Part 3

It is the absolute necessity of this co-operation of the public in the life of free government which gives so capital an importance to the popular beliefs, moral and religious. {xlix} When I say beliefs, moral and religious, I attach to the word a sense at once the largest and most positive: these beliefs may have different dogmas and different internal organizations; I am not one of those who believe that Romanists are necessarily hostile to civil liberty, or that the doctrine of the right of private judgment impels Protestants inevitably to anarchy. What is indispensable is, that in their diversity the beliefs styled moral and religious should be beliefs really moral and religious--beliefs which recognize and attest that man is naturally moral and religious, and which assign to man something essentially to distinguish him from the material world in the midst of which he lives, in short a soul. Nations animated by such beliefs are the only ones which accept really under a free _régime_ a large share both of its responsibility and of its active duties: it is only when so animated that they give consequently to civil Liberty the potent support of which it stands in need, for it is only then that they seriously believe in the existence of moral Liberty. The world has seen more than once how feeble and precarious an affection men feel for liberty when they no longer believe in the human soul; and with what a tame complacency, when they regard themselves as an ephemeral combination of material elements, they submit to the empire of the material forces which assail them. {l} Many in these days are of opinion that it is enough in a free country if religious beliefs are freely practised by those who profess them, and externally respected by others, and that all which can be expected from them is an indirect influence in favour of the maintenance of order. But this is a complete misapprehension of the great facts of nature and of human society. There are two things which never fail finally to prove incompatible, Liberty and Falsehood. Whether from prudence or in tenderness for the opinions of those who surround him, a man isolated in position may preserve silence, or may utter even a falsehood as to what he thinks and believes respecting the supreme questions concerning Man's nature and Man's destiny; this is possible, for such cases are seen; a single isolated individual is so paltry a thing, and passes so quickly, that his silence or his falsehood can exercise but little influence upon the vast ocean of society in which he is plunged: but the falsehood or the silence of a free people from feelings of respect or of prudence cannot be regarded as possible; their opinions and their sentiments concerning the supreme questions of humanity manifest themselves necessarily, and carry with them in such manifestation their natural and logical consequences. {li} To engage a free people to treat with tenderness and respect, to refrain from contesting, perhaps even to reduce to practice, moral and religious beliefs in which it does not itself believe, is to give to it not only a very discreditable but a very impracticable counsel. Liberty in the domain of civil society calls for and infallibly induces veracity in the region of the intellect; a free country can never escape in its public and practical life from the effectual influence of any ideas, whether moral or immoral, religious or irreligious, which may happen to be fermenting and spreading themselves abroad in the minds of the people.

{lii}

I leave generalities and call things by their proper names; in all that I have just said respecting beliefs moral and religious, it is of Christianity that I am thinking. That Christianity on the one hand is necessary to the firm establishment of civil Liberty amongst us, and on the other hand is very reconcilable with the principles and the rights of modern society, is what I have at heart to establish in the series of Meditations which I am now publishing.

I do not deceive myself by imagining that it will be an easy task to effect this reconciliation, and to restore at the present day to Christianity, the object of so many attacks, that influence of which the interests most dear to us, Liberty as well as Order, stand equally in need. Still, I believe that success is not only here possible but infallible. I was speaking just now of two contrary currents which had set in in the domain of intellect as well as of Politics, and which lead to the formation of groups profoundly different, Conservatives and Revolutionists, Liberals and Radicals, Spiritualists and Materialists, Christians and Disbelievers. {liii} No one of these groups really represents a dominant party in France: amidst them and around them there is a scattered and hesitating population, sometimes heedless, sometimes anxious, vacillating alternately between innovations and its traditions, wearied of its agitations and of its doubt, and not seeing clearly the quarter from which shall come that government of truth, of liberty, and of order, which is to give repose to man's thoughts and life and enable him again to rise. In this confused and wavering multitude there are to be found men whose ways of thinking, whose desires, and sometimes whose tastes, are, to appearance, very decided, but whose opinions or wills are in reality neither clear, determined, nor pronounced. We have here a vast field open to all the winds, accessible to every labourer, a field ever fertile, and, although harassed by various and incoherent attempts, still a field only demanding good seed to bear an abundant harvest. If we sound the depths of French society in all directions, and study it in all its elements and under all its aspects, we shall find it to be as I have here described it. {liv} Above and below, in all classes and parties, amongst the powerful and the humble, the learned and ignorant, we shall find everywhere, on one side groups of persons of resolute purposes devoting their activity to the service of opinions and causes the most contrary; on the other a wavering, vacillating crowd, in search of a path to follow, and impelled, perhaps, in the most different directions. Upon this population it is that we must act; it is amongst them that there are immense and decisive conquests to make; good aspirations, moral and religious instincts, those necessary preliminaries to faith in Christ, are by no means wanting; but to conduct them to their goal, to transform them into positive and effectual convictions, we must accommodate ourselves to the general character of this population; we must be of our time, and speak its language; an adequate satisfaction must be offered, and a necessary confidence must be inspired, before we can expect that a population, anxious to ensure the rights and the interests of its new life, should give in return its soul. {lv} It is not a complacent indulgence that I am counselling, it is not concessions that I ask from the contemporary defenders of Christianity; what their mission demands is, that they should know, that they should comprehend, that they should love the society to which they are addressing themselves, and that they should zealously occupy themselves with it to rally it under their banner, not to cast it prostrate or to humiliate it under their blows.

Not only must their work have this character, but when it has it prospers, and the nineteenth century has seen instances of such success. I shall only cite two, which occurred at different epochs, and in which the modes of action were different. Why did Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire exercise upon their times, and especially upon the youth of their times, so extraordinary an influence? {lvi} First, because the awakening of Christianity which they provoked was a thing in harmony with the popular instincts, but also because, in the midst of the religious reaction of which they were the organs, they each of them, by degrees and by different processes, respectively inspired the France of their days with the sentiment that they were its children and its friends, that they shared its new aspirations, that they accepted its political transformation, and that it was not in order to reconstitute it on its ancient basis that they wished it to be Christian. They more than once astounded, disquieted, even shocked their country, the one by his political career, the other by his monastic zeal; still their popularity continued, and they influenced it, the one by causing Christianity to resume her place in the modern literatures of France, the other notwithstanding his having re-established in France the monastic orders. The reason of this is, that in spite of the prejudices which it entertained against them, and the opinions in which it differed from them, France felt itself understood and honoured by them; it rejoiced in their glory, because it believed in their sympathy.

{lvii}

Men such as M. de Chateaubriand and the Father Lacordaire are rare; but the spirit which animated them, the comprehension of their age and country which distinguished them, did not die with them, nor are they without successors in their work of religion and patriotism. Beyond a doubt the Faith of Christ and the Church of Rome have in our days had no champion more eloquent and more liberal than M. de Montalembert, and worthily the Father Hyacinthe occupies the pulpit from which once resounded the voice of the Father Lacordaire. At the side of these names, already more than once cited by me, I see others start up of a different origin and with a different physiognomy, but devoted to the same cause and to the same work. {lviii} At the very moment at which I am terminating these Meditations, two compositions meet my eye, published by men, neither of whom I have the honour to know, men very different in position and in ideas: the one a Romanist, the other a Protestant, the one a great Prelate in his Church, the other a simple Pastor in his; both firm Christians, and both sympathizers with the instincts, the aspirations, and the moral and intellectual ideas prevalent in the present state of French society; both having the resolution and the ability required in order to present Christianity to Frenchmen under the form and in the language most proper to make it penetrate the soul. The one is Monseigneur Darboy, the Archbishop of Paris, the other, M. Decoppel, pastor at Alais. The former has just addressed to the clergy of his diocese, (Lent, 1868,) _A Pastoral Letter upon the Truth of Christianity_. [Footnote 3] The second presented, on the 7th of November in the previous year, to the National Evangelical Conference assembled at Nérac, _A Report as to the Actual Requirements of Preachers in the Protestant Churches_. [Footnote 4]

[Footnote 3: This Pastoral Letter was published at full length in the _Gazette de France_, on the 25th and 26th of February, 1868.]

[Footnote 4: This report was published, at Toulouse, by the Society for the Publication of Religious Books, 1868.]

{lix}

I was struck, in spite of their diversity, by the substantially analogous character of these two documents, and I cite them here because I would set in a clear light the great fact which each reveals, that a general and contemporaneous work is now being prosecuted in order to maintain and reestablish the harmony between the Christianity of former ages and the spirit of the present century, a work of which the mission is to solve, as far as the solution can rest with man, the question whether our epoch is Christian.

"Religion," says the Archbishop of Paris, "is a fact that was contemporary with primitive man--a fact present in all ages, ever paramount, ever visible, although not everywhere to the same degree. Never was there wanting in the world a voice to remind man of the truths of Religion, whether it proceeded from the tent of the Patriarch, the synagogue of the Jew, or the church of the Catholic; whether it was heard in the whisperings of a simple and upright conscience, or emanated from legislators or prophet raised up by Heaven, or was the voice of God himself incarnate, constituting Himself the preceptor and the model of His creatures, humanity was never so imperfect as that these lofty lessons did not draw forth from the generously faithful responses more or less unanimous.

{lx}

"Heathen nations--their history proves it--have preserved something of these hopes and of the religious dogmas connected with them. The grandsons of Noah, in dispersing in the plains of Sennaar, convey to the four quarters of the earth the traditions which they received from their grandsire, and which are the common patrimony of the human race. Doubtless these traditions are gradually altered and deformed by the vain intermixtures of fables, which owe their origin to the dreamers of the far East and to the poets of Greece and of Rome; but in the eyes of the multitude, and particularly of those who are its superiors and its governors, the grand features of the truth are readily distinguishable. Thus, the existence of God and the action of Providence, the distinction of good and of evil, the original fall of man and the necessity for an atonement, the immortality of the soul, the rewards and punishments of another life; all these doctrines, more or less disfigured, it is true, live in the depths of the conscience of the people. {lxi} Even Pagans have their souls by nature Christian, which testify in favour of justice and virtue; and if Pagans are to be condemned, says St. Paul, it is not for having ignored God, but for having neglected to serve Him and to glorify Him.

"At an era nearer to ourselves, three centuries ago, a sorrowful work was accomplished. Theological disputes led to religious wars, and by a tearing asunder of ties which it is impossible too much to deplore, Europe divided itself into Catholics and Protestants. But in spite of this fatal resolution it remained Christian, although not in the same degree. Their political charters and institutions, their civil laws and social habits, breathe all of Christianity; and the character of their baptism remains stamped upon their foreheads, which it for ever ennobles.

{lxii}

"And now this fact, which is the common work of so many generations, made up of beliefs expressed in every kind of manner and sometimes practised even to heroism, written in books sacred and profane, engraved on marble and on brass, in institutions and in laws, in the mind and in the heart of nations--this fact, what is its moral value, and what its bearing? Are we to be told that it is purely natural--the spontaneous production of our habits, the simple result of our instincts--and, so to say, an irrepressible necessity of mankind? Even in this case it is divine, as divine as our nature itself, which was directly created by God; and so we must recognise and respect Religion as a thing true, necessary and divine. It is reason, it is common sense which tells us this.

"But there is more than that, my very dear brethren. This fact, as it presents itself, so general and so constant, is not merely the common work of the races of mankind. Our nature, left to its own resources and its proper energy, is incapable of producing it and of continuing it with a brilliancy that so endures, and with a force which renews itself every day. {lxiii} It is also, it is more especially the providential and prodigious effect of a cause to which all of us are subject, men and nations, and which here shows itself that it is so by giving to its effects a supernatural character. ... Supernatural means were necessary, that is to say, a continual action of God always in relation to the varying exigencies of each different age, and the constant requirements of humanity, in order that the person of the Revealer having disappeared, and His direct action being no longer visible, His teachings, His spirit, and His institutions should be maintained in the world in a manner authentic, infallible, and triumphant. In a single word, there was necessary a perpetual assistance of God, accrediting the mission of His envoys by extraordinary facts--facts of a superhuman power, miraculously protecting their work against the consequences of the weaknesses of some and of the perversity of others, intervening with supernatural _éclat_ to enable the mission to develop itself amongst nations incessantly, to act more and more efficaciously upon them in spite of their shortcomings and their revolts, and to aid them and to support them in their religious and predestined course.

{lxiv}

"This paramount action, this divine action, is manifested in the highest degree in Religion. After the miracles and the prophecies of ancient times, after the Jewish nation, whose history is a prophecy and one unceasing miracle, Christianity appears with signs so supernatural that it is impossible for us to deceive ourselves. Miraculous agency appears at every turn. The Saviour, and what he affirms concerning himself, His discourses, His character and His actions, the difficulties of His undertaking, the marvels of wisdom and sanctity which He accomplished; finally, the survival and the development of His work through centuries; everything here forces us to recur to the fact of the direct intervention of God--sole possible means of finding a satisfactory explanation of such grand results."

{lxv}

The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited--a development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity in particular; considered as a grand fact--a fact universal and permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer, by the same title, if not in the same degree; {lxvi} a fact at once human and divine--human by its accordance with man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect, on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?

{lxvii}

The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there, he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly and without compromise.

"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the preacher encounters more or less in our congregations. {lxviii} Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time, they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the objections which we attribute to them.

{lxix}

"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others--it is that of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought, whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.

{lxx}