Part 4

"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts, Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality, and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. ... Let nothing henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'

{lxxi}

"Thus contemporary Atheism seeks to conquer the masses by their weak side, by their democratical and liberal instincts. This is not a mere system; it is a powerful party which has its lecturers, its newspapers, its associations, its congresses, and its Propaganda. A man of earnest meaning, M. Pearson, estimated at 640,000 copies the number of publications avowedly atheistical which appeared in England in the course of the year 1851. And it is not only in England that Atheism is raising its head, it is in France, Germany, and Italy.

"Far from me the idea of setting in the same category our Radical Reformers, and the disbelievers and free thinkers who seek to destroy every faith and all religion! Let us hope that the former never will go so far as these. {lxxii} But, definitively, they openly extend to them a sympathizing hand; they greet their writings with marked favour; and, say it we must, when they go so far as to deny the supernatural, stripping thus Christianity of every divine authority, or when merely they proclaim the unimportance of dogmas to a religious life, they are making common cause with Atheism, and working, without suspecting that they are doing so, at the same work of destruction.

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

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

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

{lxxv}

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

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

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

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

{lxxvii}

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

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

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

{lxxx}

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

Quel che morir chiaman gli sciocchi.

Guizot. Paris, _April_, 1868.

{lxxxiii}

Contents.

Page

Preface v

I. -- Christianity and Liberty 1

II. -- Christianity and Morality 52

III. -- Christianity and Science 93

IV. -- Christian Ignorance 128

V. -- Christian Faith 153

VI. -- Christian Life 190

Appendix. -- Observations upon the Work called "Ecce Homo" 213

{lxxxiv}

{1}

Meditations On Christianity

in its

Relation To The Actual State Of Society And Opinion.

First Meditation.

Christianity And Liberty.

The passionate longing both of men and of nations in these days for Liberty and Equality, is a fact not only evident but dominant in modern civilization. Sometimes this desire has for its object Liberty only, sometimes Equality only, sometimes both simultaneously. Sometimes the desire is at once intelligent and respectable, sometimes nothing more than a blind and ill-regulated impulse. {2} Sometimes the feeling displays itself in revolutions, in which it develops itself in all its intensity; sometimes it fades away, and subsides amidst the reactions which those very revolutions have, by their calamities and excesses, called forth. At one time men vaunt that the problem is solved, at another they are discouraged, and pronounce it to be insolvable. But whether they vaunt or are discouraged, the passionate desire continues to exist, and the problem ever reappears. Such a state of opinion may be applauded or may be deplored; it may have incense showered upon it or it may be visited with malediction; but to escape from it is an impossibility. It remains a trial which humanity is condemned to pass through; it furnishes it with a task which it is bound to perform.

But it is not only this fact and this problem with which our epoch has to deal; at their side there is another not less important, the solution of which also falls within the mission of the age. Many of the friends of Liberty and Equality regard Christianity, and especially Roman Catholicism, as their greatest enemy. {3} In his moments of perverseness and angry waywardness, Voltaire so treated it. Thousands of men, not only men of intelligence, but a multitude of others, obscure enough, still not deficient in activity, speak and act under the empire of the same idea; at one time brutal, at another hypocritical, the anti-Christian sentiment is at once ardent and far-spread. Is it well founded? Is Christianity, after all, the obstacle to the progress of Liberty and of Equality? Or is it not, on the contrary, rather true that both already owe much to Christianity, and that both require its sanction and its support to ensure their legitimate and durable triumph? The great question of the 19th century remains in suspense, and social order in peril, so long as that other question is not solved.

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

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

{4}

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

[Footnote 6: Matthew x. 28.]

[Footnote 7: Mark xvi. 15.]

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

The human soul is no mere word, no mere abstraction, no mere hypothesis; the soul is the human being himself, the individual being who feels and thinks, enjoys and suffers, wills and acts, who observes and knows himself, in the complexity of his actual condition, and to whom his destiny in remote futurity is an object of present solicitude. {5} To those who confound soul and body, and see in man only a product, an ephemeral form of matter, I have nothing to say. What have they to do with the words of the Gospel--with the immense value attached to a fugitive shadow, deceived according to them as to its own reality, and only appearing to lose itself forthwith in nonentity? It is Spiritualists and Christians who speak with propriety when they discourse in grand and elevated tones of the human soul; and if they so discourse it is because they see in every human soul a true being, a real and individual man, with the grandeur of man's nature and of man's destiny. What constitutes the essential worth of the human being, of every human being, is, that he is free to act or not to act, and that he is morally responsible how he acts. Man believes essentially in the distinction of moral good and evil and in the obligation which this entails; he believes that he is at liberty to act up to it or not as he pleases, that he is responsible for the use which he makes of his liberty. It is because such is the nature of man, whether his own conduct is in conformity to it or not, that the Gospel exalts man so nigh, and accords to him so sublime a destiny. {6} Philosophers, Christian and anti-Christian too, have made great efforts, in my opinion ill-judged efforts, to solve the problem of man's liberty in relation to God's prescience; the Gospel recognises and proclaims human liberty without troubling itself about the problem of philosophy. The Christian Religion entirely rests upon the fact which it assumes, that man is a free and responsible being. Man's liberty is the point from which Christianity starts in all that she says to humanity, and in every command that she gives to humanity.

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

{7}

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

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

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

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

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

[Footnote 10: Acts vii. 59.]

{8}

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

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

It is the peculiar characteristic and honour of Christianity that it derives both the right of resistance to oppression, and the principle of even Liberty itself, not from the temporal and transitory interests of earthly life, but from the moral and eternal interests of the soul. At the same time that it affirms the principle of Liberty and proclaims its consequences, it equally affirms and proclaims the principles and rights of Authority. {9} I have referred to this upon another occasion; when Jesus made that reply to the question of the Pharisees whether it was permissible or not to pay tribute to Caesar, "Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's; and unto God the things that are God's," he established in principle the distinction between the religious life and civil life, between the Church and the State. Cæsar has no right to intervene with his laws and material force, between the soul of man and his God; and on his side the faithful worshipper of God is bound to fulfil towards Cæsar the duties which the necessity of the maintenance of public order imposes. [Footnote 12]

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

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

{10}

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

Even if I wished, it would be impossible for me in this place to refer to more than the general and evident facts of history. If I remount to the origins of the different religions, I observe that Christianity was the only one which did not appeal to force; she was the only one which did not employ force to issue forth from her cradle and to grow. During more than three centuries she alone combated and conquered her adversaries by vanquishing souls in the name of truth and by the arms of truth. {11} If I interrogate the results, I find that three great religious establishments--Paganism, Bouddhism, and Mahometanism--have held, and, with Christianity, still hold a great place in the world. Paganism, after some fair but brief moments of progress, attained to nothing but the anarchy of the Greek and Roman Republics, and the despotic decay of the Roman Empire. Bouddhism did nothing but generate the fantastic superstitions and the enervating abstractions of a pantheistic mythology, amidst the immobility of the castes and the stagnation of absolute power. Mahometanism carried into every quarter to which she penetrated only the yoke of force, the incurable animosity of races, the sterility of conquest. Christianity alone accepted the spirit of Liberty and Progress where she found it already existing in the soul of man and in human societies, and where she did not find it she awakened it.