CHAPTER VII.

MORAL CONDITIONS OF SOCIAL PEACE IN FRANCE.

The political conditions which I have just specified are indispensable to the re-establishment of social peace in France; but they alone will not suffice. Such a work requires something more than a good organization of powers; it requires a certain measure of prudence and virtue on the part of the people themselves. It is a gross delusion to believe in the sovereign power of political machinery. The free will of man plays a great part in social affairs, and the success of institutions must in the end depend on the men who live under them.

Much has lately been said about Christianity, and the name of Jesus Christ has been frequently introduced into the harangues of demagogues. God forbid that I should suffer my mind to dwell long on these profanations,--this hideous mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy. I shall only suggest one question--If the French nation were sincerely and practically Christian, what would be its conduct in the midst of the terrible difficulties by which it is agitated and perplexed?

The rich and great of the earth would earnestly and perseveringly labour to alleviate the distresses of those beneath them. Their intercourse with the poorer classes would be active, affectionate, morally and physically beneficent. The various sufferings and perils of humanity would call forth corresponding associations, endowments, and works of charity.

The poor and humble would be submissive to the will of God and the laws of society. They would seek the satisfaction of their wants in regular and assiduous labour, the improvement of their condition in good conduct and provident habits, and consolation and hope in the futurity promised to man.

These are the Christian virtues--they are called Faith, Hope, and Charity. Is this the conduct men are exhorted by the preachers of Democracy to pursue? Are these the sentiments which these men, who affect a veneration for the Founder of Christianity, try to rekindle in the hearts of the people?

I doubt whether they can carry the impudence of mendacity so far as to answer in the affirmative; and if they dared to do so, I am sure that, spite of the credulity of the public, they would receive a universal contradiction.

But these monstrous attempts, whether the result of fraud or of folly, will not succeed. Christianity will not be disfigured or degraded so. Nothing can be more anti-Christian than the ideas, the language, or the influence of the present race of reformers of social order. If Communism and Socialism prevailed, Christianity must become extinct: if Christianity were more potent, Communism and Socialism would soon sink into the chaotic mass of obscure and forgotten extravagances.

I wish to be perfectly just; and while attacking notions which are the disgrace and the curse of our times, I would acknowledge whatever germ of morality they contain, and show what virtuous pretexts or benevolent instincts may delude their advocates or seduce their converts.

There is a sentiment, noble and beautiful in itself, which has been much and often appealed to throughout all the perturbations and convulsions of society in France; this sentiment is, enthusiasm for mankind--the enthusiasm of confidence, sympathy, and hope. This feeling reigned supreme among us in 1789, and gave its resistless impulse to that epoch. There was no virtue that was not ascribed to man--no success that was not hoped and predicted for him. Faith and hope in man took the place of faith and hope in God. The trial was not long deferred. The idol did not long retain its power. Confidence was soon convicted of presumption, and sympathy ended in social war and the scaffold. The hopes that were fulfilled appeared insignificant, compared to those that had vanished like dreams. Never did experience advance with such rapid strides to confront and overthrow pride.

Yet it is to this same sentiment that our modern reformers of social order appeal. It is this same idolatrous enthusiasm for human nature that they invoke. At the same time that they rob man of his sublimest emotions and loftiest prospects, they exalt without measure his nature and his power: rather, I ought to say, they miserably degrade them, for they promise him nothing beyond this earth; but while there, their belief in him is blind and implicit--their hope from him, and for him, boundless.

The most melancholy reflection is, that this insane idolatry is their only excuse; the only one of their ideas which springs from a source of the smallest elevation, or possesses the smallest moral value. If they had not a blind faith in man, and a servile adoration of humanity, they would be nothing more than the propagators of a rapacious, brutish, and lawless materialism.

“If man exalteth himself,” says Pascal, “I abase him; if he abaseth himself, I exalt him.” We ought continually to bear in mind and to apply these admirable words. Certainly man is a being worthy to inspire us with respect and love, and with high hopes of his future condition. To those who were insensible to the nobleness of his nature and his destiny--to himself, if he forgot it--I should say with Pascal, “If man abaseth himself, I exalt him.” But to those who promise themselves everything from him, by promising him everything; whose expectations from him are as boundless as those they labour to excite in him; to those who, goaded by their own pride, are constantly striving to inflate his pride; who forget, and try to make him forget, the frailty and wretchedness of his nature, the supreme laws by which he is bound, and the support of which he stands in need,--to those men I would say with Pascal, “If man exalteth himself, I abase him.” And facts,--recent, glaring, incontrovertible facts,--say it far more impressively than I.

It is impossible to restore France to the state of things which prevailed in 1789--to rekindle that enthusiasm of presumptuous confidence and hope with which the nation was then drunk--an enthusiasm which then was genuine as well as general, had the ardour and spontaneity of youth, and was rendered excusable by inexperience, but which now would be only a false and factitious excitement; a thin, an ineffectual veil thrown over bad passions and insane dreams. By what incurable arrogance could we reject the lessons which God has lavished upon us for the last sixty years? He does not require of us to despair of ourselves and of our species, to abandon all efforts for its progress, or to shut our hearts against a tender sympathy in its weal or woe; but He does forbid us to exalt our own nature into an idol. He commands us to see it as it is; without illusion and without coldness; and to love and serve it according to the laws He has established. I have certainly no desire to extinguish any of the small portion of moral ardour still remaining in the world, nor to infuse additional doubt and indifference into hearts already so lukewarm and uncertain. But neither can I add to their delusions. It is not by retracing its course toward the sources of the revolution, that France will walk with a firm and animated step: those fountains are all dry, and our generation will not go to slake its thirst or refresh its spirit at them. You complain of its languor; you want to see the faith and the moral energy, which are the soul and strength of nations, revive among us: but it is vain to seek them in the revolutionary spirit, which is wholly incapable of inspiring them. It is a fire which has still power to consume, but can neither warm nor enlighten. Instead of reviving and invigorating our belief in the great truths which are the wholesome stimulants as well as the true guardians of society, they can only diffuse doubt and perplexity. Certainly France wants to be morally elevated and strengthened; she wants to regain her faith in, and attachment to, fixed and undisputed principles. But the revolutionary spirit can do nothing to appease these wants; the scenes and the harangues, the predictions and the recollections which it suggests, can only retard the work. The honour of its accomplishment is reserved for other moral powers and other intellectual tendencies.

Among the foremost, are the domestic sentiments and morals. The Family is now, more than ever, the first element and the last rampart of society. Whilst, in general society, everything becomes more and more mobile, personal, and transient, it is in domestic life that the demand for permanency, and the feeling of the necessity of sacrificing the present to the future, are indestructible. It is in domestic life that the ideas and the virtues which form a counterpoise to the excessive and ungoverned movement excited in the great centres of civilization, are formed. The tumult of business and pleasure, temptation and strife which reigns in our great cities, would soon throw the whole of society into a deplorable state of ferment and dissolution, if domestic life, with its calm activity, its permanent interests, and its fixed property, did not oppose solid barriers throughout the country to the restless waves of this stormy sea. It is in the bosom of domestic life, and under its influences, that private, the basis of public, morality is most securely maintained. There too, and in our days there almost exclusively, the affections of our nature,--friendship, gratitude, and self-devotion,--all the ties which unite hearts in the sense of a common destiny, grow and flourish. The time has been when, under other forms of society, these private affections found a place in public life; when devoted attachments strengthened political connexions. These times are past, never to return. In the vast and complicated and ever-moving society of our days, general interests and principles, the sentiments of the masses, and the combinations of parties, have the entire possession and direction of public life. The private affections are ties too delicate to exercise any powerful influence over the conflicts of that pitiless field. But it is never without serious injury that one of the vital elements of human nature is uprooted out of any of the fields of human action; and the complete absence of tender and faithful attachments in that almost exclusive domain of abstract ideas and general or selfish interests, has robbed political life of a noble ornament and a great source of strength. It is of incalculable importance to society that there should be some safe retreat in which the affectionate dispositions--I would almost say passions--of the heart of man may expand in freedom; and that, occasionally emerging from that retreat, they may exhibit their presence and their power by some beautiful examples in that tumultuous region of politics in which they are so rarely found. But these social virtues must be nursed in the bosom of domestic life; these social affections must spring from family affections. Home, the abode of stability and morality, also contains the hearth at which all our affections and all our self-devotion are kindled; it is in the circle of the Family that the noblest parts of our nature find satisfactions they would seek for else in vain; it is from that circle that, when circumstances demand, they can go forth to adorn and bless society.

Next to the spirit of family, the political spirit is that from which France has now the greatest services to expect, and which she ought to foster with the greatest care. The political spirit shows itself in the will and the power to take a regular and active part in public affairs, without employment of violence or risk of disturbance. The greater the spread and cultivation of the political spirit, the more does it teach men the necessity and the habit of seeing things as they are in their exact and naked truth. To see, not what exists, but what they wish; to indulge complacently in illusions about facts, as if facts would, with equal complacency, take the form that they desire,--is the radical and characteristic weakness of men still new to political life, and the source of their most fatal errors. To see things as they are, is the first and very excellent fruit of the political spirit, and gives birth to another not less excellent, viz.--that, by learning to see only what is, we learn to desire only what is possible; the exact appreciation of facts begets moderation in designs and pretensions. The political spirit, true and sincere to itself, becomes prudent and reasonable towards others. Nothing inclines men more to moderation than a full knowledge of the truth; for it is rarely that she throws all her weight into one scale. The political spirit is thus naturally led by prudence, if by no higher morality, to that respect for rights which is not only its fundamental law and essential merit, but the sole basis of social stability; since, where law ceases, nothing remains but force, which is essentially variable and precarious. The respect for rights supposes, or produces, the respect for law, the habitual source of rights. The real and the possible, rights and law, such are the subjects upon which the political spirit is constantly exercised, and which become the habitual objects of its inquiry and its veneration. It thus maintains, or re-establishes, a moral principle of fixity in the relations of individuals, and a moral principle of authority in those of the state.

The more the value for family ties shall increase at the expense of the selfishness of an isolated existence, and the more the political shall gain upon the revolutionary spirit, the more tranquil will the society of France become, and the more firmly will it rest upon its foundations.

Nevertheless, neither the domestic nor the political spirit would suffice for the task. They need the assistance of another and a higher spirit, whose influence penetrates more deeply than they can do into the human soul. It is peculiar to religion that she has a language for every individual; a language which all can understand, the high as well as the humble, the happy as well as the unhappy; and that she ascends or descends, without an effort, into every rank and region of society. And it is one of the admirable features of the constitution of the Christian church, that her ministers are not only scattered over, but form an integral part of, the whole of society; living as near to the cottage as the palace; in habitual and intimate intercourse with the highest and the lowest; equally the monitors of greatness and the consolers of misery. This tutelary power, spite of the abuses and the faults into which it has been led by its very force and extent, has for ages exercised a more vigilant and energetic control over the moral dignity and the dearest interests of man, than any other. Nobody would be so averse as I should, for the sake of religion herself, to see a revival of the abuses by which she has been disfigured or corrupted; but I confess that I do not fear this at the present day. The principles of lay supremacy and freedom of thought have definitively triumphed in modern society: they may still have some enemies to repel, and some conflicts to sustain, but their victory is certain; they have in their favour the prevailing institutions, manners, opinions, and passions; and that general and overwhelming current of ideas and events which flows on through all diversities, obstacles, and perils, in the same direction, at Rome, Madrid, Turin, Berlin, and Vienna, no less than at London or Paris. For modern society to fear religion, or to dispute her influence with acrimony, would therefore be a puerile alarm and a fatal error. You are surrounded by an immense and excited multitude; you complain that you want means to act upon it, to enlighten, direct, control, and tranquillize it; that you have little intercourse with these men, save through the tax-gatherer and the policeman; that they are given over, without defence, to the inflammatory declamations of charlatans and demagogues, and to the blind violence of their own passions. Dispersed among them, you have men whose express mission and constant occupation it is to guide their faith, to console their distresses, to show them their duties, to awaken and elevate their hopes, to exercise over them that moral influence which you vainly seek elsewhere. And would you not second these men in their work, when they can second you so powerfully in yours, precisely in those obscure enclosures where you so rarely penetrate, and where the enemies of social order enter continually, and sap all their foundations?

There is, it is true, a condition attached to the favour and the political efficacy of the religious spirit; it demands sincere respect, and liberty. I will even confess that the fears and desires of the religious party often render them unjust, captious, suspicious, rancorous, and exacting; that they sometimes fall into the vortex of those false, anarchical and chimerical ideas which it is their peculiar vocation to combat. I will make as large concessions as can be required, as to the injustice you must expect to submit to, and the precautions you will have to take; yet I shall say at the conclusion, as I said at the beginning, Do not hold up acrimonious disputes with religion; do not fear her influences; allow them space and liberty to expand and to act in the largest and most powerful manner. On the whole, they will certainly be more in favour of tranquillity than of strife, and will assist more than they will embarrass you.

If we were under that proximate necessity of acting, which affords a light indispensable to those who want to do more than lay down general principles of action, it would be our business to inquire by what practical means, by what positive institutions or laws, the domestic, the political, and the religious spirit might be duly strengthened and developed in our country. At present I shall only add one word. We cannot treat with great moral forces as if they were mercenary and suspected auxiliaries. They exist by themselves, with their natural merits and defects, their unavoidable benefits and dangers. We must accept them, such as they are; without pretending to be either their slaves or their tyrants, without giving up everything to them, but also without trying to withhold their just portion. The religious, the domestic, and the political spirit are more than ever beneficent, more than ever necessary, in our society. Neither social tranquillity, nor stability, nor order can dispense with their co-operation. Seek then that co-operation with sincerity; receive it with a good grace, and resign yourselves to pay the price of it.

Societies, no more than individuals, are exempted from the necessity of purchasing advantages by efforts and sacrifices.