Part 2

The world and man himself present a strange and painful spectacle. Good and evil, both moral and physical, order and disorder, joy and sorrow, are here intimately blended and yet in continual antagonism. Whence come this commingling and this strife? Is good or is evil the condition and the law of man and of the world? If good, how then has evil found admission? Wherefore suffering and death? Why this moral disorder?--the calamities which so frequently befall the good, and the prosperity, so abhorrent to our feelings, which attends the wicked? Is this the normal and definitive state of man and of the world?

{4}

Man is conscious that he is at the same time great and little, strong and feeble, powerful and impotent. He finds in himself matter for admiration and for love, and yet he suffices not to himself in any respect; he seeks an aid, a support, beyond and above himself: he asks, he invokes, he prays. What mean these inward disquietudes,--these alternate impulses of pride and weakness? Have they, or not, a meaning and an object? Why prayer?

Such are the natural problems, now dimly felt, now clearly defined, which in all ages and among all nations, in every form and in every degree of civilization, by instinct or by reflexion, have arisen, and still arise, in the human mind. I indicate only the greatest, the most apparent: I might recall many others which are connected with them.

Not only are these problems natural to man; they appertain to him alone; they are his peculiar privilege. Man alone, among all creatures known to us, perceives and states them, and feels himself imperiously called upon to solve them. {5} I borrow the following admirable observations from M. de Châteaubriand:--"Why does not the ox as I do? It can lie down upon the grass, raise its head toward heaven, and in its lowings call upon that unknown Being who fills this immensity of space. But no: content with the turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not those suns in the firmament above, which are the grand evidence of the existence of God. Animals are not troubled with those hopes which fill the heart of man; the spot on which they tread yields them all the happiness of which they are susceptible; a little grass satisfies the sheep; a little blood gluts the tiger. The only creature that looks beyond himself, and is not all in all to himself, is man." [Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: Genie du Christianisme, vol. i. p. 208, edit, of 1831.]

From these problems, natural and peculiar to man, all religions have sprung. The object of them all is to satisfy man's thirst for their solution. As these problems are the source of religion, the solutions they receive are its substance and foundation. {6} There prevails in our days a very general tendency to regard religion as consisting essentially--I might say wholly--in religious sentiment, in those lofty and vague aspirations which are termed the poetry of the soul, beyond and above the realities of life. Through the religious sentiment, the soul enters into relation with the Divine order of things; and this relation, of a wholly personal and intimate character, independent of all positive dogma, of any organized Church, is deemed to be all-sufficient for man, the true and needful religion.

Unquestionably the religious sentiment, the intimate and personal relation of the soul with the Divine order, is essential and necessary to religion; but religion is more than this--much more. The human soul is not to be divided and restricted to certain faculties selected and exalted, whilst the rest are condemned to slumber. Man is not a mere sensitive and poetic being, aspiring to rise above the present and material world by love and imagination: he not only feels, but he thinks; he requires to know and believe as well as love; it is not enough that his soul should be capable of emotion and aspiration; he requires that it should be fixed, and rest upon convictions in harmony with his emotions. {7} This it is that man seeks in religion; he requires something more than a pure and noble rapture; he requires enlightenment, as well as sympathy. But if the moral problems that beset his thought are not solved, what he experiences may be poetry,--it is not religion.

I cannot contemplate unmoved the troubles of men of lofty minds, seeking in the religious sentiment alone a refuge against doubt and impiety. It is well to preserve, in the shipwreck of faith and the chaos of thought, the great instincts of our nature, and not to lose sight of the sublime requirements which remain unsatisfied. I know not to what extent, men of eminent minds may thus compensate, by their sincerity and fervour of sentiment, for the void in their belief; but let them not deceive themselves; barren aspirations and specious doubts satisfy a man as little as to his future spiritual interests as with respect to his condition in the present life; the natural problems to which I have alluded will ever be the great weight pressing upon the soul, and religious sentiment will never alone suffice to be the religion of mankind.

{8}

Besides this apotheosis of religious sentiment, some at the present day have essayed a different, a more serious and more daring theory. Far from sounding the natural problems to which religions correspond, schools of philosophy, occupying a prominent intellectual position,--the Pantheistic School, and the so-called Positive School,--suppress and deny them altogether. In their view, the world has existed, of itself, from all eternity, as have the laws also by which it is sustained and developed. In their elementary principles, and taken altogether, all things have ever been what they now are, and what they will ever continue to be. There is no mystery in this universe; there exist only facts and laws, naturally and necessarily linked together; and these furnish the field for human science, which, although incomplete, is yet indefinitely progressive, in its power as well as in its operations.

{9}

According to these views, Divine Providence and human liberty, the origin of evil, the commingling and the strife of good and evil in the world, and in man, the imperfection of the present order of things, and the destiny of man, the prospect of the re-establishment of order in the future--these are all mere dreams, freaks of man's thought: no such questions indeed exist, inasmuch as the world is eternal, it is in its actual state complete, normal, and definitive, though at the same time progressive. The remedy for the moral and physical evils which afflict mankind, must then be sought, not in any power superior to the world, but simply in the progress of the sciences and the advance of human enlightenment.

{10}

I shall not here discuss this system; I do not even qualify it by its true name; I merely recapitulate its tenets. But, at the first and simple aspect, what contempt does it manifest of the spontaneous and universal instincts of man! What heedlessness of the facts which fill and never cease to characterize the universal history of the human race!

Nevertheless to this we are come: not a solution, but the negation of the natural problems, which irresistibly occupy the human soul, is presented to man for his full satisfaction and repose. Let him follow the mathematical or physical sciences; let him be a mechanician, chemist, critic, novelist, or poet; but let him not enter upon what is termed the sphere of religious and theological inquiry: here are no real questions to solve, nought to investigate, nothing to do,--nothing to expect,--absolutely nothing.

{11}

Second Meditation.

Christian Dogmas.

The Christian religion knows man better, and treats man better: it has other answers to his questions; and it is between the absolute negation of the problems of religion and the Christian solution of these problems that the discussion lies at the present day.

Some words there are which we now regard with distrust and alarm: we suspect their masking illegitimate pretensions and tyranny. Such, in our days, has been the lot of the word _dogma_. To many this word imparts an imperious necessity to believe, at once offending and disquieting. Singular contrast! On all sides we seek for principles, and we take alarm at dogmas.

{12}

This sentiment, however absurd in itself, is in no way strange; Christian dogmas have served as motive and pretext for so much iniquity, so many acts of oppression and cruelty, that their very name has become tainted and suspected. The word bears the penalty of the reminiscences which it awakens: and justly. All attacks upon the liberty of conscience, all employment of force to extirpate or to impose religious belief, is, and ever has been, an iniquitous and tyrannical act. All powers, all parties, all churches, have held such acts to be not only permissible, but enjoined by the Divine Law: all have deemed it not merely their right, but their duty, to prevent and to punish by law and human force, error in matters of religion. They may all allege in excuse, the sincerity of their belief in the legitimacy of this usurpation. The usurpation is not the less enormous and fatal, and perhaps indeed it is, of all human usurpations, the one which has inflicted on men the most odious torments and the grossest errors. {13} It will constitute the glory of our time to have discarded this pretension: nevertheless it yet exists, with persistency, in certain states, in certain laws, in certain recesses of the human soul and of Christian society; and there is, and ever will be, need to watch and to combat it, to render its banishment unconditional and without appeal. Subdued, however, it is: civil freedom in matters of faith and religious life has become a fundamental principle of civilization and of law. These questions, affecting the relations of man to God, are no longer discussed or adjusted in the arena and by a recourse to the hand of political and executive power; but they are transported to the sphere of the intellect and left to the uncontrolled working of the mind itself.

But again, in this sphere of the intellect, these questions still start up and call loudly for their peculiar solution--that is, for the fundamental facts and ideas, the principles in effect which their nature requires. The Christian religion has its own principles, which constitute the rational basis of the faith it inculcates and the life which it enjoins. These are termed its dogmas. {14} The Christian dogmas are the principles of the Christian religion, and the Christian solutions of the problems of natural religion.

Let men of a serious mind, who have not entirely rejected the Christian religion, and who still admire it, whilst denying its fundamental dogmas, beware of this: the flowers whose perfume captivates them will quickly fade, the fruits they delight in will soon cease to grow when the axe shall have been applied to the roots of the tree that bears them.

For myself, arrived at the term of a long life, one of labour, of reflection, and of trials,--of trials in thought as well as in action,--I am convinced that, the Christian dogmas are the legitimate and satisfactory solutions of those religious problems which, as I have said, nature suggests and man carries in his own breast, and from which he cannot escape.

{15}

I beg, at the outset, Theologians, whether Catholic or Protestant, to pardon me. I have no design to cite or to explain, or to maintain, all the various doctrinal points, all the articles of faith, which have been included in the term of Christian dogmas. During eighteen centuries, Christian theology has very often ventured to advance out of and beyond the limits of the Christian religion: man has confounded his own labours with the work of God. It is the natural consequence of the union of human activity and human imperfection. This same result may be traced throughout the history of the world, especially in the history of the society and religion upon which God has grafted the Christian religion.

At the time when God raised up Jesus Christ among the Jews, the faith and the law of the Jews were no longer solely and purely the faith and law which God had given to them by Moses: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and many others, had essentially modified, enlarged, and altered both. Christianity too has had its Pharisees and its Sadducees; in its turn it has been made to feel the workings of human thought and the influence of human passions on its Divine revelation. {16} I cannot recognize, in all the uncertain fruits of these labours, the claim to the title of Christian dogmas. Nevertheless I have no intention here to specify particularly and to combat such tenets in the Church and in Christian theology, as I can neither accept nor defend. It is not for me--and I venture to say, it is not for any Christian--to scan critically the interior of the Edifice, at a moment when its foundations are ardently attacked. Far rather I prefer to rally in a common defence all who abide within its walls. I shall here allude only to the dogmas common to them all, which I sum up in these terms:--The Creation, Providence, Original Sin, the Incarnation, and the Redemption. These constitute the essence of the Christian religion, and all who believe in these dogmas I hold to be Christians.

One leading and common characteristic in these dogmas strikes me at the outset: they deal frankly with the religious problems natural to and inherent in man, and offer at once the solution. {17} The dogma of Creation attests the existence of God, as Creator and Legislator, and it attests also the link which unites man with God. The dogma of Providence explains and justifies prayer, that instinctive recourse of man to the living God, to that supreme Power which is ever present with him in life, and which influences his destiny. The dogma of Original Sin accounts for the presence of evil and disorder in mankind and in the world. The dogmas of the Incarnation and of Redemption, rescue man from the consequences of evil, and open to him a prospect in another life of the re-establishment of order. Unquestionably, the system is grand, complete, well connected, and forcible: it answers to the requirements of the human soul, removes the burden which oppresses it, imparts the strength which it needs, and the satisfaction to which it aspires. Has it a rightful claim to all this power? Is its influence legitimate, as well as efficacious?

{18}

In my own mind I have borne the burthen of the objections to the Christian system, and to each of its essential dogmas; I have experienced the anxieties of doubt: I shall state how I have escaped from doubt, and the ground upon which my convictions have been founded.

I. Creation.

The only serious opponents of the dogma of the Creation are those who maintain that the universe, the earth, the man upon the earth, have existed from all eternity, and, collectively, in the state in which they now are. No one however can hold this language, to which facts are invincibly opposed. How many ages man has existed on the earth, is a question that has been largely discussed, and is still under discussion. The inquiry in no way affects the dogma of the Creation itself: it is a certain and recognized fact, that man has not always existed on the earth, and that the earth has for long periods undergone different changes incompatible with man's existence. Man therefore had a beginning: man has come upon the earth. How has he come there?

{19}

Here the opponents of the dogma of Creation are divided: some uphold the theory of spontaneous generation; others, the transformation of species. According to one party, matter possesses, under certain circumstances and by the simple development of its own proper power, the faculty of creating animated beings. According to others, the different species of animated beings which still exist, or have existed at various epochs and in the different conditions of the earth, are derived from a small number of primitive types, which have possessed, through the lapse of millions and thousands of millions of ages, the power of developing and perfecting themselves, so as to gain admission, through transformation, into higher species. Hence they conclude, with more or less hesitation, that the human race is the result of a transformation, or a series of transformations.

{20}

The attempt to establish the theory of spontaneous production dates from a remote period. Science has ever baffled it: the more its observations have been exact and profound, the more have they refuted the hypothesis of the innate creative power of matter. This result has been again recently established by the attentive examination of men of eminent scientific attainments, within and without the walls of the Academy of Sciences. But were it even otherwise,--could the advocates of the theory of spontaneous production refer to experiments hitherto irrefutable, these would furnish no better explanation of the first appearance of man upon earth, and I should retain my right to repeat here what I have advanced elsewhere on this subject:[Footnote 3]--

[Footnote 3: L'Eglise et la Société Chrétienne en 1861, p. 27.]

{21}

"Such a mode of generation cannot, nor ever could, produce any but infant beings, in the first hour and in the first state of incipient life. It has, I believe, never been asserted, nor will any person ever affirm, that, by spontaneous generation, man-- that is to say, man and woman, the human couple--can have issued, or that they have issued at any period, from matter, of full form and stature, in possession of all their powers and faculties, as Greek paganism represented Minerva issuing from the brain of Jupiter. Yet it is only upon this supposition, that man, appearing for the first time upon earth, could have lived there to perpetuate his species and to found the human race. Let any one picture to himself the first man, born in a state of the earliest infancy, alive but inert, devoid of intelligence, powerless, incapable of satisfying his own wants even for a moment, trembling, sobbing, with no mother to listen to or feed him! And yet we have in this a picture of the first man, as presented by the system of spontaneous generation. It is manifestly not thus that the human race first appeared upon earth."

The system of the transformation of species is no less refuted by science than by the instincts of common sense. It rests upon no tangible fact, on no principle of scientific observation or historic tradition. {22} All the facts ascertained, all the monuments collected in different ages and different places, respecting the existence of living species, disprove the hypothesis of their having undergone any transformation, any notable and permanent change: we meet with them a thousand, two thousand, three thousand years ago, the same as they are at the present day. In the same species the races may vary and undergo mutual changes: the species do not change; and all attempts to transform them artificially, by crossings with allied species, have only resulted in modifications, which, after two or three generations, have been struck with barrenness, as if to attest the impotence of man to effect, by the progressive transformation of existing species, a creation of new species. Man is not an ape transformed and perfected by some dim imperceptible fermentation of the elements of nature and by the operation of ages: this assumed explanation of the origin of the human species is a mere vague hypothesis, the fruit of an imagination ill comprehending the spectacle that nature presents, and therefore easily seduced to form ingenious conjectures: these their authors sow in the stream of events unknown and of time infinite, and trust to them for the realization of their dreams. {23} The principle of the fundamental diversity and the permanence of species--firmly upheld by M. Cuvier, M. Flourens, M. Coste, M. Quatrefages, and by all exact observers of facts--remains dominant in science as in reality. [Footnote 4]

[Footnote 4: Cuvier--Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe, pp. 117, 120, 124 (edit. 1825); Flourens--Ontologie Naturelle, pp. 10-87 (1861); Journal des Savants (October, November, and December, 1863); three articles on the work of Ch. Darwin, On the Origin of Species and the Laws of Progress among Organised Beings; Coste--Histoire Générale et Particulière du Développement des Corps Organisés; Discours Préliminaire, vol. i. p. 23; Quatrefages--Metamorphoses de l'Homme et des Animaux, p. 225 (1862); and his articles On the Unity of the Human Species, published in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," in 1860 and 1861, and collected in one volume (1861).]

{24}

Besides these vain attempts to supersede God the Creator, and to explain by the inherent and progressive power of matter, the origin of man and of the world, the Christian dogma of Creation has yet other adversaries. One party, to combat it, seizes its arms from the Bible itself, alleging the account there given of the successive facts of the creation, of which the world and man were the result; they cite and enumerate the difficulties of reconciling this account with the observations and the conclusions of science. I shall weigh the force of this class of objections in treating of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, of their real object and true meaning; but I at once raise the dogma of Creation above this attack,--placing it at its proper height and isolation: it is the general fact, it is the very principle of creation which constitutes the dogma; what ever may be the obscurities or the scientific difficulties presented by the biblical narrative, the principle and the general fact of the Creation remain unaffected: God the Creator does not the less remain in possession of His work. The Christian religion, in its essence, asserts and demands nothing more.

{25}

But lastly, the Christian dogma of Creation is met by the general objection raised against all the facts and all the acts which are termed supernatural: that is to say, against the existence of God as well as the dogma of Creation, against all religions in common with Christianity. Such a question requires to be considered, not with reference to any particular dogma, or with a view to defend one side only of the edifice of Christianity. This point, then, I shall presently examine frankly and in all its bearings.

II. Providence.

God the Creator is also God the Preserver. He lives, and is at the same time the source of life. The union between Him and his creature does not cease when the creature is brought into existence. The dogma of Providence is consequent upon that of Creation.

{26}

Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the desires or sorrows of the soul, seeking that satisfaction, strength, or consolation which it does not find within itself; it is the expression of a faith, instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear, wavering or steadfast, in the existence, the presence, the power, and the sympathy of the Being to whom prayer is addressed. Without a certain measure of faith and trust in God, prayer would not burst forth, or would suddenly be dried up in the soul. If faith everywhere resists, and everywhere outlives all the denials, all the doubts, and all the darkness which oppress mankind, it is that man bears within himself an imperishable consciousness of the enduring bond which connects him with God, and God with him.