Part 6

A Catholic priest, now a bishop, inquiring the origin of the actual disputes of religion, and their probable issue, expresses himself as follows:--"Free institutions, freedom of conscience, political liberty, civil liberty, individual liberty, liberty of families, of education, and of opinions, equality before the laws, the equal division of imposts and of public charges, these are all points upon which we make no difficulty; we accept them frankly; we appeal to them on solemn occasions of public discussion; we accept, we invoke the principles and the liberties proclaimed in 1789; even those who combat those principles and those liberties admit that liberty of religion and free education have become acknowledged, self-evident truths (_des verités de bon sens_)." [Footnote 13]

[Footnote 13: De la Pacification religieuse. By the Abbé Dupanloup, pp. 263, 294, 306. Paris, 1845.]

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This Catholic, this bishop, is no timorous priest, disposed to make every sacrifice for the purpose of conciliation. It is the same priest, who, from the first attack made upon the constitution of the Catholic Church, has always distinguished himself by the warmth and ability with which he has defended it. The Papacy, its rights, its temporal independence and spiritual sovereignty never had a champion more resolute, more opposed to weak concessions or fallacious compromises, more constantly intrepid in the breach than the Bishop of Orleans.

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When the contest was warmest, the Pope (Pius IX.) published his "Encyclical" of the 8th of December, 1864. Exempt from every feeling of prejudice and hostility, and having no connection or relation with the Papacy to make me pause, I feel no hesitation in saying what I think of this document, at once the occasion and the pretext for such a stir. In my opinion the error was a grave one. Regarded as doctrine, the "Encyclical" was dignified and yet embarrassed, positive and yet evasive; it confounded in the same sweeping condemnation salutary truths and pernicious errors, the principles of liberty and the maxims of licentiousness; it made an effort to maintain, in point of right, the ancient traditions and pretensions of Rome, without avowing in point of fact that the ideas and potent influences of modern civilization were the objects of its declared and unceasing hostility. In a system like that of the present day--a system of publicity and freedom of discussion--this manner of proceeding, its inconsistencies, its reticence, its obscurities, whether arising from instinct or premeditation, have ceased to be good policy, and in fact serve no purpose whatever. {121} As a measure to meet a particular emergency, the "Encyclical" of the 8th of December 1864 did not resemble that of Gregory XVI. in 1832; it was not called for by such extravagances as those of the _Avenir_, or those of the Abbé de la Mennais; no urgent necessity, no public exigency required that Rome should pronounce itself; the debate between the Catholic Absolutists and the Catholic Liberals was of ancient date, and was evidently destined to long duration; the Papacy could not flatter itself that it could put an end to this contest by any peremptoriness of decision; her indulgent consideration was as due to the one party as to the other. Doubtless the Catholic Liberals had not shown less zeal for her cause, nor had the services which they had rendered been less important; it was not a moment of peril for Rome, and Rome was bound in justice, without any open declaration at least, to maintain toward them an attitude of reserve. {122} The party, even before the publication of the "Encyclical," had earned, as it still merits, her gratitude and her esteem; neither M. de Montalembert, nor the Prince Albert de Broglie, nor M. de Falloux, nor M. Cochin, nor any of their friends had imitated the example of the Abbé de la Mennais; nor has one of them shown subsequently any irritation, or even uttered a word of complaint; they have maintained a respectful silence. The Bishop of Orleans has done even more. A man of action as well as of faith, he thought in the midst of the storm excited by the "Encyclical" of the 8th of December, that he was bound to consider the perils rather than the faults, and that it became a priest who had supported liberty to support authority also when the object of attack. He threw himself into the arena to cover the Papacy at all hazards with his valiant arms: after having played the part of a sagacious counselor, he played that of a faithful champion, and he inflicted upon her adversaries blows so sturdy, that the latter were in their turn obliged to put themselves upon their defense, even in the midst of the success that the "Encyclical" had insured them.

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The Bishop of Orleans is probably reserved for many other struggles; he may even be hurried by a warlike temperament to carry the war into a field where it is uncalled for; but I shall be both surprised and grieved if he do not always remain what he is at this moment in the Church of France, the most enlightened representative of its mission, moral and social, as well as the most intrepid defender of its true and legitimate interests.

Whether the matter in debate concerns religious or social affairs and contests, parties are liable to two errors of equal gravity: they may misapprehend their respective perils, or their respective strength. Wisdom consists in a just appreciation of these perils and of these forces, and it is upon such an appreciation precisely that success itself depends. The actual perils to which Catholicism is exposed are evident to all. It owes its development and its constitution to times essentially different from the present. It adapts itself with reluctance to the principles required and the demands made upon it in this age. {124} Its antagonists think and assert that it will never so adapt itself. Most of the lookers-on, who are indifferent or vacillating--and their number is great--incline to believe its antagonists in the right. This is the trial through which Catholicism is at this moment passing. To pass through it triumphantly, it has two great forces to rely upon; the one is, the reaction in favor of religion occasioned by the follies and the crimes of the Revolution, the other is, the liberal movement that took place among the Catholics after the faults of the Restoration, and the new opening made for them by the Government of 1830. The Concordat built up again the edifice of the Catholic Church; Liberalism is laboring to penetrate its sanctuary, and, without impairing its faith, to obtain for it once more the sympathies of civil government. {125} Let sincere Catholics reflect well upon their course, for here is their main stay, here their best chance for the future; let them maintain with a firm hand the strong constitution of their Church, but accept frankly, and at once claim, their share also in the liberties of their age; let them take care of their anchors and spread their sails, for this is the conduct prescribed to them by the supreme interest, which should be their law, the future interests, I mean, of Christianity.

The time has been short, but the experiment has been made and is successful. I have now enumerated the principal events connected with religion which have taken place in the course of this century in the bosom of the Catholic Church of France. In spite of the obstacles, the oscillations, the deviations, and the faults that are remarkable, the awakening of Christianity is evident. Under the influence of the causes which I have pointed out, Christian faith has evidently made progress; Christian science, progress; Christian charity, as shown by works, progress; Christian force, progress; progress incomplete and insufficient but still progress, real, and fall of fruit, symptomatic of vital energy and future promise. {126} Let not the enemies of Christianity deceive themselves; they are waging a combat of life and of death, but their antagonist is not in extremis!

II. Awakening Of Christianity In France.

I pass without any transitional stage from the awakening of Christianity in the Roman Catholic Church to the awakening of Christianity in the Protestant Church. What need of a transition? I am not quitting the Christian Church. With respect to their claims as Christians, Protestant nations have been put to the test. They have had, like Catholic nations, to pass through violent struggles, to combat evil tendencies, to undergo perilous trials; but the peculiar characteristic of Christianity, the simultaneous action of faith and of science, of authority and liberty, has received a glorious development in the bosom of Protestant nations. {127} England and Holland, Protestant Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and the United States of America, have had their vices, their crimes, their sufferings, and their reverses; but, after all, these States have in the last four centuries labored with effect at the solution, in a Christian sense, of that grand problem of human society--the moral and physical progress of the masses, as well as the political guarantee of their rights and liberties. And in these days the States to which I have alluded resist effectually the shocks--now of anarchy, now of despotism, which alternately trouble the peace of Christendom. As for the Christian Faith itself, if, in Protestant countries, it does not escape the attacks elsewhere made upon it, neither is it without its powerful defenders and faithful followers. In those countries, Christian Churches are full of adherents, and the cause of Christianity finds every day valiant champions to devote to its service the arms which science and liberty supply. {128} There is on the part of the Romanists a puerile infatuation upon this subject, which makes them absolutely close their eyes to facts; by an error fatal to themselves, they persist in imputing the fermentation in society, and the abandonment of religion, to the influence of the Protestant nations--nations among whom these two scourges are combated with at least as much resolution and effect as elsewhere. It is not my wish to institute disparaging comparisons, or to foment a rivalry opposed to the spirit of Christ's religion. Protestantism is not, in Christendom, the last, neither is it the sole bulwark of Christianity; but there exists none that is stronger, that offers fewer weak points to assailants, or that is better provided with faithful and able defenders.

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At the commencement of this century, and in the years which followed the promulgation of the Concordat, the Protestants, like the Catholics in France, thought only of the re-establishment of their worship and of the liberty of their faith. A liberty the more precious in their eyes, as it followed upon two centuries of persecutions and of sufferings of which we cannot, in these days, read the accounts without mingled sentiments of astonishment, of indignation, and of sorrow. Faithfully should men guard the memory of such outrages; they would be infinitely better than they are if they had always present to their minds the vivid pictures of the iniquities and woes which fill the page of their history; and evils would not so soon recur if they were not so soon forgotten. The system of Terrorism under the Revolution had confounded Catholic and Protestant in a common oppression; it had abolished the forms of worship of each, denied all free expression of opinion to Christians; and without distinction condemned to the same scaffold the "pastors of the desert" and the bishops of the Court of Versailles--Rabaut Saint-Etienne as well as the nuns of Verdun. {130} When this terrible regime had ceased to exist, neither party had religiously or politically any desires or pretensions that were not extremely moderate: the one thing regarded by all as the sovereign good was, the right to live without molestation and the liberty to address their prayers to God in the light of day. No other subject so seriously interested them; and they heartily wished to show their gratitude and deference to the Government, which, while it gave security to their bodies, permitted their souls to breathe freely. The condition of the Protestants was in one sense better than that of the Catholics, for the former were now experiencing the joy, not only of a deliverance but of a positive conquest; they had just escaped as well from the system of Terrorism, as from the ancient régime; they had lost nothing to regret; no revengeful feeling made them desire a reaction; their sole aspiration was for the consolidation of their rights, and of their new acquisitions. {131} "You who lived, as we did, under the yoke of intolerance," (thus they were addressed in 1807 by M. Rabaut-Dupuy, formerly president of the legislative body, and the last surviving son of one of their most estimable pastors,) "you, the relics of so many persecuted generations, behold! compare! It is no longer in the desert and at the peril of your lives that you render to the Creator the homage which is his due. Our temples are restored to us, and every day beholds new ones erected. Our pastors are recognized as public functionaries; they receive salaries from the State; a barbarous law no longer suspends the sword over their heads. Alas! to those whom we have survived it was permitted, it is true, to ascend Mount Nebo, and to obtain thence a glimpse of the promised land, but it is we alone who have taken possession."

What wonder if, on the morrow after the Concordat, which had procured them the free exercise of their faith and the impartiality of the law, the Protestants acquiesced without difficulty in the incomplete organization with which the new system had left their Church, and that they troubled themselves little with the attacks made upon its independence and its dignity!

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But this modest enjoyment of their new privileges did not render them indifferent to their ancient belief, and they returned to the open practice of Christ's faith simultaneously with the acquisition of their liberty. In 1812, in the midst of the profound silence which reigned throughout the Empire, a professor of the faculty of Protestant theology at Montauban, M. Grasc, attacked, in his teaching, the dogma of the Trinity. Earnest remonstrances were instantly made from the general body of the Protestants in France; a great number of consistories, among others those of Nîmes, of Montpellier, Montauban, Alais, Anduze, Saint Hippolyte, pastors and laity, addressed their complaints, some to the "Doyen" of the faculty of theology, others to M. Gasc himself, demanding, all of them, the maintenance of the doctrine of the Protestant Church. {133} The grand master of the University, M. de Fontanes, "earnestly invited the professor not to depart from it," and M. Gasc himself admitted that his teaching ought to be in conformity. The spirit which had animated the Reformation in France in the sixteenth century was still living in the nineteenth; and under the new-born system of liberty, the Awakening of Christianity announced itself by a summons to the faith.

When, under the Restoration, France had regained her political liberty, it was not long before that liberty bore its natural fruits in French Protestantism; it was accompanied, both on religious and political subjects, by the manifestation of discordant ideas and discordant tendencies, which were soon to struggle for victory. {134} As at epochs of great intellectual crises eminent men emerge who represent dominant ideas, so now M. Samuel Vincent and M. Daniel Encontre immediately appeared in the Protestant Church: both were pastors, and each worthily represented one of the two principles which naturally develop themselves in the bosom of Protestantism, faith in traditions and the right of private judgment; principles different without being contradictory; principles which may subsist in peace provided they remain respectively in their proper places, and within the limits of their rights. M. Samuel Vincent was a man of a mind remarkably comprehensive and of great versatility and fecundity; but his habits at the same time were those of a student, fitting him rather for intellectual meditation than qualifying him either for expansive sympathies or for action; he was versed in the philosophy and erudite criticism of Germany, at that time novel and rare to France; he made the essence of Christianity, according to his own expression, "to consist in the liberty of inquiry." [Footnote 14:]

[Footnote 14: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M. Samuel Vincent. 2e édition, p. 15. Paris, 1859.]

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He rejected all written articles of faith, every limited idea of religious unity, and claimed within the Church, for both pastors and congregation, the greatest latitude in matters of opinion and of teaching. But when he clung closely to this view of the subject, and was pressed to indicate the extreme point to which, within the Church itself, the diversity of men's individual beliefs might be carried, his embarrassment became extreme, for he had too much sense to admit that this diversity had no limit, and that a Church, whether Protestant or not, could exist without certain articles of faith common to all its members, and recognized by them all. "Protestantism," said he himself, "must not be merely a negation; it should also have its real and positive side; it must be beyond all things a religion; that is to say, it must be in the possession of the means to endure and of the means to edify men by the propagation of a doctrine benevolent and Christian. ... Christianity is the basis of ecclesiastical teaching." [Footnote 15]

[Footnote 15: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, par M. Samuel Vincent, pp. 17, 22.]

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When, after having laid down this principle, M. Samuel Vincent inquired how the Protestant Church could remain a Church, and a Christian Church, in the midst of the independence of individual beliefs, he found no other way out of the difficulty than "to determine," he said, "by conventions, oral and unwritten, a certain number of opinions that each man should, in the interest of the general peace, be entreated to keep to himself." [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 16: Vues sur le protestantisme en France, p. 24.]

How strange a proceeding, how difficult of realization, to prescribe with once voice silence and liberty! M. Samuel Vincent did not attempt to determine what those opinions were which, in order to maintain the existence of a Christian Church in the midst of the broadest system of free inquiry, "each man should be entreated to keep to himself." {137} As for himself, he professed his faith in the supernatural, in the revelation of the Old and of the New Testaments, in the inspiration of the Scriptures, in the divinity of Jesus Christ; in the grand historical facts as well as in the moral precepts of the Gospel; he was one of the pastors, too, who signed the remonstrance of the consistory of Nîmes, for the irregularity in preaching of which Professor Grasc had been guilty. Did M. Samuel Vincent regard every opinion contrary to these great evangelical doctrines as an opinion which each man should, in the interest of the general peace, be entreated to keep to himself? I doubt whether he would have dared to engraft upon the liberty of judgment such a reservation; but I doubt at the same time if he would have persisted in regarding as true and faithful pastors of the Protestant Church, men who should have openly deserted and combated, in its most essential foundations, that Christian faith which he himself professed. He dreaded almost equally "unity defined," and "dissent declared." He would have remained in the embarrassment into which those inevitably fall who neither accept one basis and manifesto of a common faith, nor admit the moral necessity of a separation into free and distinct Churches when a common faith does not exist. [Footnote 17]

[Footnote 17: The principal works of M. Samuel Vincent are: 1. Vues sur le protestantisme en France, première édition. 2 vols. 8vo. 1829. A second edition, in 1 vol. 12mo., was published in 1859 by M. Prévost-Paradol.

2. Observations sur l'unité religieuse et observations sur la voie d'autorité appliquée a la religion, (1820,) contre l'Essai sur l'indifférance en matière de religion de l'Abbé de la Mennais.

3. Meditations ou recueil de sermons, 1829.

4. Mélanges de religion de morale et de critique sacrée. A periodical published from 1820 to 1825.]

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