Part 8

They had another principle of force as well; a force born and developed in the bosom of the Christian religion, and in that alone; they had the passionate desire to save human souls. Men are not, they never have been, struck as they ought to have been struck with the beauty of this passion, or with its novelty in the moral history of the world, or with the part that it has played among Christian nations. {161} Before the era of Christianity, in times of Asiatic and European antiquity, pagans and philosophers busied themselves about the destiny of men after the close of their earthly life, and with curiosity, too, did they sound the obscurity; but the ardent solicitude for the eternal welfare of human souls, the never-wearying labor to prepare human souls for eternity--to set them even during this existence in intimate relations with God, and to prepare them to undergo God's judgments;--we have in all this a fact essentially Christian, one of the sublimest characteristics of Christianity, and one of the most striking marks of its divine origin. God constantly in relation with mankind and with every man, God present during the actual life of every man, and God the arbiter of his future destiny; the immortality of each human soul, and the connection between his actual life and his future destiny; the immense value of each human soul in the eyes of God, and the immense import to the soul of the future that awaits it: these are the convictions and the affirmations all implied in the one passion alluded to, the passion for the salvation of men's souls, which was the whole life of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which passed by his example and by his precepts into the life of his primitive disciples, and which, amid the diversities of age, people, manners, opinions, has remained the characteristic feature and the inspiring breath of the genius of Christianity; breath which animated the men who in our days labored, and with success, to revive Christian faith among the Protestants of France! {162} Their zeal was employed in a very circumscribed sphere; beyond it their names were unknown, and unknown they have remained. What spectators, what readers, what public knew at that time, or know even at this moment, what manner of men they were or what their deeds--those men who called themselves Neff, Bost, Pyt, Gonthier, Audebez, Cook, Wilks, Haldane? {163} But who, I would ask, in the time of Tacitus and of Pliny, knew what manner of men they were, and what the deeds of Peter, Paul, John, Matthew, Philip--the unknown disciples of the Master, unknown himself, who had overcome the world? Notoriety is not essential to influence; and in the sphere of the soul, as in the order of nature, fountains are not the less abundant because their springs are hidden in obscurity. The Christian missionaries of our time did not trouble themselves to lessen that obscurity. To literary celebrity they had no pretension, nor did they seek the triumph of any political idea, of any specific system of ecclesiastical organization, of any favorite plan in which their personal vanity was interested: the salvation of human souls was their only passion, and their only object. They looked upon themselves as humble servants commissioned to remind men of promises which they had forgotten--of promises of salvation by faith in Jesus. "The stir of the reaction," one of themselves has said, "bore impressed upon it the character of youth, or even of childhood. {164} The humblest pastor on his circuit became a missionary; his transit was regarded almost like that of a meteor. On the instant an assembly was convoked, it numbered twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred persons, collected to listen joyfully, as if it were a great novelty or miracle, to that Gospel which we know by heart;--alas! which we know by heart far more than we have it in the heart!" [Footnote 24]

[Footnote 24: Mémoires pouvant servir à l'histoire du réveil religieux des églises protestantes de la Suisse et de la France, par A. Bost, (1854,) t. 1, p. 240.]

Who could mistake, on hearing such sentiments and such language, the really Christian character of the reaction?

Never-ending weakness of man's nature, and inevitable imperfection of man's work, even when man is walking in the ways of God! In the midst of awakening Christianity, and of this fervent return to the faith of the Gospel, reappeared some of the ancient pretensions of theology, and among others the pretension to penetrate the decrees of God and to define the terms of man's salvation.

{165}

In February, 1818, the pious and orthodox "Doyen" of the Protestant Faculty of Montauban, M. Daniel Encontre, rendering an account of the work of Mr. Robert Haldane, (Emmanuel, ou vues Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ,) which had just appeared, hastened, after having justly commended it, to add: "The concluding pages of the 'Emmanuel' express sentiments which Evangelical Christians are far from sharing. The author lays down the principle, that all men who do not believe in the perfect equality of the _Son_ and of the _Father_, are enemies alike of both _Father_ and _Son_; that they deny, and blaspheme against both, and cannot avoid eternal death. He regards the forbearance we show to them as infinitely criminal, and seems even inclined to condemn all who have not the courage to condemn them. As for me, I venture to believe that it is the duty of a Christian to work out his own salvation without allowing himself to pronounce upon the salvation of others. {166} _Judge not, that ye be not judged_, says He whom we all acknowledge as our Master; and St. Paul adds, '_Who art thou_ that condemnest another man's servant?' I seize this opportunity to declare to all men desirous to hear it, that I believe firmly in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that I adopt in every respect the Nicæan Creed. I dare to affirm besides, that these sentiments are actually those of all the members of our Faculty, as they have always been those of our Churches. It seems to me that persons who know not Jesus Christ as 'God above all things, blessed eternally,' are much to be pitied, and want the greatest of all consolations. This error appears the more dangerous, because it is generally followed by other errors; for the truths which are the objects of faith are so connected and riveted together, that it is impossible to discard one without shaking or overturning all the others. {167} These truths form together a majestic edifice, to which all its parts are absolutely necessary, and which falls in ruins if a breach be made anywhere; and particularly, if the first stone removed be the keystone of the corner. But what would become of us all, if the erring, even when they err in good faith, had no hope of access to the throne of grace? Men who, as I do, feel how much they need God's mercy, and man's indulgence, feel little disposition to be severe toward others." [Footnote 25]

[Footnote 25: Archives du Christianisme aux XIX e siècle, t. 1, pp. 63-66.]

In holding this language, M. Encontre was not merely performing, on his own account, an act of humility and of Christian charity; he was touching upon one of the supreme questions which, in our days, are occasioning a crisis in Christendom; and he was indicating its true and its sole solution. Like all passions, (the best are not exempt,) the passion for the salvation of man's soul is full of enthusiasm and fall of blindness; it believes too readily in the possibility of attaining the object; it is too unscrupulous and undiscriminating in the means. {168} Hence sprung religious tyranny and theological intolerance: the powerful thought they could compel the human soul to work out its own salvation; the learned believed they could define the conditions of that salvation. Mistakes, both of them, profoundly antichristian! Just as no power of man has the right to strip any single soul, created by God free and responsible, of its liberty of conscience; so, equally, no science of man can define the laws and the facts that shall regulate the future state of the soul. Liberty is, on this earth, the principle of the moral life of man; man's state beyond this earth is a question between him and his Maker, and to be determined by the use which man may have here made of his liberty. To respect God's gift of liberty to man, and the mystery of God's decrees respecting man's salvation, is in reality the law of Christians; and it is only on this double condition that there really is either any awakening or any progress of Christians.

{169}

Nothing does more honor to the memory of M. Daniel Encontre than to have been one of the first to understand and to fulfill this double duty. Firmly attached to those fundamental articles of belief which are Christianity itself, he was strange to every narrowness or exaggeration of doctrine, to every presumptuousness of opinion, and to every theological intolerance; his piety was comprehensive, without there being any vagueness in his faith; his Christianity was that of a Liberal; nor did his attainments as a mathematician indispose him to remain a Christian.

Scarcely was M. Encontre dead, when two new men, both, like him, eminent as pastors and professors--M. Alexandre Vinet and M. Adolphe Monod--appeared on the religious arena, and gave more éclat to the Christian reaction by using similar means, and by impelling the Protestant Church of France in the same direction.

{170}

Although he was born and continually lived and wrote in Switzerland, M. Alexandre Vinet was of French extraction; he belongs to France as much as to Switzerland, for he knew, and understood, and loved France as much as he did Switzerland. He served, too, the cause of religious liberty, and the Christian reaction, in France not less than in Switzerland. A delicate child, son of a poor and an austere school-master, who destined him to the obscure life of a village clergyman, he manifested from the commencement of his laborious career an ardent taste for literature and for study, which promised him a rich reward in the intellectual enjoyment of the chef-d'oeuvres of ancient and modern literature. He was found upon one occasion in his little chamber in a fit of enthusiasm and affected to tears by a perusal of the "Cid." At the age of twenty he became Professor of French Literature at Bâle; and there he devoted himself to the service of every candidate upon the Rhine or upon the Swiss Alps who required to be taught to comprehend and admire the great writers of France of whatever age, and in whatever department of literature. {171} Philosophers and orators, prose-writers and poets, Christians or Freethinkers, Catholics or Protestants, Conservatives or Reformers, Classicists or Romanticists--all the men who have constituted the intellectual and literary glory of France, obtained in this fervent Methodist of the Valdenses an admirer as warm as he was intelligent and impartial. The prevailing characteristic of M. Vinet's literary essays and criticisms is their geniality; and wherever he encounters any spark or trace of the true or the beautiful, under whatever banner they appear, and however they may be mingled with opinions otherwise shocking to his feelings, he is at once attracted and moved, and he admires and praises with enthusiasm. His was a mind of comprehensive sympathies, open to every impression, keen to appreciate, always ready to enjoy everything that deserved to give pleasure, even although it might be only momentarily and in passing.

{172}

This passionate admirer of the beautiful, this critic, so liberal-minded and so impartial, was a sound and uncompromising moralist, as well as a pious and firm Christian. The predominant idea of all his literary judgments is moral; and this determines the tone of his criticism, and the impression which it leaves behind it, without ever rendering it either harsh, or illiberal, or narrow-minded. In the sphere of positive belief, without importing into controversies between believer and believer any microscopic criticism of detail, M. Vinet has never, upon the divine origin and the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, had the least hesitation, never made the smallest concession; he grapples directly with the most specious and the most popular objections of his adversaries, and combats them with a conviction the expression of which becomes more and more eloquent the clearer and the more complete its manifestation. "To attempt to distinguish morality from dogma," he says, "is to attempt to distinguish a river from its source. {173} The Christian dogma is at its outset a morality, although a Christian one. Just as God, in the creed of Christianity, reveals himself under a form that nature did not announce, Christian morality, in its turn, invests itself with a character that nature would never have impressed upon it. Man finding his own inability to make himself a religion, God came to aid him in his weakness. It is now rather more than eighteen centuries since, in an obscure corner of the world, there appeared a man. I do not say that a long series of prophets had announced the coming of that man; that a long series of miracles had marked with the seal of God the nation where he was to be born, and even the prophecy which foretold him; that, in a word, an imposing mass of evidence surrounds and authenticates him. I say merely that that man preached a religion. That religion is not natural religion; the dogmas of the existence of God and of the soul's immortality are everywhere taken for granted in his discourses--never taught, never proved. {174} Neither are the ideas which he teaches deduced logically from the primitive axioms of reason; that which he teaches, that which forms the substance of his doctrine, embraces subjects which confound the reason, and to which the reason has neither way nor access; he preaches a God on earth, a God man, a God poor, a God crucified; he preaches wrath involving the innocent, mercy exempting the guilty from all condemnation, God the victim of man, and man forming one person with God; he preaches a new birth, without which man can never be saved; he preaches the sovereignty of God's grace, and the plenitude of the liberty of man. I do not in any way qualify his teaching; I give them to you as they are, and without disguise; I seek not to justify them. You may, if you please, feel surprise, you may take offense; scruple not to do so. But when you have to your heart's content wondered at their strangeness, I on my side will propose to you another subject for your wonder. {175} These strange dogmas conquered the world. In their very infancy they invaded learned Athens, rich Corinth, haughty Rome. They gathered together 'Confessors' from workshops, from prisons, from schools, from the courts of justice, and from thrones. Conquerors of civilization, they triumphed over barbarism; they made to pass under the same yoke the degraded Roman, the savage Sicambrian. The forms of society have changed; society has been dissolved and moulded afresh. They alone have endured in their integrity. No other doctrine, whether of philosophy or of religion, lasted: each had its time; each time its idea; and, as a celebrated writer has said, the religious sentiment, abandoned to itself, chose for itself moulds in accordance with the time, which it broke when the time was no longer there. But the dogma of the Cross persisted in recurring. {176} Had it only taken possession of a certain class of persons it would have been much, it would perhaps have been even inexplicable; but you find followers of the Cross in the camp and in civil life, among the rich and among the poor, among the bold and among the timid, among the learned and among the ignorant. This dogma is good for all, everywhere, always; it never grows old. The religion of the Cross appears nowhere in arrear of civilization; on the contrary, far as civilization may progress, it ever finds Christianity in advance. Suppose not that a complaisant Christianity will ever cancel any article or expunge any idea to accommodate itself to the age: no, it derives its strength from its inflexibility, and needs not make any surrender to be in harmony with what is beautiful, legitimate, true; for it is in itself the type of them all. Still it is not a religion which flatters man; and the worldly, by keeping aloof, show plainly enough that Christianity is a strange doctrine. Those who dare not reject it strive to render it palatable. They strip it of what offends them--of its myths, as they are pleased to style them; they almost make out of Christ's doctrine a _rationalism_. {177} But, singular to say, once a rationalism it has no longer any force; in this respect resembling one of the most marvelous creatures in the animate world, to which it is death to lose its sting. The _strange_ dogmas disappear, but with them all zeal, fervor, sanctity, charity, disappear also; the salt of the earth has lost its savor, and we know not by what means to restore it. But, on the other hand, do you learn that somewhere or other there is an awakening of Christians, that Christianity is resuscitating, that faith shows signs of life, that zeal abounds? Ask not in what soil these precious plants are springing; you may pronounce yourself: it is in the rude and rugged soil of orthodoxy, in the shade of the mysteries which confound human reason, and of which human reason would like so much to get rid, ... Some passages in the fair work of M. Saint-Marc Girardin upon dramatic literature might, at least I fear so, lead to the conclusion that Christianity is, in its essence, only the result of a natural progress of man's mind, a gradual development of ancient wisdom. {178} Such, for instance, is the passage where the author tells us that the Greeks were advancing step by step toward Christian spiritualism. We regret that M. Saint-Marc Girardin did not say in what sense he understood this, and within what limits. We hope that he will not see in us the champion of a captious orthodoxy, if we say that nothing so much weakens the authority of Christianity, that nothing prejudices in men's minds its cause more, than to treat it as a link in the chain, which chain in reality it severed. That events, that is, Providence, did aforehand hollow a bed in the regions of the west for this divine river, what believer, however rigid, would ever entertain any scruple in admitting? But still it is essential that we should not misapprehend the source whence that river welled forth. {179} No natural development of events, either among the Jews or among the Greeks, can account for the existence of Christianity. Whatever the progress made by the ancients, there never was a time when there existed not an infinity between their ideas, and the ideas of Christianity; and infinity alone can fill up the gulf between. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in thinking the contrary--if they succeed in causing the Supernatural to assume a place in one of the compartments of the Philosophy of History. As far as we are concerned, we would prefer for the Christian religion the most outrageous denial, to an admiration circumscribed within such limits. Christ's faith is nothing if not, like Melchisedek without earthly parent here below, and without genealogy." [Footnote 26]

[Footnote 26: Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, p. 85. Premiers discours, pp. 14, 50, 53. Littérature Française, vol. iii, p. 623.]

{180}

Whoever indicated with greater distinctness the keystone in the edifice of Christianity, or ever clung to it more closely? M. Vinet occupied himself in turn with freedom of conscience and of man's thought, with the faith of Christ, and with the literature of France. These three subjects became the passions of his life, stirring his soul, though at unequal depths. But of these three only one, the passion for literature, was a source to him of tranquil and unmitigated enjoyment. In his advocacy of man's liberty and of Christianity, M. Vinet had to pass not only through the ordeal of intellectual labors and combats, but through the solicitudes and sorrows of life. The defender of the liberty of forms of worship, crowned as such by the "Societé Français de la Morale Chrétienne," lived to see this liberty attacked in his native Switzerland, at once by popular fury and by civil authority. The fervent promoter of the Christian reaction, beheld one hundred and sixty evangelical pastors of the Canton of the Vaud, his companions in this pious work, forced to quit their "Chairs" in order to preserve their faith. {181} And it was in sickness, and at the approach of death, that M. Vinet had to undergo all this. Neither his faith nor the tranquillity of his soul was disturbed. He continued, to his last hour, to be the active champion of liberty, the faithful servant of Christ, the eloquent admirer and commentator upon French literature, which he followed in all its phases, whether calm or stormy, whether pure or defiled. "After all," so he wrote in 1845, "I am not one of those who despair; God, without any violence to our freedom of action, rather by that freedom itself, conducts us to the unknown shores. The ports at which we land do not all of them afford secure mooring; we know something of that even in this little country. Our progress will be slow, and amid storms; but the circle of universal truth will be completed, and man's sense of moral right and wrong will be improved, at the same time that man's science will be enriched. {182} I should feel horror if I thought that _Some One_ is not at the center of all this movement, holding all its elements in his hand; _Some One_ to whom, whether they know him or do not know him, the aspirations of all creatures ascend in their sorrow, and whom they instinctively salute with the sweet reassuring name of 'Father.'" [Footnote 27]

[Footnote 27: Notice sur M. Alexandra Vinet, par M. E. Souvestre, published in the Magazin Pittoresque de 1848, p. 81.

The principal works of M. Alexandre Vinet are:

1. Traité et Polémique sur la liberté des cultes. 1826, 1852.

2. Discours sur quelques sujets religieux. 1831, 1853.

3. Essais de philosophic et de morale religieuse. 1837.

4. Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, et sur la séparation de l'Église et de État. 1842, 1858.

5. Études et méditations évangéliques. 1847, 1849, 1851.

6. Études sur Pascal. 1848, 1856.

7. Chrestomathie Française, Histoire de la littérature Française au XVIII siècle, et Études sur la littérature Française au XIX siècle. 1829, 1849, 1853, etc.

He wrote, besides, numerous short pieces, and articles in reviews and journals, suggested by topics of the day.]