to prevent and to punish by law and human force, error in matters of religion. They may all allege in excuse, the sincerity of their belief in the legitimacy of this usurpation. The usurpation is not the less enormous and fatal, and perhaps indeed it is, of all human usurpations, the one which has inflicted on men the most odious torments and the grossest errors. It will constitute the glory of our time to have discarded this pretension: nevertheless it yet exists, with persistency, in certain states, in certain laws, in certain recesses of the human soul and of Christian society; and there is, and ever will be, need to watch and to combat it, to render its banishment unconditional and without appeal. Subdued, however, it is: civil freedom in matters of faith and religious life has become a fundamental principle of civilization and of law. These questions, affecting the relations of man to God, are no longer discussed or adjusted in the arena and by a recourse to the hand of political and executive power; but they are transported to the sphere of the intellect and left to the uncontrolled working of the mind itself.

But again, in this sphere of the intellect, these questions still start up and call loudly for their peculiar solution—that is, for the fundamental facts and ideas, the principles in effect which their nature requires. The Christian religion has its own principles, which constitute the rational basis of the faith it inculcates and the life which it enjoins. These are termed its dogmas. The Christian dogmas are the principles of the Christian religion, and the Christian solutions of the problems of natural religion.

Let men of a serious mind, who have not entirely rejected the Christian religion, and who still admire it, whilst denying its fundamental dogmas, beware of this: the flowers whose perfume captivates them will quickly fade, the fruits they delight in will soon cease to grow when the axe shall have been applied to the roots of the tree that bears them.

For myself, arrived at the term of a long life, one of labour, of reflection, and of trials,—of trials in thought as well as in action,—I am convinced that, the Christian dogmas are the legitimate and satisfactory solutions of those religious problems which, as I have said, nature suggests and man carries in his own breast, and from which he cannot escape.

I beg, at the outset, Theologians, whether Catholic or Protestant, to pardon me. I have no design to cite or to explain, or to maintain, all the various doctrinal points, all the articles of faith, which have been included in the term of Christian dogmas. During eighteen centuries, Christian theology has very often ventured to advance out of and beyond the limits of the Christian religion: man has confounded his own labours with the work of God. It is the natural consequence of the union of human activity and human imperfection. This same result may be traced throughout the history of the world, especially in the history of the society and religion upon which God has grafted the Christian religion.

At the time when God raised up Jesus Christ among the Jews, the faith and the law of the Jews were no longer solely and purely the faith and law which God had given to them by Moses: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and many others, had essentially modified, enlarged, and altered both. Christianity too has had its Pharisees and its Sadducees; in its turn it has been made to feel the workings of human thought and the influence of human passions on its Divine revelation. I cannot recognize, in all the uncertain fruits of these labours, the claim to the title of Christian dogmas. Nevertheless I have no intention here to specify particularly and to combat such tenets in the Church and in Christian theology, as I can neither accept nor defend. It is not for me—and I venture to say, it is not for any Christian—to scan critically the interior of the Edifice, at a moment when its foundations are ardently attacked. Far rather I prefer to rally in a common defence all who abide within its walls. I shall here allude only to the dogmas common to them all, which I sum up in these terms:—The Creation, Providence, Original Sin, the Incarnation, and the Redemption. These constitute the essence of the Christian religion, and all who believe in these dogmas I hold to be Christians.

One leading and common characteristic in these dogmas strikes me at the outset: they deal frankly with the religious problems natural to and inherent in man, and offer at once the solution. The dogma of Creation attests the existence of God, as Creator and Legislator, and it attests also the link which unites man with God. The dogma of Providence explains and justifies prayer, that instinctive recourse of man to the living God, to that supreme Power which is ever present with him in life, and which influences his destiny. The dogma of Original Sin accounts for the presence of evil and disorder in mankind and in the world. The dogmas of the Incarnation and of Redemption, rescue man from the consequences of evil, and open to him a prospect in another life of the re-establishment of order. Unquestionably, the system is grand, complete, well connected, and forcible: it answers to the requirements of the human soul, removes the burden which oppresses it, imparts the strength which it needs, and the satisfaction to which it aspires. Has it a rightful claim to all this power? Is its influence legitimate, as well as efficacious?

In my own mind I have borne the burthen of the objections to the Christian system, and to each of its essential dogmas; I have experienced the anxieties of doubt: I shall state how I have escaped from doubt, and the ground upon which my convictions have been founded.

I. Creation.

The only serious opponents of the dogma of the Creation are those who maintain that the universe, the earth, the man upon the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, in the state in which they now are. No one however can hold this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many ages man has existed on the earth, is a question that has been largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry in no way affects the dogma of the Creation itself: it is a certain and recognized fact, that man has not always existed on the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man therefore had a beginning: man has come upon the earth. How has he come there?

Here the opponents of the dogma of Creation are divided: some uphold the theory of spontaneous generation; others, the transformation of species. According to one party, matter possesses, under certain circumstances and by the simple development of its own proper power, the faculty of creating animated beings. According to others, the different species of animated beings which still exist, or have existed at various epochs and in the different conditions of the earth, are derived from a small number of primitive types, which have possessed, through the lapse of millions and thousands of millions of ages, the power of developing and perfecting themselves, so as to gain admission, through transformation, into higher species. Hence they conclude, with more or less hesitation, that the human race is the result of a transformation, or a series of transformations.

The attempt to establish the theory of spontaneous production dates from a remote period. Science has ever baffled it: the more its observations have been exact and profound, the more have they refuted the hypothesis of the innate creative power of matter. This result has been again recently established by the attentive examination of men of eminent scientific attainments, within and without the walls of the Academy of Sciences. But were it even otherwise,—could the advocates of the theory of spontaneous production refer to experiments hitherto irrefutable, these would furnish no better explanation of the first appearance of man upon earth, and I should retain my right to repeat here what I have advanced elsewhere on this subject:[Footnote 3]—

[Footnote 3: L'Eglise et la Société Chrétienne en 1861, p. 27.]

"Such a mode of generation cannot, nor ever could, produce any but infant beings, in the first hour and in the first state of incipient life. It has, I believe, never been asserted, nor will any person ever affirm, that, by spontaneous generation, man— that is to say, man and woman, the human couple—can have issued, or that they have issued at any period, from matter, of full form and stature, in possession of all their powers and faculties, as Greek paganism represented Minerva issuing from the brain of Jupiter. Yet it is only upon this supposition, that man, appearing for the first time upon earth, could have lived there to perpetuate his species and to found the human race. Let any one picture to himself the first man, born in a state of the earliest infancy, alive but inert, devoid of intelligence, powerless, incapable of satisfying his own wants even for a moment, trembling, sobbing, with no mother to listen to or feed him! And yet we have in this a picture of the first man, as presented by the system of spontaneous generation. It is manifestly not thus that the human race first appeared upon earth."

The system of the transformation of species is no less refuted by science than by the instincts of common sense. It rests upon no tangible fact, on no principle of scientific observation or historic tradition. All the facts ascertained, all the monuments collected in different ages and different places, respecting the existence of living species, disprove the hypothesis of their having undergone any transformation, any notable and permanent change: we meet with them a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years ago, the same as they are at the present day. In the same species the races may vary and undergo mutual changes: the species do not change; and all attempts to transform them artificially, by crossings with allied species, have only resulted in modifications, which, after two or three generations, have been struck with barrenness, as if to attest the impotence of man to effect, by the progressive transformation of existing species, a creation of new species. Man is not an ape transformed and perfected by some dim imperceptible fermentation of the elements of nature and by the operation of ages: this assumed explanation of the origin of the human species is a mere vague hypothesis, the fruit of an imagination ill comprehending the spectacle that nature presents, and therefore easily seduced to form ingenious conjectures: these their authors sow in the stream of events unknown and of time infinite, and trust to them for the realization of their dreams. The principle of the fundamental diversity and the permanence of species—firmly upheld by M. Cuvier, M. Flourens, M. Coste, M. Quatrefages, and by all exact observers of facts—remains dominant in science as in reality. [Footnote 4]

[Footnote 4: Cuvier—Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe, pp. 117, 120, 124 (edit. 1825); Flourens—Ontologie Naturelle, pp. 10-87 (1861); Journal des Savants (October, November, and December, 1863); three articles on the work of Ch. Darwin, On the Origin of Species and the Laws of Progress among Organised Beings; Coste—Histoire Générale et Particulière du Développement des Corps Organisés; Discours Préliminaire, vol. i. p. 23; Quatrefages—Metamorphoses de l'Homme et des Animaux, p. 225 (1862); and his articles On the Unity of the Human Species, published in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," in 1860 and 1861, and collected in one volume (1861).]

Besides these vain attempts to supersede God the Creator, and to explain by the inherent and progressive power of matter, the origin of man and of the world, the Christian dogma of Creation has yet other adversaries. One party, to combat it, seizes its arms from the Bible itself, alleging the account there given of the successive facts of the creation, of which the world and man were the result; they cite and enumerate the difficulties of reconciling this account with the observations and the conclusions of science. I shall weigh the force of this class of objections in treating of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, of their real object and true meaning; but I at once raise the dogma of Creation above this attack,—placing it at its proper height and isolation: it is the general fact, it is the very principle of creation which constitutes the dogma; what ever may be the obscurities or the scientific difficulties presented by the biblical narrative, the principle and the general fact of the Creation remain unaffected: God the Creator does not the less remain in possession of His work. The Christian religion, in its essence, asserts and demands nothing more.

But lastly, the Christian dogma of Creation is met by the general objection raised against all the facts and all the acts which are termed supernatural: that is to say, against the existence of God as well as the dogma of Creation, against all religions in common with Christianity. Such a question requires to be considered, not with reference to any particular dogma, or with a view to defend one side only of the edifice of Christianity. This point, then, I shall presently examine frankly and in all its bearings.

II. Providence.

God the Creator is also God the Preserver. He lives, and is at the same time the source of life. The union between Him and his creature does not cease when the creature is brought into existence. The dogma of Providence is consequent upon that of Creation.

Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the desires or sorrows of the soul, seeking that satisfaction, strength, or consolation which it does not find within itself; it is the expression of a faith, instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear, wavering or steadfast, in the existence, the presence, the power, and the sympathy of the Being to whom prayer is addressed. Without a certain measure of faith and trust in God, prayer would not burst forth, or would suddenly be dried up in the soul. If faith everywhere resists, and everywhere outlives all the denials, all the doubts, and all the darkness which oppress mankind, it is that man bears within himself an imperishable consciousness of the enduring bond which connects him with God, and God with him.

Far from destroying this sentiment, experience and the spectacle of life explain and confirm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man recognises in it three different sources, and divides, so to say, into three classes the facts which make up the whole. He is conscious of being subject to events which are the consequence of laws, general, permanent, and independent of his will, but which by his intelligence he observes and comprehends. By the act of his free will he also himself creates events, of which he knows himself to be author, and these have their own consequences and enter too into the tissue of his life. Lastly, he passes through events, in his view, neither the result of those general laws from which nothing can withdraw him, nor the act of his own liberty,—events of which he perceives neither the cause, the reason, nor the author.

Man attributes this last class of events sometimes to a blind cause, which he terms chance; at another, to an intelligent and supreme intention which is in God. His mind at times revolts at the inanity of this word chance, which explains and defines nothing; and he then pictures to himself a mysterious, impenetrable power, a merely necessary chain of unknown facts, to which he gives the name of fatality, destiny. To account for this obscure and accidental part of human life, which originates neither from any general and conceivable laws, nor from the free will of man himself, we must choose between fatality and Providence, chance and God.

I express my meaning without hesitation. Who ever accepts as a satisfactory explanation the theory of fatality and chance, does not truly believe in God. Whoever believes truly in God, relies upon Providence. God is not an expedient, invented to explain the first link in the chain of causation, an actor called to open by creation the drama of the world, then to relapse into a state of inert uselessness. By the very fact of his existence, God is present with his work, and sustains it. Providence is the natural and necessary development of God's existence; his constant presence and permanent action in creation. The universal and insuperable instinct which leads man to prayer, is in harmony with this great fact; he who believes in God cannot but have recourse to Him and pray to Him.

Objections are raised to the name itself of God. He acts, it is said, only by general and permanent laws: how can we implore His interference in favour of our special and exceptional desires? He is immutable, ever perfect, and ever the same: how is it conceivable that He lends Himself to the fickleness of human sentiments and wishes? The prayer which ascends to Him is forgetful of his real nature. Men have treated the attributes of God as furnishing an objection to his Providence.

This objection, so often repeated, never fails to astonish me. The majority of those who urge it, assert at the same time that God is incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate the secret of his nature. What then is this but to pretend to comprehend God? and by what right do they oppose his nature to his providence, if his nature is, to us, an impenetrable mystery? I refrain from reproaching them for their ambition; ambition is the privilege and the glory of man; but in retaining it, let them not overlook its legitimate limits. There is only this alternative: either man must cease to believe in God, because he cannot comprehend Him, or in effect admit his incomprehensibility, and still at the same time believe in Him. He cannot pass and repass incessantly from one system to the other, now declaring God to be incomprehensible; now speaking of Him, of his nature and his attributes, as if He were within the province of human science. Great as is the question of Providence, the one I have here to consider is still greater, for it is the question of the very existence of God; and the fundamental inquiry is to know whether He exists, or does not exist. God is at once light and mystery: in intimate relation with man, and yet beyond the limits of his knowledge. I shall presently endeavour to mark the limit at which human knowledge stops, and indicate its proper sphere; but this I at once assume as certain: whoever, believing in God and speaking of Him as incomprehensible, yet persists in endeavouring to define Him scientifically, and seeks to penetrate the mystery, which he has yet admitted, is in great risk of destroying his own belief, and of setting God aside, which is one way of denying Him.

But I leave for a moment these two simultaneous propositions, namely, the impossibility of comprehending God, and the necessity of believing in Him; and I proceed at once to that objection to the special providence of God which is drawn from the general character of the laws of nature. This objection results from confounding very different things, and overlooking a fundamental one,—the fact characteristic indeed of human nature. It is true that the providence of God presides over the order of the world which He governs by general and permanent laws: these laws would be more accurately designated by another name; they are the Will of God, continually acting upon the world, for not only the laws but the Lawgiver are there ever present. But when God created man, He created him different from the physical world; free, and a moral agent; and hence there is a fundamental difference between the action of God on the physical world, and his action on man. I shall subsequently state my opinion as to the full meaning of the expression, "Man is a free being," and as to the nature of the consequences to which it leads; for the present, I assume, as a certain and incontestable fact, this principle of human liberty,—of the free determination of man considered as a moral agent. Admitting this, it cannot be said that God governs mankind at large by general and permanent laws; for what would this be but to ignore or annul the liberty granted to man, that is to say, to misconceive and mutilate the Work of God himself. Man exercises a free determination, and in his own life actually gives birth to events which are not the result of any general and external laws. Divine Providence watches the operations of man's volition, and records the manner in which it has been exercised. It does not treat man as it deals with the stars in heaven and the waves of the ocean, which have neither thought nor will; with man it has other relations than with nature, and employs a different mode of action.

There is little wisdom in instituting comparisons between objects or facts not essentially analogous; and the idea of God has been so often disfigured by representing Him in the image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of any analogies borrowed from humanity to convey a conception of God. I cannot, however, overlook the fact, that God has created man in his own image, nor can I absolutely refrain from seeking, in nature or the life of man, some type to shadow forth the features of God. Let us consider the human family: the father and mother assist in directing the active development of the child; they watch over it with authority and tenderness; they control its liberty without annulling it, and they listen to its little prayers—now granting them, now refusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a view to the child's main and future interests. The child, without thought or design, by the spontaneous instinct of its nature, recognizes the authority and feels the tenderness of its parents; as it advances in age, it sometimes obeys and sometimes resists their injunctions, using or misusing its natural liberty; but in all the fickleness of its will, it asks, it entreats, full of confidence—joyous and thankful when it obtains from its parents what it desires; yet, when denied, still ready again to ask and to entreat with the same confidence as before.

This is what takes place in the government of the human family when ruled according to the dictates of nature and right. An image we have here, imperfect but still true—a shadowing-forth, faint yet faithful—of Divine Providence. Thus it is that the Christian religion qualifies and describes the action of God in the life of man. It exhibits God as ever present and accessible to man, as a father to his child; it exhorts, encourages, invites man to implore, to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves absolutely the answer of God to that prayer; He will grant, or He will refuse: we cannot penetrate his motives—"The ways of God are not our ways." Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless and ever renewed, the Christian dogma associates the firm hope that "nothing is impossible with God." This dogma is thus in full and intimate harmony with the nature of man; whilst recognizing his liberty, it does homage to his dignity; in tendering to him the resource of an appeal to God it provides for his weakness. In science, it suppresses not the mystery which cannot be suppressed; but, in man's life, it solves the natural problem which weighs upon the soul.

III. Original Sin.

The dogmas of Creation and Providence bring us into the presence of God; it is the action of God upon the world and man that they proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Original Sin brings us back to man; it is the act of man towards God, which stands at the very beginning of the history of mankind.

In what does this dogma consist? What are the elements and the essential facts which constitute it, and upon which it is founded?

The dogma of Original Sin implies and affirms these propositions:

1. That God, in creating man, has created him an agent, moral, free, and fallible;

2. That the will of God is the moral law of man, and obedience to the will of God is the duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and free agent;

3. That, by an act of his own free will, man has knowingly failed in his duty, by disobeying the law of God;

4. That the free man is a responsible being, and that disobedience to the law of God has justly entailed on him punishment;

5. That that responsibility and that punishment are hereditary, and that the fault of the first man has weighed and does weigh upon the human race.

The authority of God, the duty of obedience to the law of God, the liberty and responsibility of man, the heritage of human responsibility are, in their moral chronology, the principles and the facts comprised in the dogma of Original Sin.

I turn away my attention for a moment from the dogma itself, its source, its history, the Biblical and Christian tradition of this first step in evil of the human race. And considering man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual and general state, I investigate and verify the moral facts as they manifest themselves at the present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst the disputes of the learned.

Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral authority, as well as the physical power of the parents who, humanly speaking, created him. Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same time a necessity. This physical necessity and this moral obligation, however ultimately connected with each other, are not one and identical; and the child, in its spontaneous development, instinctively feels the moral obligation long before it is conscious of the physical necessity. The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united with the growing sentiment of affection; and the child obeys the look, the voice of its mother, unconscious of its absolute dependence upon her. As the sentiment of affection and the instinct of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of moral good in the development of the child, so the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, the first appearance of moral evil. It is with the voluntary disobedience of the child to the will of its mother that the moral infraction commences, and it is in disobedience that it resides. It considers neither the motives nor the consequences of its act; it is simply conscious that it disobeys, and regards its mother with a mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority; it strives to be, and especially to appear, independent of the natural and legitimate power which rules it, and which it recognises at the very moment when it opposes its own will to that higher law.

As the child, so is the man. As man is born free, so he lives free; and as he is born subject, so he lives subject. Liberty co-exists with authority and resists without annulling it. Authority exists before liberty, and as it does not yield to it, so neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys, renders homage to authority by the very fact of his disobedience. Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemnation which it passes on him for having misused it; for he would not be responsible for his acts were he not free. In the co-existence of these two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great secret of nature and of human destiny, the fundamental principle of man and of the world.

Let it be clearly understood that I speak here of the moral world, of the world of thought and of will. In the physical world there is neither authority nor liberty; there are merely certain forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally. If the question concerned the material world, could I do better than repeat what Pascal has admirably said: "Man is but a reed—the weakest in nature—but he is a reed which thinks; the universe need not rise in arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the power which killed him, for he knows that he dies; and of the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, he knows just as well that authority confronts him, as that liberty of action abides with himself. He knows what he does, and he charges himself with the responsibility. Moral order is here complete.

Throughout all times and in all places, in all men, as in the first man, disobedience to legitimate authority is the principle and foundation of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious name, of sin.

Disobedience has various and complicated sources; it may spring from a thirst for independence, from ambition or presumptuous curiosity, or from giving rein to human inclinations and temptations; but, whatever its origin, disobedience is ever the essential characteristic of that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also the source of the responsibility which accompanies it.

Eminent men, eminently pious men, have combated the doctrine of human liberty; unable to reconcile it with what they term the divine prescience, they have denied the fundamental fact of the nature of man, rather than fully acknowledge the mystery of the nature of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, have limited themselves to raising doubts regarding human liberty, and denying it the value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In my opinion, they have confounded facts essentially different, although intimately blended; they have ignored the special and simple character of the very fact of free will. During a course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of civilization in France, having occasion to examine the controversy of St. Augustine with Pelagius on free will, predestination, and grace, I explained these subjects in terms which I repeat here, finding no others which appear to me more exact and more complete:—

"The fact which lies at the foundation of the whole dispute," I said in 1829, "is liberty, free will, the human will. To comprehend this fact exactly, we must divest it of every foreign element, and confine it strictly to itself. It is the want of this precaution that has led to such frequent misconception of the thing itself; men have not looked simply at the fact of liberty, and at that alone. It has been viewed and described, so to speak, péle-méle with other facts, closely connected to it, it is true, in the moral life of man, but which are no less essentially different. For example, human liberty has been said to consist in the act of deliberating upon and choosing between motives; that deliberation, and that choice and judgment consequent upon it, have been regarded as the essence of free will. Not so at all. These are acts of the intellect, not of liberty; it is before the intellect that the various motives of resolution and action, interests, passions, opinions, and such like, present themselves; the intellect considers, compares, estimates, weighs, and judges them. This is a preparatory task, which precedes the act of volition, but which does not in any way constitute it. When, after deliberation, man has taken full cognisance of the motives presented to him, and of their value, there takes place a process entirely new, and wholly different, that of free will; man forms a resolution—that is to say, he commences a series of facts having their source in himself, of which he regards himself as the author; and these are effectuated because he wills them; they would have no existence did he not will it, and would be different if he desired to produce them otherwise. Now, let us imagine all remembrance of this process of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the motives so known and appreciated, forgotten; concentrate your thought, and that of the man who takes a resolution, upon the moment when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so; and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he could not will and act otherwise. Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and this it is that reveals the fact of liberty; it consists wholly in the resolution which man takes after the deliberation is at an end; it is the resolution that is the proper act of man, which is through him and through him alone; a simple act, independent of all the facts which precede or accompany it, identical in the most varied circumstances, always the same, whatever be its motives or its results.
"At the same time that man feels himself free, and is conscious of the power of commencing by his own will alone a series of facts, he recognises that his will is subjected to the empire of a certain law, which takes different names, according to the circumstances to which it is applied—moral law, reason, good sense, &c … Man is free, but according even to man's own way of thinking, his will is not arbitrary; he may use it in an absurd, senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he uses it a certain rule must govern it. The observance of this rule is his duty, the task assigned to his liberty."

It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will strictly brought back to its central and essential limits) acting freely in the intimate recesses of his being, which, in the case of disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility.

Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and limited to the author of the act, or communicated, so to say, by contagion, and transmitted in a certain measure to his descendants?

I am still considering only actual appreciable acts, such as they produce and manifest themselves in the moral life of the human race.

We find the poetry and mythology of nearly all nations expressing the idea of an Utopian state of existence, referred to times remote and primitive, to which they assign different names, as the Golden Age, the Age of the Gods, and which they picture as an epoch when there existed no moral and physical evil in the world,—an era of peace, bliss, and innocence. This is the more remarkable, as it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in any tradition of historical times, however remote; for from the commencement of history, from the time that we can discern any trace of facts at all precise and authentic, it is not the Golden Age, on the contrary, it is the Iron Age which appears—an epoch of violence and ignorance and barbarism, in which war and force are rampant, and which has not in effect the least resemblance to those beautiful dreams of ancient poetry. Without now seeking to establish any relation between these mythological dreams and the Biblical traditions; or, for the moment, drawing from the Golden Age any argument in support of the Garden of Eden; I merely point it out as a great fact, as evidence of a general instinct, so to say, of the human imagination. What is the meaning of this? Whence comes this Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of the human race? To what does this idea of a primal time, without strife, without sin, and without pain, correspond?

But from this cradle of man and this primitive poetry, to revert to the present time, to real life, to the cradle of the infant, why is it that, apart from all personal affection, we so readily term infancy the age of innocence? How is it that we find it so charming to give it this name, and regard it under this aspect? Physical ill is already present, for it begins with the very beginning of life; but moral ill has not yet appeared; life has not yet brought to the soul its trials, nor called forth its failings, and the idea of the soul without spot or stain has for us an inexpressible attraction; we feel a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least its image in the child, when we no longer see it around us, nor find it within ourselves.

What means this universal instinct, which in the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we turn in thought to the cradle of the human race or to that of the infant, leads us to regard innocence as the primitive and normal state of man, and makes us place in the spot where innocence resides that which some term Paradise, and others the Golden Age?

Manifestly between the soul without spot and the soul tainted with evil, between the creature who is merely fallible and the creature who has sinned, there is a very great change of state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the fall into this abyss; and it is without premeditation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer our thoughts to bear us far—far beyond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous contemplation of a state anterior to the fall. Hence spring, and thus are explained, the power and the charm which the idea of innocence has for us; absolute innocence we have never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to us; and so it appears to us in the cradle of the world, and in the cradle of the infant, and the pleasure is infinite which we derive from the ideal spectacle of purity which they each suggest.

Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sentiment, to all secret reference to ourselves, the pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator? No: these impressions, which the picture of innocence awakens in us, are connected with and carry us back to ourselves; this change in the state of man, that mysterious Past which has thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it—these were not the lot of the first man alone: the entire human race was, and remains, subject to them. Our present evil does not proceed solely from ourselves; we have received it as a heritage before having brought it upon us as a penalty: we are not merely fallible beings, we are the children of a being who has sinned.

How can we feel surprise at this inheritance of woe! Have we not daily the example and the spectacle before our eyes? It is an incontestable and undisputed fact, that two elements enter into the moral life of man: on the one side, his innate dispositions, his natural and involuntary inclinations,—on the other, his inmost and individual will. The natural inclinations of a man do not destroy his moral liberty nor enslave his will, but they render its exercise more laborious and more difficult to him; it is not a chain which he carries, it is a burden that he bears. Equally incontestable and undisputed is it that the natural dispositions of men are different and unequally distributed; no one is entirely exempt from evil inclinations; every man is not only fallible, but prone to transgress, and prone not only to transgress, but to transgress in some particular direction or other. Nor can the fact be disputed, although appreciable with more difficulty, that the natural and special dispositions of the individual descend to him in a certain measure from his origin, and that parents transmit to their children such or such moral propensities just as they do such or such physical temperament, or such or such features. Hereditary transmission enters into the moral as well as the physical order of the world.

This inheritance must take effect, it has done so from the first days of man's existence upon earth, for man has been created complete in his whole nature. And whilst, at the same time as complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, who shall measure the distance between man fallible, but still without fault, and the first transgression? Who shall sound the depth of the fall, and of the change which it brought into the moral condition of its author? Who shall weigh the consequences of this change to the state and the moral dispositions of man's descendants? To appreciate the extent and gravity of this awful fact, of this first appearance and this first heritage of moral evil, we have but one test,—the instinct we still preserve of a state of innocence, and of the immense space which this instinct irresistibly compels us to place between native innocence and man's first transgression; but this test is unexceptionable; it dimly reveals to us, in this fatal transformation, the whole infirmity and responsibility of the human race.

An objection is raised to this as an injustice: how, it is said, can each man be responsible for a fault which he has not himself committed—for the transgression of another man, separated from himself by so many ages? I consider this objection weak and frivolous. Such an objection would attach to all the inequalities which exist among men, to the inequality of the destinies as well as that of the nature of man, to the inequality of his moral disposition as well as to that of his physical powers. The objection would attach to the solidarity of successive generations, and the controlling influence which the ideas, the acts, the destiny of each of them exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny of those which follow it. The objection would attach to the ties which unite the child with its parents, and which are the cause of its sometimes inheriting their evil dispositions, and sometimes suffering for their faults. It is in short the general order of the world to which such an objection must apply; it is the very existence of evil, and its unequal distribution in a manner wholly independent of individual merit which assumes the character of a monstrous iniquity. And when we come to this point, that we no longer refer the source of evil to the fault and the responsibility of man, placed here on earth in a scene and period of transition and of trial, see to what alternative we are brought. We must either regard evil as natural, eternal, necessary, in the future as in the past, as the normal state of man and of the world; that is to say, we must deny God, the creation, the Divine Providence, human morality, liberty, responsibility and hope; or, on the other hand, it is to God Himself that we must impute evil, and whom we must render accountable.

The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the human mind from this odious and unacceptable alternative: far from being in contradiction either with the history of humanity, or with the facts and instincts which constitute man's moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, and explains them. The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day, arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of temptation. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, it produces an immense change in the inmost state of man, a change, the mere idea of which seizes upon the human soul, and disturbs it to its very depths; it transports man from the state of innocence to the state of sin. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, the act which produces this change involves and entails the responsibility not only of its author but of his descendants; sin is contagious in time as in space, it is transmitted, as well as diffused. The Christian dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, but born innocent; innocent at the age of man, proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at once, for the first time, of his own will, man disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same in its nature as sin at the present day, for they both consist in disobedience to the law of God, but it is the first in date in the history of man's liberty, and the human source of that evil for which the Christian religion, whilst pointing it out, offers to man the remedy and the cure.

IV. The Incarnation.

All religions have given a prominent place to the problem of existence and the origin of evil; all have attempted its solution. The good and the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahriman among the Persians; God the Creator, God the Preserver, and God the Destroyer—Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—in India; the Titans overwhelmed by the thunderbolts of Jove while scaling Olympus; Prometheus chained to the rock for having snatched fire from heaven; all are so many hypotheses to explain the conflict between good and evil, between order and disorder in the world and in man. But all these hypotheses are complicated, confused, and encumbered with chimeras and fables; all attribute the derivation of evil to incongruous causes, none assign any term to the conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil. The Christian religion alone clearly states and effectually solves the question; it alone imputes to man himself, and to him alone, the origin of evil; it alone represents God as intervening to raise man from his fall, and to save him from his peril.

In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era, a great fact appears in history; a breath of reform, religious, moral and social, arises, and spreads from east to west, among all the nations then at all progressing in the path of civilization. Notwithstanding the uncertainties of chronology, it may be said, according to the most recent and accurate researches, that Confucius in China, the Buddha Càkya-Mouni in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Pythagoras and Socrates in Greece, are all included in the limits of this epoch; [Footnote 5] men as dissimilar as they are celebrated, but who have all, in different ways and in unequal degrees, undertaken a great work of reforming both the men and the social institutions of their times.

[Footnote 5: These researches give the following dates:—1. Confucius, from 551 to 478 B.C.; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to 487, or from 589 to 512 B.C.; 3. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. (he died, according to Burnouf, 543 B.C.); 4. Pythagoras, from 580 to 500 B.C.; 5. Socrates, 470 to 400 or 399 B.C.]

Confucius was above all a practical moralist, skilled in observation, counsel, and discipline; Buddha Càkya-Mouni, a dreamer, and a mystical and popular preacher; Zoroaster, a legislator, religious and political; Pythagoras and Socrates, philosophers, bent upon instructing the distinguished bands of disciples whom they gathered around them. There is no doubt, notwithstanding the trials of their life, that neither power nor glory amongst their contemporaries was wanting to them. Confucius and Zoroaster were the favourites and counsellors of kings. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, himself the son of a king, became the idol of innumerable multitudes. Pythagoras and Socrates formed schools and pupils who were an honour to the human mind. By their personal genius and by the excellence of some of their ideas and actions, these men have ensured themselves the admiration of all posterity. Did they act up to their teachings, and accomplish what they attempted? Did they really change the moral and social condition of nations? Did they cause humanity to make any great progress, and open to it horizons which it had not before known? By no means. Whatever fame attaches to the names of these men, whatever influence they may have exerted, what ever trace of their passage may have remained, they rather appeared to have power than really to possess it; they agitated the surface far more than they stirred the depths; they did not draw nations out of the beaten tracks in which they had lived. They did not transform souls. In considering the facts at large, and notwithstanding the political and material revolutions which they underwent, China after Confucius, India after Buddha, Persia after Zoroaster, Greece after Pythagoras and Socrates, followed in the same ways, retained the same propensities, as before. Still more, among these very different nations, stagnation was only be succeeded by decay. Where are these nations at the present day, more than two thousand years after the appearance of these glorious characters in their history? What great progress, what salutary changes, have been effected? What are they in comparison and in contact with Christian nations? Outside of Christianity there have been grand spectacles of activity and force, brilliant phenomena of genius and virtue, generous attempts at reform, learned philosophical systems, and beautiful mythological poems; no real profound or fruitful regeneration of humanity and of society.

A few ages only after these barren efforts among the great nations of the world, Jesus Christ appears among a small, obscure people, weak and despised. He Himself is weak and despised in the midst of his people; He neither possesses nor seeks any social power, any temporal means of action and of success; He collects around Him only disciples weak and despised as Himself. Not only are they weak and despised, they proclaim it themselves, and, far from being troubled at this, they glory in it, and derive from it confidence. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. … Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong." [Footnote 6]

[Footnote 6: 1 Corinthians ii. 13; 2 Corinthians xii. 10.]

And in truth, Jesus Christ, the Master of St. Paul, is strong in his sufferings, and imparts his strength to his disciples; from his cross, He accomplishes what erewhile, in Asia and Europe, princes and philosophers, the powerful of the earth, and sages, attempted without success; He changes the moral state and the social state of the world; He pours into the souls of men new enlightenment and new powers; for all classes, for all human conditions, He prepares destinies before his advent unknown; He liberates them at the same time that He lays down rules for their guidance; He quickens them and stills them; He places the divine law and human liberty face to face, and yet still in harmony; He offers an effectual remedy for the evil which weighs upon humanity; to sin He opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness the door of hope.

Whence comes this power? What are its source and its nature? How did those who were its witnesses and instruments think and speak of it at the moment when it was manifested?

They all, unanimously, saw in Jesus Christ, God; most of them, from the first moment, suddenly moved and enlightened by his presence and his words; some, with rather more surprise and hesitation, but soon penetrated and convinced in their turn. "When Jesus came into the coasts of Cæsarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." [Footnote 7] Another day, meeting with a similar instance of doubt, Jesus says to Thomas, "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 7: Matthew xvi. 13-17.]
[Footnote 8: John, xiv. 7-9.]

It has been remarked, that there are certain variations in the language of the Apostles, and certain shades of difference in their leading impressions; and this is indeed true: they call Jesus Christ at one time the Son of God, at another the Son of Man; they regard Him and represent Him now under his divine aspect, at another under his human aspect; they do not present exactly the same image of Him; they do not all equally dwell upon the same traits of his nature, or the same facts of his earthly life. St. Matthew is more a narrator and moralist; it is he who relates with fuller details the birth and childhood of Jesus Christ, and who gives at the greatest length the Sermon on the Mount. St. John is more in the habit of contemplating and depicting the divine nature of Jesus Christ and his relation to God: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. … No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." [Footnote 9]

[Footnote 9: John, i. 1, 14, 18.]

It is also St. John who relates the testimony of the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, answering to those who had said to him that all men come to Jesus Christ: "Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. … He that cometh from above is above all. … He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. … The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand" [Footnote 10] St. Paul is more systematic, and enters more fully into the questions and principles of the Christian doctrine, and he regards the divinity of Jesus Christ as the first of these principles. He writes to the Philippians: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it no usurpation to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." [Footnote 11]

[Footnote 10: John iii. 28, 31, 34, and 35.]
[Footnote 11: Philippians ii. 5-6. I have given this verse in Osterwald's translation, which is also that of the Vulgate; but my son Guillaume, who is following out a careful course of study of Latin and Greek philology in sacred and profane literature, reminds me that the text of this passage presents a difficulty which furnished a field for the labours of Erasmus, Cameron, Grotius, Méric Casaubon, in the sixteenth century, as well as many others before and after them. The Greek word ἁρπαγμός admits of two meanings, an active and a passive sense—it may designate the action of ravishing, of carrying off by force, or the object carried off—the act of depredation, or the spoil. Substantives derived from verbs frequently waver between these two acceptations, and the word ἁρπαγή, which is merely another form of ἁρπαγμός, is unquestionably a case in point. Æschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, have employed it in the first sense; Æschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, and Polybius in the second sense. Now, in the passage of St. Paul, accordingly as one or the other sense is adopted, these words must either be translated thus: "He did not consider it a usurpation to be equal to God;" or thus, "He did not display as a trophy his equality to God;" that is to say: He did not display His equality with God as the conquerors of the earth display the spoils and booty which they have amassed; He did not make use of His divinity to reign, to triumph, to pride himself in it; He was not the Messiah whom the carnal Jews expected, a visible king and victorious in arms; but, on the contrary, "he humbled himself, and took upon him the form of a servant," etc., etc. This second interpretation seems more probable; the reasoning on which it is founded is thus more connected and flowing; and at the same time, it leaves the doctrine of the Apostle intact; it changes nothing in his conception or his conclusions. In this passage, as in many others, St. Paul likewise affirms the divinity of the Saviour whom he announces to men; and it is from this majesty, subjected to a voluntary humiliation, veiled under the form of a servant, obedient unto the death of the cross, that He presents an august example and an imperative lesson for Christians of humility and mutual support. It is thus that this interpretation has been admitted and defended by two eminent men, a scholar of the sixteenth and a theologian of the nineteenth century, both of whom were strongly attached to the dogma of the divinity of Jesus Christ—I allude to Méric Casaubon (De Verborum Usu, pp. 138-146, at the end of the letters of his father), and M. A. Vinet (Homilétique, p. 116).]

…. It is he "who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist." [Footnote 12]

[Footnote 12: Colossians i. 15-17.]

St. Peter and St. John, in their Epistles, speak in the same terms as St. Paul. St. Peter says, "We have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him." [Footnote 13]

[Footnote 13: 2 Peter i. 16, 17.]

St. John writes: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father; but he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also." [Footnote 14] "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." [Footnote 14]

[Footnote 13: 1 John ii. 23.]
[Footnote 14: 1 John iv. 2, 3.]

Such is the language of the Apostles; such are, at the same time, its shades of variance and its harmony. They have all evidently the same conception of Jesus Christ, they have all the same faith in Him. St. Matthew, as well as St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul, alike regard Jesus Christ as at once God and man, the representative of God on earth, and the Mediator between God and men—come from God, and re-ascended unto Him as the source and centre of His being. The dogma of the Incarnation, that is to say, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, pervades the Holy Scriptures—the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of the Apostles, the writings of the first Fathers. It is the common and fixed basis, the source and essence of the Christian faith.

This was affirmed and declared by Jesus Christ himself. What His disciples believed and related of Him, is what He himself told them of himself, as well as what they themselves witnessed and thought of Him: "All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him." [Footnote 15] —"I and my Father are one." [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 15: Matthew xi. 27.]
[Footnote 16: John x. 30.]

And when He approaches the term of His mission, when, after having announced to His disciples that the hour was coming when they would be dispersed, each going his own way, leaving Him alone, Jesus Christ raises His thoughts to God and says, "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are." [Footnote 17]

[Footnote 17: John xvii. 1-11.]

I might multiply these texts; but these surely suffice to show that the words of Jesus Christ in relation to himself, and those of His Apostles, are in perfect unison; He speaks of himself as they speak of Him; He qualifies himself as they qualify Him; He calls God His "Father," as His disciples call Him "the Son of God." He has the same faith in himself, in His nature, and in His mission, as St. Matthew, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had in Him.

It is a great source of error, in the study of facts, not to know how to stop at their general and essential features, and, losing sight of these, to give prominence to partial and secondary features. On the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ, that fundamental principle of the Christian religion, the precise meaning and import of such or such a word may be disputed; such or such an expression may be thought an interpolation, and so eliminated in any particular Gospel, in any particular Epistle; nevertheless there will always remain infinitely more than sufficient evidence of the fact that those who at the present day believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, believe simply what the Apostles believed and said, and that the Apostles themselves only believed and said, nearly nineteen centuries ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to them.

The opponents of the dogma of the Incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus Christ disregard equally man and history, the complex elements of human nature, and the meaning of the great facts which mark the religious life of the human race.

What is man himself, but an incomplete and imperfect incarnation of God? The materialists who deny the soul, and the naturalists who deny creation, are alone consistent in rejecting the Christian dogma. All who believe in the distinction of spirit and matter, who do not believe that man is the result of the fermentation of matter, or of the transformation of species, are constrained to admit the presence in human nature of the divine element, and they must necessarily accept these words in Genesis: "God created man in his own image;" that is to say, they must acknowledge the presence of God in frail and fallible humanity.

I open the histories of all religions, of all mythologies, the most refined as well as the grossest; I find at every step the idea and the assertion of the Divine Incarnation. Brahmanism, Buddhism, Paganism, all faiths, all religious idolatries, abound in incarnations of every kind and date, primitive or successive, connected with this or that historical event, adapted to explain this or that fact, to satisfy this or that human propensity. It is the natural and universal instinct of men to picture to themselves the action of God upon the human race under the form of the incarnation of God in man.

Like all religious instincts, that of the belief in the Divine Incarnation may engender, and has engendered, the most absurd superstitions, the most extravagant hypotheses. In the same way as the natural faith in God has been the source of all idolatries, so the tendency to incarnate God in man has given rise to, and admitted, every kind of strange imagining and spurious tradition. Are we then to pronounce all divine incarnation false, every tradition of it spurious? Rather let us say that it proceeds from the infirmity of the human mind, if we see realities and mere chimeras, truths and errors, in such close proximity, if we find them calling one another by the same names and unceasingly confounding one another's attributes. The pretended incarnation of Brahma, or of Buddha, proves no more against the divinity of Jesus Christ than the adoration of idols proves against the existence of God. Jesus Christ, God and Man, has characteristics which appertain to Him alone. These have founded His power and occasioned the success of His works, a power and a success which belong to Him alone. It is not a human reformer, but God himself, who, through Jesus Christ, has accomplished what no human reformer has ever accomplished, or even conceived,—the reform of the moral and social condition of the world, the regeneration of the human soul, and the solution of the problems of human destiny. It is by these signs, by these results, that the divinity of Jesus Christ is manifested. How was the Divine Incarnation accomplished in man? Here, as in the union of the soul and the body, as in the creation, arises the mystery; but if we cannot fathom the reason of it, the fact not the less exists. When this fact has taken the form of dogma, theology has sought to explain it. In my opinion, this was a mistake; theology has obscured the fact in developing and commenting upon it. It is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all theological controversies. To disregard this fact—to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ—is to deny, to overthrow the Christian religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation was its principle, and Jesus Christ—God and Man—its author.

V. The Redemption.

I enter into the sanctuary of the Christian faith.

God has done more than manifest himself in Jesus Christ. He has done more than place upon the earth and before men His own living image, the type of sanctity and the model of life. The Creator has accomplished, through Jesus Christ, toward man, His creature, an act of His beneficence and at the same time of His sovereign power. Jesus Christ is not only God made man to spread the divine light upon men; He is God made man to conquer and efface in man moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He brings not only light and law, but pardon and salvation. And it is at the price of His own suffering, of His own sacrifice, that He brings these to them. He is the type of self-devotion at the same time as of sanctity. He has submitted to be a victim in order to be a saviour. The Incarnation leads to the Cross, and the Cross to the Redemption.

Here are the supreme dogma and mystery. Here are revealed plainly the sense and the import of Christianity. By what ways did Jesus Christ penetrate the human soul to accomplish this great work? How did He win the human soul to the Christian faith, in order to snatch it from evil and to save it?

When man fails in the duty of which he recognises the law,—when he commits the wrong which he is bound to shun,—when, after sin, repentance arises within him, and a sense of the necessity of expiation is soon joined with this sentiment of repentance, the moral instinct of man teaches that repentance does not suffice to efface the fault, and that it requires to be expiated: reparation supposes suffering.

And when the religious sentiment is joined to the moral sentiment,—when man believes in God, and sees in Him the author and dispenser of the moral law, he regards himself as guilty of transgression toward God whom he has disobeyed, he feels the need of being pardoned and of being restored to the favour of the Sovereign Master whom he has offended.

Among all nations, in all religions, under all social forms, these two instincts—as to the necessity of expiation to ensue upon the fault, and the necessity of pardon to follow the transgression—appear natural and inherent in the human soul. They have been at all times and in all places, the source of a multitude of beliefs and practices; some pure and touching, others foolish and odious: these may all be briefly comprised in the single expression, sacrifices. The histories of all nations, barbarous or civilized, ancient or modern, teem with sacrificial rites of every description, whether they be of a nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild or bloody; rites invented and celebrated either to expiate the sins of man, or to appease the anger of God and regain His favour.

Nor is this all; we have here to note another moral fact, not less real although it seems stranger to the eyes of superficial reason. Mankind has believed that a fault might be expiated by another than its author, that innocent victims might be efficaciously offered up to influence God, and to save the guilty. This belief has led to sacrifices no less absurd than atrocious: the pretended expiation has become an additional crime: it has at the same time been also the source of heroic acts and sublime examples of self-devotion. Both the domestic records of families and the public histories of nations have furnished us with admirable instances of innocence voluntarily offering itself as a sacrifice, taking upon itself the penalty, the suffering, the death, to expiate the sin of others, and to win from Divine Justice—now satisfied—the pardon of the offender.

And are we then to regard this merely as a pious, a generous illusion, a devotedness as vain as admirable? Yes, such is the view that all those must adopt who believe neither in Providence nor prayer, nor in the existence of any efficacious relation between the actions of man and the purposes of God; no solidarity between men, no connection between the sacrifice of him who practises the act of self-devotion, and the destiny of him who is its object. But those who have faith in the living God, in His continued presence, and His never-sleeping providence, those who believe that nothing in man, whether it be good or whether it be evil, is in vain, that every moral act bears its fruit visible or invisible, immediate or remote, such as these cannot fail to feel, to have, as it were, a presentiment, that in such self-sacrifice of the innocent for the salvation of the guilty, there exists a mysterious virtue. The secret of this it may not be given them to fathom, but it nevertheless gives life in their bosom to the hope that such sublime devotion will not fail of its object.

And now, to pass from this feeling, and from the acts of man, whose reality no one can dispute, to the corresponding dogmas of Christianity, let me, by the side of these acts of devotedness and self-sacrifice of the human creature in his innocence seeking to atone for the sins of the human creature who is guilty, place the self-devotion and the self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Man-God, tendered to ransom from sin the race of mankind and to open to it the way of salvation; who is not struck by this sublime analogy? What connection and harmony between the purest, the most generous, instincts of the human soul, and the dogma of God's Redemption? I touch upon none of the questions, I enter into none of the controversies which have sprung up with respect to this dogma of Redemption; I do not weigh with a view to compare faith and works, nor do I essay to assign the part due to divine grace or to human virtue; I do not define or seek to number the elect, but I pause upon the fact itself of the Redemption by Jesus Christ, the fact upon which the dogma itself reposes. All that the most renowned heroes, the most glorious saints of humanity have striven to accomplish, in order to expiate the sins of any creature or any nation, Jesus Christ the Elect of God, the Son of God, the God-Man, came to effect for all mankind, by means of incomparable sorrow, humiliation, and sufferings. And, as was affirmed by St. Paul in the first century, and by Bossuet in the seventeenth, this very suffering, this humiliation, this martyrdom of Jesus Christ, have constituted his victory and his empire. And I would ask, what other spectacle than that of God made man to constitute himself victim—made victim to become the saviour—could have excited in the soul of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of respect, and of love, that ardent, invincible, and contagious faith, of which the Apostles and the primitive Christians have left us the evidences and the example? It was requisite that the victim and the sacrifice should be equal to the work. That work was the Christian religion, that incomparable system of facts, dogmas, precepts, promises, which, in the midst of all the doubts and all the controversies of the mind of man, have for nineteen centuries afforded satisfaction and solution to those aspirings of the human race, which nature prompts, whether they assume the form of religious instincts or religious problems.

Third Meditation.
The Supernatural.

To a system so grand, and in such profound harmony with man's own nature, an objection is made which is thought decisive; that system proclaims the Supernatural, has the Supernatural for its principle and foundation. It is objected that the Supernatural itself has no existence.

This objection is not novel, but it has at this moment in appearance assumed a more serious and formidable shape than ever. It is in the name of science itself, of all the human sciences, of the physical sciences, historical science, philosophical science, that the pretension is made that is to reduce the Supernatural to a nonentity, and to banish it from the world and from man.

The reverence that I feel for science is infinite. I would have it as free and unshackled as I would desire to see it honoured. But I would at the same time like to see it deal somewhat more rigorously and logically with itself. I would like to see it less exclusively absorbed by its own peculiar labours and occupations, its momentary successes; more careful not to forget or omit any of the ideas or any of the facts which bear upon the subject with which it deals, and for which in its solution it has still to account.

In whatever quarter, at this day, the wind may be, the abolition of the Supernatural is a difficult enterprise, for the belief in the Supernatural is a fact natural, primitive, universal, constant in the life and history of the human race. We may interrogate mankind in all times and places, in all states of society and degrees of civilization, we find it always and everywhere spontaneously believing in facts and causes beyond the sphere of this palpable world, of this living piece of mechanism termed nature. In vain do we extend, explain, amplify nature itself; the instinct of man, the instinct of human masses, has never suffered that nature to confine it: it has always sought and seen something beyond.

It is this belief—instinctive, and hitherto indestructible—which is qualified as a radical error; this universal and enduring fact in man's history it is which men seek to abolish. They go farther; they affirm that it is already abolished—that the people no longer believe in the Supernatural, and that any attempt to bring them back to it would be vain. Incredible conceit of man! What, because in a corner of the world in one day among ages brilliant progress may have been made in natural and historical science—because in the name of the sciences, and in brilliant books, the Supernatural has been combated, they proclaim the Supernatural vanquished, abolished; and we hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in the name of the learned, but of the people! Have you then completely forgotten, or have you never thoroughly comprehended, humanity and the history of humanity? Do you ignore absolutely what the people really is, and what all those nations are that cover the surface of the earth? Have you never then penetrated into those millions of souls in which the belief in the Supernatural is and abides, present and active even when the words which move their lips disown it? Are you then unconscious of the immense distance which there is between the depths and the surface of those souls, between the variable breaths which only ruffle the minds of men, and the immutable instincts which preside over their very being? True, there are, in our days, amongst the people, many fathers, mothers, children, who believe themselves incredulous, and mock scorn fully at miracles; but follow them in the intimacy of their homes, amongst the trials of their lives, how do these parents act, when their child is ill, those farmers when their crops are threatened, those sailors when they float upon the waters a prey to the tempest? They elevate their eyes to heaven, they burst forth in prayer, they invoke that Supernatural power said by you to be abolished in their very thought. By their spontaneous and irresistible acts they give to your words and to their own a striking disavowal.

But to advance a step towards you, admitted that the faith in the Supernatural is abolished; let us enter together that society and those classes to whom this moral ruin is a triumph and a vaunt. What then ensues? In the place of God's miracles, man's miracles make their appearance. They are searched for, they are called for; men are found to invent them, and to contrive them to be recognised by thousands of beholders. It is not necessary to go either far in time or wide in space to see the Supernatural of Superstition raising itself in the place of the Supernatural of Religion, and Credulity hurrying to meet Falsehood half-way.

But away with these unhealthy paroxysms of humanity; and to return to its sober and enduring history. We will admit that the instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been the source and abides the foundation of all religions, of religion in the most general sense of the word, and of essential religion. The most serious, at the same time the most perplexed, of the thinkers who in our days have approached the subject, M. Edmond Scherer, saw plainly enough that that was the question at issue, and he has so put it in the third of his "Conversations Théologiques," noble yet sad imaging forth of the fermentation in his own ideas and the struggles which they occasion in his soul. "The Supernatural is not a something external to religion," says one of the two speakers between whom M. Scherer supposes the discussion, "it is religion itself." "No," says the other, "the Supernatural is not the peculiar element of religion, but rather of superstition: the Supernatural fact has no relation with the human soul, for it is the essence of the Supernatural that it goes beyond all those conditions which constitute credibility; its essence indeed is the being anti-human." The discussion continues and becomes animated: the contrary nature of the perplexities experienced by the two speakers becomes manifest. "Perhaps," says the Rationalist, "the Supernatural was a necessary form of religion for ill cultivated minds: but rightly or wrongly, our modern civilization rejects miracles; without positive denial, it remains indifferent to them. Even the preacher knows not how to deal with them; the more he is in earnest, the more his Christian feeling has inwardness and vitality, the more does the miracle also disappear from his teaching. Miracles formerly constituted the great force of the sermon, at the present day what are they but a secret source of embarrassment? Everybody feels vaguely when confronted by the marvellous accounts in our sacred volumes, what he feels when confronted by the Legends of the Saints; it is impossible for that to be religion, it is only its superfoetation." "It is true," exclaims with sorrow the hesitating Christian, "we believe no longer in miracles; you might have added that neither do we any more believe in God himself; the two things go together. We hear much now-a-days of Christian Spiritualism—of the religion of the conscience, and you yourself seem to see that men in giving up miracles are making progress in religion. Ah! why is it that the intimate experience of my own heart cannot express itself in a forcible protest against any such opinion? Whenever I find my faith in miraculous agency vacillating within me, the image of my God seems to be fading away from my eyes: He ceases to be for me God the free, the living, the personal; the God with whom the soul converses, as with a master and friend; and this holy dialogue once interrupted, what is left us? How does life become sad? how does it lose its illusions? Reduced to the satisfaction of mere physical wants, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to make money, deprived of all horizon, how puerile does our maturity appear, how sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our anxieties!

"No more mystery, no more innocence, no more infinity, no longer any heaven above our heads, no more poesy. Ah! be sure: the incredulity which rejects the miracle has a tendency to unpeople heaven, and to disenchant the earth. The Supernatural is the natural sphere of the soul. It is the essence of its faith, of its hope, of its love. I know how specious criticism is, how victorious its arguments often appear; but I know one thing besides, and perhaps I might here even appeal to your own testimony; in ceasing to believe in what is miraculous, the soul finds that it has lost the secret of divine life; henceforth it is urged downwards towards the abyss, soon it lies on the earth, and not seldom in the dirt."

In his turn the disbeliever in the Supernatural is troubled and saddened: "Listen," he says: "the history of humanity seems to be sometimes moving in obedience to the following scheme. The world begins with religion, and, referring all phenomena to a first cause, it sees God everywhere. Then comes philosophy, which, having discovered the connection of secondary causes, and the laws of their operation, makes a corresponding deduction from the direct intervention of divinity, and then founding itself upon the idea of necessity (for it is only necessity which falls within the domain of science, and science is in fact but the knowledge of what is necessary); philosophy tends in its very fundamental principle to exclude God from the world. It does more; it finishes by denying human liberty as it has denied God. The reason is evident: liberty is a cause beyond the sphere of the necessary connection of causes, a first cause, a cause which serves as cause to itself: and from that moment philosophy, unequal to any explanation, feels itself disposed to deny that first cause. A philosophy true to itself will ever be fatalistic. For from that moment philosophy corrupts and destroys itself. When it has no other God than the universe, no other man than the chief of the mammalia, what is it but a mere system of Zoology? Zoology constitutes the whole science of the epoch, of the Materialists, and to speak plainly, that is our position at the present day. But materialism can never be the be-all and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt and enervated, society is passing through immense catastrophes, is falling in ruins; the iron harrow of Revolution is breaking up mankind like the clods of the field; in the bloody furrows germinate new races; the soul in the agony of its distress believes once more; it resumes its faith in virtue, it finds again the language of prayer. To the age of the Renaissance succeeded that of the Reformation; to the Germany of Frederick the Great, the Germany of 1812. So faith springs up for ever and ever out of its ashes. Ah, that I must add it, humanity rises again but to resume the march which I have just described. But can it be said of it besides, that like this Globe of ours it is making any movement in advance whilst it is so turning round itself, and if it does so advance, towards what is it gravitating?

'Whither, whither, O Lord,
marches the earth in the heavens?'" [Footnote 18]

[Footnote 18: Mélange de Critique Religieuse, par Edmond Scherer—Conversations Théologiques, pp. 169-187.]

But it is not towards heaven that the earth would march if it followed the path in which the adversaries of the Supernatural are impelling it. It is this peculiarity, they say, of the Supernatural, that being incredible, it is in its very essence anti-human. Now it is precisely to something not anti-human but superhuman that the human soul aspires, and there seeks to realize these aspirations in the Supernatural. We should be never weary of repeating it; the whole finite world in its entirety, with all its facts and all its laws, comprising indeed man himself, suffices not for the soul of man; it requires something grander and more perfect for the subject of its contemplation, the object of its love; it desires to fix its trust in something more stable; to lean upon something less fragile. This supreme and sublime ambition it is to which religion, in its widest sense, gives birth and supplies nourishment; and this supreme and sublime ambition it is also that the religion of Christ more particularly responds to and satisfies. Let those, therefore, who flatter themselves that although abolishing the belief in the Supernatural, they leave Christians still Christians, undeceive themselves; what they are abolishing, destroying, is very religion, for their arguments assail all religion in general, and Christianity in particular. It may be that they do not inflict upon themselves all this evil, and that in retaining a sincere religious sentiment they really believe themselves nearly Christians; the soul struggles against the errors of the thought, and a moral suicide is a rare spectacle. But the evil even in spreading unveils more plainly its nature and increases in intensity; besides men, in masses, draw from error far more logical conclusions than the man ever did in whom the error had its origin. The people are not the learned, neither are they philosophers, and only once succeed in destroying in them all faith in the Supernatural, and you may consider it certain that the faith in Christ must have previously disappeared. Have you well weighed all this? Have you pictured to yourself what a man, what mankind, what the soul of man, what human society itself would become if religion were in effect abolished, if religious faith entirely disappeared? I will not give way to anguish of soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hesitate to affirm that no imagination can represent with adequate fidelity what would take place in us and around us if the place at present occupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to become vacant, and its empire annihilated. No one could pronounce to what degree of disorder and degradation humanity would be precipitated. But awful indeed would be the result if all faith in the Supernatural were extinct in the soul, and if man had in a supernatural state neither trust nor hope.

It is not my design, however, to confine myself here to the question regarded merely in its moral, practical light; I approach the Supernatural as viewed with the eyes of free and speculative reason.

It is condemned for its very name's sake. Nothing is or can be, it is said, beyond and above nature. Nature is one and complete; everything is comprised in it; in it, of necessity, all things cohere, enchain, and develop themselves.

We are here in thorough pantheism—that is to say, in absolute atheism. I do not hesitate to give to pantheism its real name. Amongst the men who at the present day declare themselves the opponents of the Supernatural, most, certainly, do not believe that they are nor do they desire to be atheists. But let me tell them that they are leading others whither they neither think nor wish themselves to go. The negation of the Supernatural, and that in the name of the unity and universality of nature, is pantheism, and pantheism is nothing more nor less than atheism. In the sequel of these Meditations, when I come to speak particularly of the actual state of the Christian religion, and of the different systems which combat it, I will in this respect justify my assertion; at present, I have to repel direct attacks upon the Supernatural—attacks less fundamental than those of pantheism, but not less serious, for in truth, whether men know it or not, and whether they mean it or not, all attacks in this warfare reach the same object, and as soon as the Supernatural is the aim it is religion itself that receives the shaft.

The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed to; that, say they, is the palpable and incontestable fact established by the experience of mankind, and upon which rests the conduct of human life. In presence of the permanent order of nature and the immutability of its laws, we cannot admit any partial, any momentary infractions; we cannot believe in the Supernatural, in miracles.

True, general and constant laws do govern nature. Are we, therefore, to affirm that those laws are necessary, and that no deviation from them is possible in nature? Who is there that does not discern an essential, an absolute difference between what is general and what is necessary? The permanence of the actual laws of nature is a fact established by experience, but it is not the only fact possible, the only fact conceivable by reason; those laws might have been other laws, they may change. Several of them have not always been what they now are, for science itself proves that the condition of the universe has been different from what it is at present; the universal and permanent order of which we form part, and in which we confide, has not always been what we now see it; it has had a beginning; the creation of the actual system of nature and of its laws is a fact as certain as the system itself is certain. And what is creation but a supernatural fact, the act of a Power superior to the actual laws of nature, and which has power to modify them just as much as it has had power to establish them? The first of miracles is God himself.

There is a second miracle—man. I resume what I have already said; by his title as a moral being and free agent, man lives beyond and above the influence of the general and permanent laws of nature; he creates by his will effects which are not at all the necessary consequence of any pre-existent law; and those effects take their place in a system absolutely distinct and independent from the visible order which governs the universe. The moral liberty of man is a fact as certain, and natural, as the order of nature, and it is at the same time a supernatural fact—that is to say, essentially foreign to the order of nature and to its laws.

God is the being moral and free par excellence, that is to say, the being excellently capable of acting as first cause beyond the influence of causation. By his title as a moral being and free agent, man is in intimate relation with God. Who shall define the possible contingencies, or fathom the mysteries of this relation? Who dare to say that God cannot modify, that He never does modify, according to his plans with respect to the moral system and to man, the laws which He has made and which He maintains in the material order of nature?

Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the possibility of supernatural facts; and so their attack is indirect. If those facts, say they, are not impossible, they are incredible, for no particular testimony of man in favour of a miracle can give a certitude equal to that which, on the opposite side, results from the experience which men have of the fixity of the laws of nature.

"It is experience only," says Hume, "which gives authority to human testimony; and it is the same experience which assures us of the laws of nature. When therefore these two kinds of experience are contrary, we have nothing to do, but subtract the one from the other, and embrace an opinion, either on one side or the other, with that assurance which arises from the remainder. But according to the principles here explained, this subtraction, with regard to all popular religions, amounts to an entire annihilation: and therefore we may establish it as a maxim, that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion." [Footnote 19]

[Footnote 19: Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by David Hume; Essay on Miracles, vol. iii. p. 119-145, Bâle, 1793. [Same work, p. 91, London, 16mo, 1860.—TRANSLATOR.]

It is in this reasoning of Hume that the opponents of miracles shut themselves up as in an impregnable fortress to refuse them all credence.

What confusion of facts and ideas! What a superficial solution of one of the grandest problems of our nature! What! a simple operation of arithmetic, with respect to two experimental observations, estimated in ciphers, is to decide the question whether the universal belief of the race of man in the Supernatural is well-founded or simply absurd; whether God only acts upon the world and upon man by laws established once for all, or whether He still continues to make, in the exercise of his power, use of his liberty! Not only does the sceptic Hume here show himself unconscious of the grandeur of the problem; he mistakes even in the motives upon which he founds his shallow conclusion; for it is not from human experience alone that human testimony draws her authority: this authority has sources more profound, and a worth anterior to experience: it is one of the natural bonds, one of the spontaneous sympathies which unite with one another men and the generations of men. Is it by virtue of experience that the child trusts to the words of its mother, that it has faith in all she tells it? The mutual trust that men repose in what they say or transmit to each other is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous, which experience confirms or shakes, sets up again or sets bounds to, but which experience does not originate.

I find in the same essay of Hume, [Footnote 20] this other passage: "The passion of surprise and wonder, arising from miracles, being an agreeable emotion, gives a sensible tendency towards the belief of those events from which it is derived."

[Footnote 20: Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 128, ubi supra.]

Thus, if we are to credit Hume, it is merely for his pleasure, for the diversion of the imaginative faculty, that man believes in the Supernatural; and beneath this impression—though real, still only of a secondary nature—which does no more than skim the surface of the human soul, the philosopher has no glimpse at all of the profound instincts and superior requisitions which have sway over him.

But why an attack of this character, so indirect and little complete? Why should Hume limit himself to the proposition that miracles can never be historically proved, instead of at once affirming the impossibility of miracles themselves? This is what the opponents of the Supernatural virtually think; and it is because they commence by regarding miracles as impossible that they apply themselves to destroy the value of the evidences by which they are supported. If the evidence which surrounds the cradle of Christianity, if the fourth, if even the tenth part of it were adduced in support of facts of a nature extra-ordinary, unexpected, or unheard of, but still not having a character positively supernatural, the proof would be accepted as unexceptionable: the facts for certain. In appearance, it is merely the proof by witnesses of the Supernatural that is contested; whereas, in reality, the very possibility of the thing is denied that is sought to be proved. The question ought to be put as it really is, instead of such a solution being offered as is a mere evasion.

Lately, however, men of logical minds and daring spirits have not hesitated to speak more frankly and plainly. "The new dogma, they say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is the negation of the Supernatural. … Those still disposed to reject this principle have nothing to do with our books, and we, on our side, have no cause to feel disquietude at their opposition and their censure, for we do not write for them. And if this discussion is altogether avoided, it is because it is impossible to enter into it with out admitting an unacceptable proposition, viz., one which presumes that the Supernatural can in any given case be possible. [Footnote 21]

[Footnote 21: Conservation, Involution, et Positivisme, par M. Littré, Preface, p. xxvi, and following pages—M. Havet, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 Août, 1863.]

I do not reproach the disciples of the school of Hume for having evinced greater timidity: if they attacked the Supernatural by a side way, not as being impossible in itself, but as being merely incapable of proof by human testimony, they did not do so designedly and with deceitful purpose. Let us render them more justice, and do them more honour. A prudent and an honest instinct held them back on the declivity upon which they had placed themselves; they felt that to deny even the possibility of the Supernatural, was to enter at full sail into pantheism and fatalism, that is to say, was the same thing as at once dispensing with God and doing away with the free agency of man. Their moral sense, their good sense, withheld them from any such course. The fundamental error of the adversaries of the Supernatural is that they contest it in the name of human science, and that they class the Supernatural amongst facts within the domain of science, whereas the Supernatural does not fall within that domain, and the very attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to its being entirely rejected.

Fourth Meditation.
The Limits Of Science.

An eminent moralist, who was at the same time not only a theologian, but a philosopher well versed in the physical sciences, I mean Dr. Chalmers, professor at the University of Edinburgh, and corresponding member of the Institute of France, wrote in his work on Natural Theology, a chapter entitled: On man's partial and limited knowledge of divine things. The first pages are as follows:—

"The true modern philosophy never makes more characteristic exhibition of itself, than at the limit which separates the known from the unknown. It is there that we behold it in a twofold aspect—that of the utmost deference and respect for all the findings of experience within this limit; that, on the other hand, of the utmost disinclination and distrust for all those fancies of ingenious or plausible speculation which have their place in the ideal region beyond it. To call in the aid of a language which far surpasses our own in expressive brevity, its office is 'indagare' rather than 'divinare.' The products of this philosophy are copies and not creations. It may discover a system of nature, but not devise one. It proceeds first on the observation of individual facts and if these facts are ever harmonised into a system, this is only in the exercise of a more extended observation. In the work of systematising, it makes no excursion beyond the territory of actual nature—for they are the actual phenomena of nature which form the first materials of this philosophy—and they are the actual resemblances of these phenomena that form, as it were, the cementing principle, to which the goodly fabrics of modern science owe all the solidity and all the endurance that belong to them. It is this chiefly which distinguishes the philosophy of the present day from that of by-gone ages. The one was mainly an excogitative, the other mainly a descriptive process—a description however extending to the likenesses as well as to the peculiarities of things; and, by means of these likenesses, these observed likenesses alone, often realising a more glorious and magnificent harmony than was ever pictured forth by all the imaginations of all the theorists.
"In the mental characteristics of this philosophy, the strength of a full-grown understanding is blended with the modesty of childhood. The ideal is sacrificed to the actual—and, however splendid or fondly cherished a hypothesis may be, yet if but one phenomenon in the real history of nature stand in the way, it is forthwith and conclusively abandoned. To some the renunciation may be as painful as the cutting off a right hand, or the plucking out a right eye—yet, if true to the great principle of the Baconian school, it must be submitted to. With its hardy disciples one valid proof outweighs a thousand plausibilities—and the resolute firmness wherewith they bid away the speculations of fancy is only equalled by the childlike compliance wherewith they submit themselves to the lessons of experience.
"It is thus that the same principle which guides to a just and a sound philosophy in all that lies within the circle of human discovery, leads also to a most unpresuming and unpronouncing modesty in reference to all that lies beyond it. And should some new light spring up on this exterior region, should the information of its before hidden mysteries break in upon us from some quarter that was before inaccessible, it will be at once perceived (on the supposition of its being a genuine and not an illusory light) that, of all other men, they are the followers of Bacon and Newton who should pay the most unqualified respect to all its revelations. In their case it comes upon minds which are without prejudice, because on that very principle, which is most characteristic of our modern science, upon minds without preoccupation. … The strength of his confidence in all the ascertained facts of the terra cognita is at one or in perfect harmony with the humility of his diffidence in regard to all the conceived plausibilities of the terra incognita.
"And let it further be remarked of the self-denial which is laid upon us by Bacon's Philosophy, that, like all other self-denial in the cause of truth or virtue, it hath its reward. In giving ourselves up to its guidance, we have often to quit the fascinations of beautiful theory; but in exchange for them, we are at length regaled by the higher and substantial beauties of actual nature. There is a stubbornness in facts before which the specious imagination is compelled to give way; and perhaps the mind never suffers more painful laceration than when, after having vainly attempted to force nature into a compliance with her own splendid generalizations, she, on the appearance of some rebellious and impracticable phenomenon, has to practise a force upon herself—when she thus finds the goodly speculation superseded by the homely and unwelcome experience. It seemed at the outset a cruel sacrifice, when the world of speculation, with all its manageable and engaging simplicities, had to be abandoned; and on becoming the pupils of observation, we, amid the varieties of the actual world around us, felt as if bewildered, if not lost, among the perplexities of a chaos. This was a period of greatest sufferance; but it has had a glorious termination. In return for the assiduity wherewith the study of nature hath been prosecuted, she hath made a more abundant revelation of her charms. Order hath arisen out of confusion, and in the ascertained structure of the universe there are now found to be a state and a sublimity beyond all that was ever pictured by the mind in the days of her adventurous and unfettered imagination. Even viewed in the light of a noble and engaging spectacle for the fancy to dwell upon, who would ever think of comparing with the system of Newton, either that celestial machinery of Des Cartes, which was impelled by whirlpools of ether, or that still more cumbrous planetarium of cycles and epicycles which was the progeny of a remoter age? It is thus that at the commencement of the observational process there is the abjuration of beauty. But it soon reappears in another form, and brightens as we advance, and at length there arises on solid foundation, a fairer and goodlier system than ever floated in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor is it difficult to perceive the reason of this. What we discover by observation is the product of divine imagination bodied forth by creative power into a stable and enduring reality. What we devise by our own ingenuity is but the product of human imagination. The one is the solid archetype of those conceptions which are in the mind of God: the other is the shadowy representation of those conceptions which are in the mind of man. It is just as with the labourer, who, by excavating the rubbish which hides and besets some noble architecture, does more for the gratification of our taste, than if by his unpractised hand he should attempt to regale us with plans and sketches of his own. And so the drudgery of experimental science, in exchange for that beauty whose fascinations it withstood at the outset of its career, has evolved a surpassing beauty from among the realities of truth and nature. …
"The views contemplated through the medium of observation, are found not only to have a justness in them, but to have a grace and a grandeur in them far beyond all the visions which are contemplated through the medium of fancy, or which ever regaled the fondest enthusiast in the enchanted walks of speculation and poetry. But neither the grace nor the grandeur alone would, without evidence, have secured acceptance for any opinion. It must first be made to undergo, and without ceremony, the freest treatment from human eyes and human hands. It is at one time stretched on the rack of an experiment, at another it has to pass through fiery trial in the bottom of a crucible. In another it undergoes a long questioning process among the fumes and the filtrations and the intense heat of a laboratory; and not till it has been subjected to all this inquisitorial torture and survived it, is it preferred to a place in the temple of Truth, or admitted among the laws and lessons of a sound philosophy."

No one certainly will contest that this is the language of a fervent disciple of science. It is impossible to have a keener apprehension of its beauty, and to accept more completely its laws. What mathematician, natural philosopher, physiologist, or chemist, could speak in terms of greater respect and submission of the necessity of observation, and of the authority of experience? Dr. Chalmers is not the less for that a true and fervent Christian; his religious faith equals his scientific exactitude: he receives Christ, and professes Christ's doctrine with as firm a voice as he does Bacon and Bacon's method. Not that for him religious belief is the mere result of education, of tradition, of habit; but it, on the contrary, springs as much from reflection and learning, as his acquirements in natural science themselves; in each sphere he has probed the very sources and weighed the motives of his convictions. How did he, in each instance, reach such a haven of repose? Whence in him this harmony between the philosopher and the Christian?

Let us again allow Dr. Chalmers to speak for himself:—

"It is of importance here to remark that the enlargement of our knowledge in all the natural sciences, so far from adding to our presumption, should only give a profounder sense of our natural incapacity and ignorance in reference to the science of theology. It is just as if in studying the policy of some earthly monarch we had made the before unknown discovery of other empires and distant territories whereof we knew nothing but the existence and the name. This might complicate the study without making the object of it at all more comprehensible, and so of every new wonder which philosophy might lay open to the gaze of inquirers. It might give us a larger perspective of the creation than before, yet, in fact, cast a deeper shade of obscurity over the counsels and ways of the Creator. We might at once obtain a deeper insight into the secrets of the workmanship, and yet feel, and legitimately feel, to be still more deeply out of reach, the secret purposes of Him who worketh all in all. Every discovery of an addition to the greatness of his works may bring with it an addition to the unsearchableness of his ways. ….
"That telescope which has opened our way to suns and systems innumerable, leaves the moral administration connected with them in deepest secrecy. It has made known to us the bare existence of other worlds; but it would require another instrument of discovery ere we could understand their relation to ourselves, as products of the same Almighty Hand, as parts or members of a family under the same paternal guardianship. This more extended survey of the Material Universe just tells us how little we know of the Moral or Spiritual Universe. It reveals nothing to us of the worlds that roll in space, but the bare elements of Motion, and Magnitude, and Number—and so leaves us at a more hopeless distance from the secret of the Divine administration than when we reasoned of the Earth as the Universe, of our species as the alone rational family of God that He had implicated with body, or placed in the midst of a corporeal system. …
"To know that we cannot know certain things, is in itself positive knowledge, and a knowledge of the most safe and valuable nature. … There are few services of greater value to the cause of knowledge than the delineation of its boundaries." [Footnote 22]

[Footnote 22: Chalmers's Works: Natural Theology, pp. 249-265; Glasgow.]

In holding this language, what in effect is Dr. Chalmers doing? He is separating what is finite from what is infinite, the thing created from the Creator, the world subject to government from the Sovereign that governs it; and in marking this line of demarcation, he says in his modesty to science, what God in his power says to the ocean: "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther."

Doctor Chalmers was right; the limits of the finite world are those also of human science: how far within these vast limits science may extend her empire, who shall affirm? But what we certainly may assert is, that she never can exceed them. The finite world alone is within her reach, the only world that she can fathom. It is only in the finite world that man's mind can fully grasp the facts, observe them in all their extent, and under all their aspects, discriminate their relations and their laws (which constitute also a species of facts), and so verify the system to which they should be referred. This it is that makes what we term scientific processes and labour, and human sciences are the results.

What need to mention that in speaking of the finite world, I do not mean to speak of the material world alone? Moral facts there also are which fall under observation, and enter into the domain of science. The study of man in his actual condition, whether considered as an individual or as forming a member of a nation, is also a scientific study, subject to the same method as that of the material world: and it is its legitimate province also to detect in the actual order of this world the laws of those particular facts to which it addresses itself.

But if the limits of the finite world are those of human science, they are not those of the human soul. Man contains in himself ideas and ambitious aspirations extending far beyond and rising far above the finite world, ideas of and aspirations towards the Infinite, the Ideal, the Perfect, the Immutable, the Eternal. These ideas and aspirations are themselves realities admitted by the human mind; but even in admitting them man's mind comes to a halt; they give him a presentiment of, or to speak with more precision, a revelation of, an order of things different from the facts and laws of the finite world which lies under his observation; but whilst man has of this superior order the instinct and the perspective, he can have of it no positive knowledge. It proceeds from the sublimity of his nature if he has a glimpse of Infinity—if he aspires to it; whereas it results from the infirmity of his actual condition if his positive knowledge is limited by the world in which he exists.

I was born in the south, under the very sun. I have yet, for the most part, lived in regions either of the north, or bordering upon the north, regions so frequently immersed in mists. When under their pale sky we look towards the horizon, a fog of greater or less density limits the view; the vision itself might penetrate much farther, but an external obstacle arrests it; it does not find there the light it needs. Regard now the horizon under the pure and brilliant sky of the south; the plains, distant as well as near, are bathed in light; the human eye can penetrate there as far as its organization permits. If it pierces no farther, it is not for want of light, but because its proper and natural force has attained its limit: the mind knows that there are spaces beyond that which the eye traverses, but the eye penetrates them not. This is an image of what happens to the mind itself when contemplating and studying the universe: it reaches a point where its clear sight, that is to say its positive appreciation, halts, not that it finds there the end of things themselves, but the limit of man's scientific appreciation of them; other realities present themselves to him; he has a glimpse of them; he believes in them spontaneously and naturally; it is not given to him to grasp them and to measure them; but he can neither ignore them, nor know them, neither have positive knowledge of them, nor refrain from having faith in them.

I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing what I wrote thirteen years ago upon the same subject, when philosophically examining the real meaning of the word faith. "The object of every religious belief," said I, "is in a certain, a large measure, inaccessible to human science. Human science may establish that object's reality; it may arrive at the boundary of this mysterious world; and assure itself of the existence there of facts with which man's destiny is connected; but it is not given to it so to attain the facts themselves as to subject them to its examination.

"Their incapacity to do so has struck more than one philosopher, and has led them to the conclusion that no such reality exists, that every religious belief contemplates subjects simply chimerical. Others, shutting their eyes to their own incompetency, have dashed daringly forwards towards the sphere of the supernatural; and just as if they had succeeded in penetrating into it, they have described its facts, resolved its problems, assigned its laws. It is difficult to say who shows more foolish arrogance, the man who maintains that that of which he cannot have positive knowledge has no real existence, or the man who pretends to be able to know everything that actually exists. However this may be, mankind has never for a single day assented to either assertion: man's instincts and his actions have constantly disavowed both the negation of the disbeliever and the confidence of the theologian. In spite of the former, he has persisted in believing in the existence of the unknown world, and in the reality of the relations which connect him with it: and notwithstanding the powerful influences of the latter, he has refused to admit their having attained their object—raised the veil; and so man has continued to agitate the same problems, to pursue the same truths, as ardently and as laboriously as at the first day, just as if nothing had been done at all." [Footnote 23]

[Footnote 23: Meditations et Êtudes Morales, p. 170. Paris, 1851.]

I have just read again the excellent compendium given by M. Cousin in his General History of Philosophy from the most Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. He establishes that all the philosophical labours of the human understanding have terminated in four great systems—sensualism, idealism, scepticism, and mysticism—the sole actors in that intellectual arena where, in all ages and amongst all nations, they are in turn in the position of combatants and of sovereigns. And, after having clearly characterised in their origin and their development these four systems, M. Cousin adds, "As for their intrinsic merits, habituate yourselves to this principle: they have existed; therefore they had their reason to exist; therefore they are true at least in part. Error is the law of our nature: to it we are condemned; and in all our opinions and all our words there is always a large allowance to be made for error, and too often for absurdity. But absolute absurdity does not enter into the mind of man; it is the excellence of man's thought, that without some leaven of truth it admits nothing, and absolute error is impossible. The four systems which have just been rapidly laid before you have had each their existence; therefore they contain truth, still without being entirely true. Partially true, and partially false, these systems reappear at all the great epochs. Time cannot destroy any one of them, nor can it beget any new one, because time develops and perfects the human mind, though without changing its nature and its fundamental tendencies. Time does no more than multiply and vary almost infinitely the combinations of the four simple and elementary systems. Hence originate those countless systems which history collects and which it is its office to explain." [Footnote 24]

[Footnote 24: Histoire Générale de la Philosophic depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu'à la fin du XVIII Siècle, par M. Victor Cousin, pp. 4-31. 1863.]

M. Cousin excels in explaining these numberless philosophical combinations, and in tracing them all back to the four great systems which he has defined; but there is a fact still more important than the variety of these combinations, and which calls itself for explanation. Why did these four essential systems—sensualism, idealism, scepticism, and mysticism, appear from the most ancient times? why have they continued to reproduce themselves always and everywhere, with deductions more or less logical, with greater or less ability, but still fundamentally always and everywhere the same? Why, upon these supreme questions, did the human mind achieve at so early a period, what may be termed, it is true, but essays at a solution, but which essays in some sort have exhausted the mind rather than satisfied it? How is it that these different systems, invented with such promptitude, have never been able either to come to an accord, nor has any one been able to prevail decidedly against another and to cause itself to be received as the truth? Why has philosophy, or, to speak more precisely, why have metaphysics, remained essentially stationary; great at their birth, but destined not to grow: whereas the other sciences—those styled natural sciences—have been essentially progressive: at first feeble, and making in succession conquest after conquest; these they have been able to retain, until they have formed a domain day by day more extended and less contested?

The very fact that suggests these questions contains the answer to them. Man has, upon the fundamental subject of metaphysics, a primitive light, rather the heritage and dowry of human nature, than the conquest of human science. The metaphysician appropriates it as a torch to lighten him on his obscure and ill-defined path. He finds in man himself a point of departure at once profound and certain; but his aim is God; that is to say, an aim above his reach.

Must we, then, renounce the study of the great questions which form the subject of metaphysics as a vain labour, where the human mind is turning indefinitely in the same circle, incapable not only of attaining the object which it is pursuing, but of making any advance in its pursuit?

Often, and with more ability than has been evinced by the Positive school of the present day, has this judgment been pronounced against metaphysics. But that judgment man's mind has never accepted, and never will accept; the great problems which pass beyond the finite world lie propounded before him; never will he renounce the attempt to solve them; he is impelled to it by an irresistible instinct, an instinct full of faith and of hope, in spite of the repeated failure of his efforts. As man is in the sphere of action, so is he also in that of thought; he aspires higher than it is possible to achieve: this is his nature and his glory; to renounce his aspirations would be declaring his own forfeiture. But without any such abdication, it is still necessary that he should know himself, it is necessary that he should understand that his strength here below is infinitely less than his ambition, and that it is not given him to have any positive scientific knowledge of that infinite and ideal world towards which he dashes. The facts and the problems which he there encounters are such, that the methods and the laws which direct the human mind in the study of the finite world are inapplicable. The infinite is for us the object not of science but belief, and it is alike impossible for us either to reject or penetrate it. Let man, then, feel a profound sentiment of that double truth: let him, without sacrificing the ambitious aspirations of his intelligence, recognise the limits imposed upon his achievements in science; he will not then be long in also recognising that, in the relations of the finite with the infinite—of himself with God—he stands in need of superhuman assistance, and that this does not fail him. God has given to man what man never can conquer, and revelation opens to him that world of the infinite over which, by its own exertions and of itself alone, man's mind never could spread light. The light man receives from God himself.

Fifth Meditation.
Revelation.

When it was objected to Leibnitz "that there is nothing in the intelligence that has not first been in the sense," Leibnitz replied, "if not the intelligence itself." [Footnote 25]

[Footnote 25: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.—Nisi intellectus ipse.]

In the answer of Leibnitz I will change but a single word, and substitute for intelligence, soul. Soul is a term more comprehensive and more complete than intelligence; it embraces everything in the human being that is not body and matter; it is not the mere intelligence, a special faculty of man; it is all the intellectual and moral man.

The soul possesses itself and carries with it into life native faculties and an inborn light: these manifest and develop themselves more and more as they come into relation with the exterior world; but they had still an existence prior to those relations, and they exercise an important influence upon what results. The external world does not create nor essentially change the intellectual and moral being that has just come into life, but it opens to it a stage where that being acts in accordance at once with its proper nature, and the conditions and influences in the midst of which the action takes place. The hypothesis of a statue endowed with sensibility is a contradiction; in seeking to explain man's first growth, it loses sight of the entire intellectual and moral being.

When, as I said before, man first entered the world, he did not enter it, he could not enter it, as a new-born babe, with the mere breath of life; he was created full grown, with instincts and faculties complete in their power and capable of immediate action. We must either deny the creation and be driven to monstrous hypotheses, or admit that the human being who now develops himself slowly and laboriously, was at his first appearance mature in body and in mind.

The creation implies then the Revelation, a revelation which lighted man at his entrance into the world, and qualified him from that very moment to use his faculties and his instincts. Do we, can we, picture to ourselves the first man, the first human couple, with a complete physical development, and yet without the essential conditions of intellectual activity, physically strong and morally a nonentity, the body of twenty years and the soul in the first hour of infancy? Such a fact is self-contradictory, and impossible of conception.

What was the positive extent of this primal revelation, the necessary attendant upon creation, which occurred in the first relation of God with man? No man can say. I open the book of Genesis and there I read:

"And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. … Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." [Footnote 26]

[Footnote 26: Genesis ii. 15-24.]

According, then, to the Bible, the primitive revelation essentially bore upon the three points,—marriage, language, and the duty of man's obedience to God his Creator: Adam received at the hand of God the moral law of his liberty, the companion of his life, and the faculty by which he was enabled to name the creatures that were around him: in other words, the three sources of religion, of family, and of science were immediately unclosed to him. It is not necessary here to enter upon any of the questions which have been raised, as to the human origin of language, the primitive language, or the formation of families, with their influence upon the great organisation of society: the limits of the primitive revelation cannot be determined scientifically; the fact of the revelation itself is certain. This is the light which lighted the first man from his first entrance upon life, and without which it is impossible to conceive that he could have survived.

The primitive revelation did not abandon mankind on its development and dispersion; it accompanied it everywhere, as a general and permanent revelation. The light which had lighted the first man spread amongst all nations and throughout all ages, assuming the character of ideas, universal and uncontested; of instincts, spontaneous and indestructible. No nation has been without this light, none left to its own unassisted efforts to grope its way through the darkness of life. Let not the human understanding pride itself too much upon its works; the glory does not belong to it alone: what it has accomplished it has accomplished by aid of the primitive principles received from God; in all his works and all his progress man has had for point of departure and support that primitive revelation. All the grand doctrines, all the mighty institutions, which have governed the world, whatever intermixture of monstrous and fatal errors they may have contained, have preserved a trace of the fundamental verities which were the dowry of humanity at its birth. God has forsaken no portion of the human race; and not less amidst the errors into which it has fallen, than in the noble developments which constitute its glory, we recognise signs of the primitive teaching derived from its Divine Author.

After the revelation made to the first man, and in the midst of the general revelation diffused over all mankind, a great event occurs in history: a special revelation takes place, and has for its seat the bosom of an inconsiderable nation, that had been shut in during sixteen centuries in a little corner of the world; and it was thence that, nineteen centuries ago, that revelation proceeded to enlighten and to subdue, according to the predictions of its Author, all the human race.

A man of an imagination as fertile as his knowledge is profound, who, with an admirable candour has in his works associated hypothesis and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the University of Göttingen, has recently thus characterised this event:—"The history of the old Jewish people is fundamentally the history of the true religion, proceeding from step to step to its complete development, rising through all kinds of struggles, until it achieves a supreme victory, and finally manifesting itself in all its majesty and power, in order to spread irresistibly, by its proper virtue, so as to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations." [Footnote 27]

[Footnote 27: H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus. 2nd ed., vol. i. p. 9. Göttingen, 1851. ]

How is the great event thus characterised by M. Ewald proved? By what marks can we distinguish the Divine origin of this special revelation that became the Christian religion? What does it affirm itself in support of its claim to the moral conquest of mankind?

At the very outset, in proving her dogmas and precepts to have come from God, the Christian revelation asserts that the documents in which it is written are themselves of divine origin. The divine inspiration of the sacred volume is the first basis of the Christian Faith, the external title of Christianity to authority over souls. What is the full import of this title? What the signification of the inspiration of the sacred volumes?

Sixth Meditation.
The Inspiration Of The Scriptures.

I have read the sacred volumes over and over again, I have perused them in very different dispositions of mind, at one time studying them as great historical documents, at another admiring them as sublime works of poetry. I have experienced an extraordinary impression, quite different from either curiosity or admiration. I have felt myself the listener of a language other than that of the chronicler or the poet; and under the influence of a breath issuing from other sources than human. Not that man does not occupy a great place in the sacred volumes; he displays himself there, on the contrary, with all his passions, his vices, his weaknesses, his ignorance, his errors; the Hebrew people shows itself rude, barbarous, changeable, superstitious, accessible to all the imperfections, to all the failings, of other nations. But the Hebrew is not the sole actor in his history; he has an Ally, a Protector, a Master, who intervenes incessantly to command, inspire, direct, strike, or save. God is there, always present, acting—

"Et ce n'est pas un Dieu comme vos dieux frivoles, Insensibles et sourds, impuissants, mutilés, De bois, de marbre, ou d'or, comme vous le voulez." [Footnote 28]
"Not such a god as are your friv'lous gods, Insensible and deaf, weak, mutilated, Of wood, or stone, or gold, as you will have them."

[Footnote 28: Corneille, Polyeucte, acte iv. sc. 3.]

It is the God One and Supreme, All Powerful, the Creator, the Eternal. And even in their forgetfulness and their disobedience, the Hebrews believe still in God: He is still the object at once of their fear, of their hope, and of a faith that persists in the midst of the infidelity of their lives. The Bible is no poem in which man recounts and sings the adventures of his God combined with his own; it is a real drama, a continued dialogue between God and man personified in the Hebrews; it is, on the one side, God's will and God's action, and, on the other, man's liberty and man's faith, now in pious association, now at fatal variance.