Part 13

Every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has yet to submit to a test--the great test--the practical application. The idea has to be transformed into reality, the thought to be made life.

Philosophers pride themselves upon searching only for the truth, upon busying themselves only with the theoretical truth of their ideas, to the neglect of every other consideration. They are right in one sense: for the knowledge of truth, of truth as it is in itself, is that which the human mind proposes to itself as its object, and is the only thing which can satisfy it; if man pretends to it, it is his right and his honour to do so: whatever the object of his study, the mind does not halt or rest until it believes that it has attained to the truth.

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This is no privilege of philosophers; neither are they the only ones for whom truth is a law: all men have a right to live under its empire, whether as to facts or ideas. No one, not even those who affect most disdain for theory, would venture to lay down the principle that we should be indifferent whether we are essentially in the right, and that practically there is no difference between truth and error.

But by what signs is truth recognisable? Are there no other than the affirmations of that inquisitive spectator, named the human mind? Is it only by language, by reasoning, and by discussion, that the truth of an idea and of a doctrine manifests and proves itself?

To such a pretension, if advanced, I hesitate not to reply with a denial, and in doing so, to repeat what I have just said: every doctrine, religious, moral, or political, has to submit to a test,--the practical application. {192} The idea transformed into reality, the thought made the life; these are the most certain signs of an idea being intrinsically true, these, too, are proofs of its reasonable legitimacy, which it is bound to give.

There is a radical difference between the material world and the intellectual world. The laws which regulate and maintain order in the material world, are independent of man, of both his thought and his volition. It matters not that he knows these laws, or is ignorant of them; they do not the less exist and govern; man has no power to change, arrest, or suspend their operation; he cannot influence them. Galileo was right to say of the earth, in spite of his judges, "Still it moves;" it would have moved even if Galileo, as well as his judges, had been ignorant of the fact, and the contest between the whirlpool of Descartes and Newton's principle of attraction, was a matter perfectly indifferent to the general system of the world. _There_ man's error is absolutely without effect or influence.

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In the intellectual and moral world it is otherwise; here man is not only spectator, he is an actor, an actor free or not to act-- to act with effect. He thinks and he wills, and so contributes to the facts which take place in the world; he knows, or is ignorant of, the laws, he respects or violates the laws which preside here, but which do not preside here as laws external to and independent of himself. Man's errors, man's faults, are not here without real and serious consequences; they have the power of sowing evil and of carrying perturbation into the intellectual and moral world, thus delivered up, as the Bible proclaims, to the disputes of men.

Learned men, in the study and appreciation of the material world, separate sciences absolutely, and, considering each apart from its practical application, occupy themselves in their scientific investigations only with the pure theory. This I understand and admit; for such a course does not endanger the security of society or the results of their own labours. {194} Their ignorance and their errors have no doubt grave inconveniences; the facts and the forces of the material world are either misconceived or not turned sufficiently to account; man and human society do not reap all the advantages which the profound and exact knowledge of the truth might, in this respect, procure them. Such ill, although real, is of a negative description, a good, it may be, missed or postponed; but no general disturbance results in that material world upon which naturalists or chemists concentrate their labours; the world will not have to undergo the effect, nor to pay the penalty, of their ignorance or of their errors. The intellectual and moral world, on the contrary, runs a greater risk, and imposes upon its teachers severer duties; no doubt these study it as freely, and make truth, too, their object; but science does not here escape the weight of its own conclusions; it is a power as formidable in its abuse as it is in itself sublime; it may carry into the world to which it addresses itself trouble instead of order, incendiarism instead of light. If practical application is not here the object of science, it is still its necessary and appropriate proof; in facts as in a mirror are reflected the truth or the error, the good or the ill, of human opinions.

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Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single small part of this history, the most modest part, the least pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the furtherance of his ultimate destiny.

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Three words, "_Rights of Man_" inscribed upon the banners of the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his humanity. Three other words, _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_, have served as a commentary upon the three former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.

Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the good also to perish.

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It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself, the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state, where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles, Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life, constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant precept of the Christian religion. {198} It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom. {199} Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear themselves greeted as _brethren_.

The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand to the political authorities, or in which the different classes stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association, called family. {200} There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman family,--we shall not need to examine long before we discern clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and liberty.

I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not merely in the records of a few years, but through three centuries. {201} Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny, and never made appeals to insurrection against authority. Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected, and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty. {202} They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage to its right at the same time that they maintained their own right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]

[Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]

Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them, and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain." [Footnote 45]

[Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]

And when St. Paul, although exposed to all kinds of perils and struggles, spread abroad throughout the Roman Empire the doctrines of Jesus, he said to the new Christians, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. ... Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake." [Footnote 46]

[Footnote 46: Romans xiii. 1, 5. ]

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Nor can I here omit again to cite the words which Jesus himself addressed to the Pharisees: "Render under Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's." [Footnote 47]

[Footnote 47: Matthew xxii. 21.]

The respect for authority as much as for liberty, the right of power as well as the right of conscience, the separation of religious life from civil life,--all these were not, for the primitive Christians, simple necessities arising out of their situation, nor simple counsels of prudence; they were principles of doctrine and precepts of life, recognised and practised in the name of justice and of truth.

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Christian doctrine and Christian practice have been, I know, greatly altered, lost sight of, violated, in the course of the history of the Christian world. Human nature succumbs readily to the temptations of victory and pleasure; when Christianity once became powerful it was too often invaded and disfigured by earthly interests and passions; ambition, cupidity, pride, the arrogance of power, and the lies of cunning; every evil inclination, every vice which the Christian faith rebukes and combats, displayed themselves in this world which Christianity had not conquered merely to hand it over to them, but from which, nevertheless, it had not expelled them. The grand and salutary doctrines of Christianity have been often themselves perverted and profaned to the service of an egotism assuming every shape and carried to every pitch. Still they never were lost, they never perished in this impure mixture and this unworthy use; they survived, they combated, sometimes in obscurity, sometimes in the broad light of day; everywhere, at every epoch, Christian voices, Christian lives, and Christian Reforms protested and struggled against the passions and the corruptions of mankind. And in spite of all these centuries, so sombre, so full of agitation, of violence, and of oppression, so full of moral and material ill, the decline of man and of human society did not ensue. {205} Greece and Rome, in their state of youthful growth, were glorious and vigorous; and glorious, too, was the development in them of human intelligence and dignity; but their career was short, and these two brilliant forms of society did not find in their ideas, traditions, or models, a sufficiency of moral force to enable them to escape from, or even survive, the seductive and corrupting influence of material grandeur and of human success. Amidst all the sufferings, all the darkness, all the crimes which agitate her long career, Christianity has proved infinitely healthier and more sound; she has made herself an incessant subject of study; she has shifted her place upon her couch of sorrow; she has raised herself up, she has renewed, regenerated herself; she has grown and prospered at the same time that she has suffered; and in spite of the ills, vices, and perils against which Christianity has had to defend herself, and against which she will ever have to defend herself, she has before her, over the whole face of the world, a future immense and full of promise. This she owes to her origin--she was born in the manger of Jesus.

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There is at present a disposition amongst earnest and enlightened men to recognise, it is true, the services which Christianity has rendered to the world; but to attribute them only to the morality of Christianity. They laud to the sky the moral character of Jesus, and his moral precepts; but they repudiate, nay, deplore, the dogmas with which, in the Christian faith, Christian morality is combined and incorporated; they demand that the morality be separated from it, and be presented to man without anything but its intellectual beauty and practical excellence. Although not disputing that there is somewhat of human in the origin and empire of morality, I have established in this volume of Meditations that it is necessarily allied to religious belief, and that when separated from its divine source, and viewed apart from that which gives it sanction, it is incomplete, illogical, and powerless--a branch without root and without fruit. {207} I go farther now, and express my meaning fully. Not only is Christian morality intimately connected with Christian faith, as the Christian faith is itself connected with Christian dogmas, but Christian morals, Christian faith, and Christian dogmas have taken their origin, and derived their force, at a source still higher, and in an authority still more decisive. Christianity did not begin, it did not rise upon the world, as one body of doctrines or code of precepts; from its first step it was a truth, strange to the ordinary course of human affairs, and superior to them; a fact divine, and an act divine; it was as such, and by its character as such, that, sometimes all at once, and sometimes gradually, it struck men as by a blow and vanquished them, at first the rude and simple, then the great and learned, publicans and emperors, the disciples of Plato, and the fishermen of the sea of Gennesareth. {208} At different moments, and for different motives, all of them saw in the cradle, and the rapid extent of infant Christianity, a sublime and superhuman fact, a God present and acting in and by Jesus. Some recognised and adored him at the very moment of his appearing; others observed him with troubled and angry feelings; but, in proportion as the truth developed itself, even those who detested him doubted if they were right in doubting. The council and all the senate of the children of Israel had caused Peter and the other apostles to be placed in prison, and took counsel to have them put to death. "Then stood there up one in the council, a Pharisee, named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputation among all the people, and commanded to put the apostles forth a little space; and said unto them: Ye men of Israel, take heed to yourselves what ye intend to do as touching these men. For before these days rose up Theudas boasting himself to be somebody, to whom a number of men, about four hundred, joined themselves: who was slain, and all, as many as obeyed him, were scattered and brought to nought. {209} After this man rose up Judas of Galilee in the days of the taxing, and drew away much people after him: he also perished; and all, even as many as obeyed him, were dispersed. And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: But if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God." [Footnote 48]

[Footnote 48: Acts v. 21, 33--39.]

The question which Gamaliel thus put with respect to Christianity at its birth was not new; the high priest of Israel had already made the same demand of Jesus himself: "I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God? Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said." [Footnote 49]

[Footnote 49: Matthew xxvi. 63, 64.]

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The Jews replied to the affirmation of Jesus by crucifying him. A short time afterwards, when they sought to treat the apostles as their Master had been treated, Gamaliel counselled them to abide the test of time, and in the meanwhile to leave "these people in repose." They did not leave these people in repose, and the proof was only on that account the more decisive: after three centuries of persecutions and martyrdoms, the grand facts of Christianity,--the Revelation, the Incarnation, the Redemption, the Inspiration of the Scriptures,--became the grand dogmas of Christianity, the basis of Christian faith, which faith in its turn is the basis of Christian Life. Sixteen centuries elapsed from this trial of Christianity in its cradle, and it was made to undergo fresh and still ruder trials; in these trials earthly interests and human errors and passions had a great part; Christ's precepts were sometimes forgotten, and sometimes converted into human instruments; no doctrine or idea was ever so constantly in contact with, and at issue with, facts; never was theory more rigorously reviewed, more subjected to the test of practical application in every form and every shape. {211} The design which emanated from God traversed and surmounted all these perils; it braved the faults of its adherents and the blows of its enemies. It is engaged in our days in a new contest, and is subjected to fresh trials; it has entered upon it with the same arms, which, nineteen centuries ago, secured its triumph, with the grand facts which form the basis of Christian faith, and the great examples which furnish the rule of Christian living. The History of Christianity is the strongest proof of its Divinity, and the surest guarantee for its future. The authenticity and authority of this history will be the subject of the next and last series of my "Meditations."

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Appendix.

Ecce Homo: such is the title of a work published anonymously, at London and at Cambridge in 1866, which produced on its appearance a great sensation in London, a sensation which still continues: all the papers and reviews, whether religious, philosophical, or simply literary, busied themselves with it, either to praise or attack it; the distinguished chief of the Liberal Party himself, perhaps soon to be the Prime Minister of England, Mr. Gladstone, has just made it the subject of three articles, which are remarkable alike for acuteness, elegance, and eloquence. They appeared in one of the most widely circulated periodicals in his country. [Footnote 50]

[Footnote 50: "Good Words," a Monthly Review, edited by Norman Macleod, one of the Chaplains of her Majesty Queen Victoria. The articles referred to appeared in the numbers of January, February, and March, 1868.]

"No anonymous book," says he, "since the 'Vestiges of Creation' (now more than twenty years old), indeed, it might almost be said, no theological book, whether anonymous, or of certified authorship--that has appeared within the same interval, has attracted anything like the amount of notice and of criticism which have been bestowed upon the remarkable volume, entitled 'Ecce Homo.'"

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