CHAPTER I.

DOGMATIC FAITH.

I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First, spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief in dogma, revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in intolerance—Modern tolerance.

II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas of orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.

III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society—Reasons that render this dissolution inevitable—Comparative influence of the various sciences: influence of public instruction, of means of communication, of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The disappearance of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual disappearance of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc.

_I. Narrow dogmatic faith._

If faith has not varied especially in and of itself as a mode of feeling, the objects with which it is concerned have differed from generation to generation. Hence the various forms of doctrine which we shall pass in review as showing the evolution and dissolution of faith.

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[Sidenote: Primitive faith more properly a credulity.]

In primitive religions, faith was altogether experimental and physical; it was not opposed to scientific belief, which, to say the truth, did not exist. It was a credulity rather than a faith; and religious faith, in our day, is still a credulity, an obligatory credulity, primarily in the authority of superior men, secondarily in that of God himself.

[Sidenote: Subordination of the marvellous in primitive faith.]

The origin of religious faith has been attributed solely to an appetite for the marvellous and the extraordinary; but we have already shown that religions do everything in their power to regulate the imagination even in the very act of stimulating it, and to bring the unknown to the touchstone of the known. The marvellous must aid in making something at least apparently comprehensible; with marvel for marvel’s sake religion holds no commerce. So much so, that primitive people have sought in religion, less to multiply the marvellous, in the modern sense of the word, than partially to suppress it; they have been in search of an explanation of some sort. An explanation by superior powers, by spirits, by occult virtues, seemed clearer to them than an explanation by scientific law.

[Sidenote: Rationale of primitive man’s faith in the marvellous.]

For the rest, any explanation once given, primitive man never dreamed of disputing it, he was essentially a “man of faith.” The delicate shades of thought we designate as verisimilitude, probability, possibility, were as little known to primitive man as to children. The voluntary suspension of judgment that we call doubt indicates an extremely advanced state of mind. With children and savages, to conceive and to believe are one; they know nothing about reserving their approbation, or mistrusting their own intelligence or that of others. A certain humility, which young minds do not possess, is necessary before one can say: That may be true but also it may not, or in other words, I don’t know. And also one must have patience to verify with care what one believes, and patience is courage of the most difficult kind. Finally, man always feels the need to declare that what is attractive, what satisfies his mind, is real: when one tells an interesting story to a child, he says, “It is true, is it not?” If, on the contrary, it is a sad story he will cry out: “That is not true!” A man of the people to whom one should demonstrate, with the evidence in one’s hand, that a thing he thought true was false, would reply with a shake of the head, “If it is not true, it ought to be.” All primitive people were like that. In a memorandum on The Development of Language and Intelligence among Children, E. Egger characterized this state of mind as “rebellion against the notion of doubt and even that of simple probability.” Felix, a child of five and one-half years, took a lively interest in sacred history, but he could not understand why all the lacunæ had not been filled in, or why doubtful points should be marked as such. “The actual state of his mind,” adds E. Egger, “corresponds in a manner to that of the Greek mind during the period when the effort was made painfully to set in order the chaos of ancient legend.” Two years later the same child received a present of a collection of stories. He found in the preface that the author gave the stories out as true; he asked nothing further, and was promptly astonished to find anybody else in doubt. “His trustfulness displayed no disposition to go behind the letter of his text, in especial as the stories sounded to him sufficiently probable.” In my own experience with children, I have noticed that nothing irritates them like uncertainty; a thing must be true or false, and generally they prefer that it should be true. For the rest, a child does not know the limits of his own power, and still less that of others; and too, he has no clear sense of the marvellous and the improbable. A child saw a horse galloping by one day, and said to me seriously, “I could run as fast as that.” Thus again the little peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, asked her mistress why she might not have made the flowers in the garden. A sense of the possible is lacking in primitive intelligences: because you seem to a child or a savage to be able to do more things than he, he readily comes to believe that you can do everything; so that what we call miracles seem to primitive people simply the visible and necessary sign of superior power; so much so, indeed, that to them a man of mark ought to be able to perform miracles; they expect them from him as their due, and become indignant if they are not forthcoming, as a child is indignant when one does not help him carry a burden that is too heavy for his strength. The Hebrews precisely expected Moses to perform miracles and, so to speak, obliged him to do them. The people believe in their great men, and the belief in miracles is but a corollary from their general confidence.

[Sidenote: Absoluteness of primitive faith.]

Moreover, faith reaches a height among primitive nations that it never does among cultivated intelligences: they believe immeasurably things that it is out of all measure to believe at all; the happy _inter utrumque_ is as lacking in the belief itself as in the thing believed. Mr. Spencer, in his “Sociology,” cites the example of a young woman who attributed to a certain amulet the magical virtue of preserving her against injuries. She thought herself as invulnerable as Achilles. The chief of the tribe, astonished that so precious an amulet should exist, and wishing no doubt to acquire it, asked to have its virtues verified before his eyes. The woman was brought to him, a warrior prepared his hatchet, and in perfect confidence she put out her arm. The blow fell and the woman uttered a cry of astonishment not less than of pain as her hand fell to the ground. Who in our day has such absolute faith? Very few among us would risk his life, or even his hand, to maintain such and such a dogma. This woman belonged to the race of martyrs; her intense credulity bordered on heroism.

[Sidenote: Confusion of sincerity with verity by primitive man.]

Man’s natural confidence in his fellow-men, especially when there is no very evident reason why the latter should mislead him, is the origin of the credence we give to the testimony and authority of those who claim to be inspired; which all seemed very human and natural in the beginning, and only later came to be regarded as supernatural. This spontaneous disposition to believe is an elementary instinct which plays a large rôle in religious sociomorphism. Suspicious as primitive man is when his material interests are at stake, in all other matters he is apt to be credulous to a fault. Moreover, he scarcely knows what one means by _error_, and does not distinguish it from deception; he puts trust in his own judgment and in that of other people. When you tell him something extraordinary, his first thought is that you are making sport of him; he is less inclined to believe that you have deceived yourself, that you have reasoned falsely; sincerity and verity are confused in his mind. It has taken all the experience of modern life to make clear to us the difference between these two things; to induce us to verify the affirmations even of those whose characters we esteem most highly; to contradict, without offending, those who are dearest to us. Primitive man never distinguished his belief in the “law” from his faith in the “prophets.” Those whom he esteemed and admired seemed to him of necessity to know the facts. Add that man is always inclined to make much of anything that is a material fact, of anything that appeals to his eyes and to his ears. The sacred word, and the sacred writings that embody it, are to him not merely indications, but _proofs_ of what they affirm. I overheard it given in a church one day as an incontestable proof that Moses conversed with the Lord that Mt. Sinai is still in existence; that is the sort of argument that is successful with the people. Livingstone says that the negroes listened and believed from the moment he showed them the Bible and told them that the celestial Father had written His will on the pages of that book; they touched the pages and believed at once.

[Sidenote: Inference from reality of the sign to reality of the thing signified the essence of faith in revelation.]

In effect, blind confidence in a word, in a sign—precipitate induction from which one infers from the reality of the sign to the reality of the thing signified: a second induction to the effect that any doctrine relatively elevated, from the social and moral point of view, and put forth by men one respects, is probably true, even if it be in many points irrational—these are the principal elements of the primitive faith in revelation. And this faith, in all its crudity, exists at the present day. It wins its way through the eyes and ears; therein lies its power. It is much less mystical than we are inclined to fancy; it is incarnate in its monuments, its temples, its books; it walks about and breathes in the person of its priests, its saints, its gods; we cannot look about us without realizing its existence in one form or another. It has been of great service to human thought, in spite of its pitfalls, thus to have been able to express itself, to fashion objects in its own image, to penetrate marble and stone, to provide that it shall itself be borne back in upon us from without. How can one doubt what is visible and tangible?

[Sidenote: Results in “credo quia ineptum.”]

Faith in testimony and authority leads to faith in sacred texts and in the very letter of these texts. This is what one means by _literal_ faith. It exists still in our day, among many civilized people. It constitutes the basis of the Catholicism of the masses. “In order to silence restless spirits,” said the council of Trent, “it is decreed that no one may, in the interpretation of the Scriptures, ... deviate from the construction sanctioned by the Church, to seek for a supposedly more exact rendering.” Faith lies thus in a renunciation of thought, an abdication of liberty; imposes upon itself a rule not of logic but of morals, and subjects itself to dogmas as to immutable principles. It restricts intelligence beforehand to precise limits, and imposes a general direction on it, with instructions not to swerve from it. It is at this point that faith comes really to be opposed to scientific belief for which in the beginning it was a substitute. According to the council of the Vatican, those who have faith do not believe “because of the intrinsic truth of the things revealed,” but “because of the divine _authority_ that revealed them.” If you reason with a person of that stamp, he will listen, understand, and follow you—but only to a certain point; there he stops, and nothing in the world can make him go beyond. Or rather from that point he will declare himself inexpugnable, and will assure you that you have absolutely no hold on him; and in effect, no scientific or philosophical reason could turn him from his belief, since he places the object of his faith in a sphere superior to reason, and makes his faith an affair of “conscience.” Nothing can force a man to think rightly when he does not propose rectitude of thought to himself as a supreme aim, and nothing can oblige him to follow the dictates of reason to the bitter end, if he believes that the instant he calls certain dogmas and certain authorities in question he is committing a sin. Thus, faith gives a certain sacred and inviolable character to what it sanctions,—converts it into a sacred ark that one may not touch without sacrilege or danger, neither may one look at it too closely nor touch it with one’s fingers, even to lend it support now and then when it seems ready to fall. Free-thought and science never consider a thing as true except provisionally, and so long as it is not seriously doubted by someone. Dogmatic faith, on the contrary, affirms as true not only the things that are uncontested, but those which, according to it, are conclusively presumed, and therefore above discussion. It follows that, if reasons for belief diminish, faith must be none the less strong. It was this that Pascal endeavoured to demonstrate. In effect, the less a belief seems rational to our finite minds, the more merit there is in lending credence to “divine authority.” It would be too simple to believe no more than what one sees or what sounds probable to one; to affirm the improbable, to believe in what seems incredible, is much more meritorious. Our courage rises in proportion as our intelligence becomes humble; the more absurd one is the greater one is—_credo quia ineptum_; the more difficult the task, the greater the merit. The strength of our faith is estimated, in the mysticism of Pascal, by the weakness of its “reasons.” The ideal, on this theory, would be to possess no more than the metaphysical minimum of reason for belief, the weakest conceivable of motives, a mere nothing; that is to say, one should be attached to the supreme object of one’s faith by the slenderest of bonds. The Albigensian priests, the _parfaits_, wear a simple white cord around their waists as an emblem of their vow; all mankind wears this cord, and it is in reality more solid and often heavier than any chain.

[Sidenote: Complete intellectual rest incident to faith.]

Scepticism tends toward a complete intellectual indifference with regard to all things; dogmatic faith produces a partial indifference, an indifference limited to certain points, determined once for all; it is no longer anxious on these heads, but rests and delights in established dogma. The sceptic and the man of faith abandon themselves thus to a more or less extensive abstinence from thought. Religious faith is a determination to suspend the flight of the imagination, to limit the sphere of thought. We all know the Oriental legend that the world is held up by an elephant, which stands on a tortoise, which floats on a sea of milk. The believer must always refrain from asking what supports the sea of milk? He must never notice a point of which there is no explanation; he must constantly repeat to himself the abortive incomplete idea that has been given him without daring to recognize that it is incomplete. In a street through which I pass every day, a blackbird whistles the same melodic phrase; the phrase is incomplete, ends abruptly, and for years I have heard him lift his voice, deliver himself of his truncated song, and stop with a satisfied air, with no need to complete his musical fragment, which I never hear without a feeling of impatience. It is thus with the true believer; accustomed as he is in the most important questions to dwell within the limits of the customary, without any curiosity about the beyond, he sings his monotonous little note without dreaming that it lacks anything—that his phrase is as clipped as his wings are, and that the narrow world of his belief is not the universe.

[Sidenote: Wilful blindness of faith.]

The people who still hold to this kind of faith represent the antique world endeavouring to perpetuate itself without a compromise in the bosom of the new world, the world of modern society. The barbarian does not wish to yield to the progress of ideas and of manners; if such people formed the majority of the nation they would constitute the greatest danger to human reason, to science, and to truth. Literal faith, in effect, makes naked truth a subject of pudicity; one does not dare to look it in the face or lift the sacred veil that hides its beauty; you find yourself in the midst of a conspiracy, mysterious beings surround you, putting their hands before your eyes and a finger on your lips. Dogma holds you, possesses you, masters you in spite of yourself; it is fixed in your heart and petrified in your intelligence: it is not without reason that faith has been compared to an anchor that has caught on the bottom and checked the vessel in its course, while the open and free ocean stretches beyond as far as the eye can reach. And who shall break the anchor from his heart? When you shake it loose in one place, faith settles to its hold somewhere else; you have a thousand weak points at which it attacks you. You can completely abandon a philosophical doctrine; but you cannot break away absolutely from a collection of beliefs in which blind and literal faith has borne sway; there is always something left; you will carry the scars and marks from it as slaves who are freed still carry on their flesh the signs of their servitude. You are branded in the heart, you shall feel the effects of it always; you shall have moments of dread and shuddering, of mystic enthusiasm, of distrust of reason, of need to represent things as being other than they really are, to see what is not, and not to see what is. The fiction that was early forced upon your soul shall often seem to you sweeter than the sound and rugged truth, you need to know; you shall hate yourself for the sin of knowledge.

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[Sidenote: Intolerance incident to faith.]

There is a story of a Brahman who was talking with a European of his religion, and among other dogmas mentioned the scrupulous respect due to animals. “The law,” said he “not only forbids one’s doing evil, voluntarily, to the smallest creature even for the purpose of supplying one’s self with food, it even bids one walk with extraordinary circumspection with one’s eyes down, that one may avoid stepping on the humblest ant.” Without trying to refute this naïve faith the European handed the speaker a microscope. The Brahman looked through the instrument and saw on everything about him, on the fruits that he was about to eat, in the beverage that he was about to drink, everywhere that he might put his hand or foot, the movement of a multitude of little animals of whose existence he had never dreamed: creatures that he had totally left out of account. He was stupefied and handed the microscope back to the European. “I give it to you,” the latter said. The Brahman with a movement of joy took it and threw it on the ground, and broke it, and departed satisfied; as if by that stroke he had destroyed the truth and saved his faith. Happily, in our day, one may without great loss destroy an optical or physical instrument, it can be replaced; but what is to become of an intelligence in the hands of the fanatical believer? Would he not crush it, in case of need, as the instrument of glass was crushed, and sacrifice it the more gaily that a more limpid gleam of truth might well filter through it? In India we have an example of the philosophical doctrine, very inoffensive in appearance and upheld, with various modifications, by great thinkers, of the transmigration of souls, becoming a religious dogma, producing as a direct result intolerance, contempt of science, and all the usual effects of blind dogmatism. Dogmatic and absolute faith in its every form tends to check thought; thence springs its intolerance—a consequence that may well be insisted on.

[Sidenote: And even logically resulting from it.]

Intolerance is only an outward realization of the tyranny exercised within by dogmatic faith. Belief in a _revelation_, which all religion rests upon, is the very opposite of progressive _discovery_; the instant one affirms that the first exists, the latter becomes useless, dangerous, and ends in being condemned. Intolerance, first theoretic, then practical, is the legitimate offspring of absolute faith of every kind. In all revealed religion doctrine first appears in the form of _dogma_, then of dogmatic and categorical commandment. There have always been things that must be believed, and practices that must be observed, under pain of perdition. The sphere of dogmas and sacred rites may be widened or narrowed, the discipline may be loose or so strict that it extends to the very items of one’s diet; but there is always at least a minimum of dogma that is absolute and of practice that is rigidly obligatory, without which no truly religious church could exist. And this is not all. Theological sanction is by its very nature always in extremes; it presents one with no mean between absolute good and absolute evil, both conceived as eternal. And this being granted, how should believers, who are dominated by an exclusive preoccupation with an ardent and profound faith, hesitate to employ constraint in case of need when the matter at stake is so great—is of absolute and eternal good or of absolute and eternal evil? For them the only value of free-will lies in its use—in its use toward its proper object, which is the fulfilment of the divine will. In the presence of an eternity of penalties to be avoided, everything seems permissible; any means seems good provided it be successful. Possessed of that implicit certitude which is inseparable from an absolute and explicit faith, what really enthusiastic soul would hold back before the employment of force? Accordingly, as a matter of fact, every religion which is at once new and powerful is intolerant. The appearance of tolerance marks a decline of faith; a religion which allows for the existence of another is a religion in decay. One cannot believe anything “with all one’s heart” without a sentiment of pity and even of horror for those who believe differently. If I were absolutely certain of possessing the supreme and ultimate verity, should I hesitate to turn the world upside-down to make it prevail? One puts blinkers on a horse to keep him from seeing to the right or left; he looks straight ahead and runs forward under the whip with the hardiness and vigour of ignorance; it is in the same fashion that the partisans of an absolute dogma move through life. “Every positive religion, every immutable form,” says Benjamin Constant, “leads directly to intolerance, providing one reasons logically.”

[Sidenote: Use of force as justifiable in a priest as in a physician.]

The reply to Benjamin Constant is that it is one thing to believe that one knows the way to salvation and another thing to force others to walk in that way. The priest looks upon himself as the physician of the soul; to wish to minister by violence to an ailing soul, “is quite as if,” it has been said, “the physician of the body for greater certainty should take the precaution of having his patient condemned to death or to hard labor in case of disobedience to his prescriptions.”[51] Assuredly it would involve a contradiction in terms for the physician of the body to wish to bring it to death; but it in nowise involves a contradiction for the physician of the soul to wish to put constraint upon the body. The objection falls of its own weight. For the rest, let us not deceive ourselves; if the physicians of the body leave their patients free, it is sometimes that they cannot help so doing, simply; in certain grave cases they insist on having the patient under their control in a hospital, which is, after all, a sort of prison. If a European physician had to prescribe for one of those American Indians, whose habit it is in an attack of smallpox, when the fever reaches forty degrees, to plunge into the water to refresh themselves, the first thing he would do would be to strap his patient to his cot. And every physician would like really to be able to proceed after the same fashion, even in Europe, even at the present day, with people like Gambetta, Mirabeau, and many others less illustrious, who kill themselves by negligence.

[51] M. Franck, _Des rapports de la religion et de l’État_.

[Sidenote: Intolerance a perverted charity.]

Besides, one must not reason as if the believer could isolate himself and act only for himself. For example, to a Catholic what is the meaning of absolute liberty of choice in education? It means the right of parents to damn their children. Is this right thus permissible in their eyes? There are books calculated to destroy faith; books by Voltaire, or Strauss, or Renan; books which, if circulated, result in our losing our souls, “a thing far more grave than the death of the body,” as Théodore de Bèze said, after St. Augustine. Can a nation truly penetrated by a Christian charity allow such books to be circulated on the pretext of liberty of conscience? No; one must before all else deliver the very will from the bonds of heresy and error; it is on this condition only that it can be free. Moreover, one must prevent the corrupt conscience from corrupting others. We see plainly that charitable intolerance is justified from an exclusively theological point of view. It rests on logical reasonings of which the point of departure alone is vicious.[52]

[52] It is easy to understand the high ecclesiastical authorities in the Catholic Church, who maintain as an article of faith the right to repress error. Recollect the well-known pages in which St. Augustine speaks of what good effects he had observed to result from the employment of constraint in religious matters. “A great many of those who have been brought back into the Church by force confess themselves to be greatly rejoiced at having been delivered from their former errors, who, however, by I know not what force of custom, would never have thought of changing for the better if the fear of the law had not put them in mind of the truth. Good precepts and wholesome fear must go together so that not only the light of truth may drive away the gloom of error, but that charity may break the bonds of bad custom, so that we may rejoice over the salvation of the many.... It is written: ‘Bid them to enter in.’ ... God Himself did not spare his son, but delivered Him for our sake to the executioners.” Schiller makes the great inquisitor in _Don Carlos_ say the same thing. See St. Augustine, _Epist._ cxiii. 17, 5—St. Paul, _Ephes._, vi. 5, 6, 9. Lastly, recollect also the reasoned decision of the doctors and councils. “Human government,” said St. Thomas, “is derived from _divine government_ and should _imitate_ it. Now although God is all-powerful and infinitely good, He nevertheless permits in the universe that He has made the existence of evils which He could prevent; He permits them for fear that in suppressing them more than equivalent goods might be suppressed incidentally along with them and greater evils provoked in their stead. The same is true in human government; _rulers naturally tolerate certain evils for fear of putting an obstacle in the way of certain goods, or of causing greater evils_, as St. Augustine said in the treatise on _Order_. It is thus that _infidels_, though they sin in their rites, may be _tolerated, either because of some good coming from them, or to avoid some evil_. The Jews observe their rites, in which formerly the truth of the faith that we hold was prefigured; the result is advantageous in this, that we have the testimony of our enemies in favour of our faith, and that the object of our faith is, so to speak, shown in a reflected image. As for the worship of the other unbelievers, which is opposed in every way to truth and is entirely useless, _it would merit no tolerance_ if it were not to avoid some evil, such as the scandal or _the trouble which might result from the suppression of this worship_; or again as an impediment to the salvation of those who, under cover of this species of tolerance, come little by little into the faith. It is for that reason that the Church has occasionally tolerated even the worship of heretics, and heathens, when the number of infidels was great.” (_Summa theol._, 2 a; q. x, a. II.) One readily perceives the nature of _tolerance_ in that sense. It does not in the least recognize the right of those who are the object of it: if it does not maltreat them, it is simply to _avoid a greater evil_, or rather because its power is too small, and the number of infidels is too large.

A professor of theology at the Sorbonne has recently contested the charge of Catholic intolerance. (M. Alfred Fouillée had just spoken of it in his _Social Science_.) He did so for reasons that may be cited as further proof. “Neither to-day, nor _ever, in any epoch of its history_, has the Catholic Church intended to _impose acceptance of the truth by violence_. All great theologians have taught that the act of faith is a voluntary act, which presupposes an illumination of the mind; _but they have also taught that constraint may favour this illumination, and in especial may preserve others from_ a bad example, from a contagious darkness. The Christian Church has had no need of the sword to evangelize the nations; if it has shed blood in its triumph, it has been _its own_.” Has it, then, not shed the blood of others? If one counts all the murders committed by intolerance in the name of absolute dogma, in every country in the world; if one could measure all the bloodshed; if one could gather together all the dead bodies—would the pile not mount higher than the spires of the cathedrals and the domes of the temples, where man still goes, with unalterable fervour, to invoke and bless the “God of Love”? Faith in a God who talks and acts, who has a history of His own, His Bible, His prophet and His priest, will always end by being intolerant. By adoring a jealous and vengeful God, one becomes in the end His accomplice. One tacitly approves all the crimes committed in His name and often (if one believes the Holy Scriptures) commanded by Him. One endeavours to forget these things when they are too stained with blood and filth. The monuments of such bloody scenes have been razed, and the places to which the strongest memories are attached have been purified and transformed: the partisans of certain dogmas need to wash their hearts also in lustral water.

[Sidenote: And a half-caste public spirit.]

In order to understand how legitimate religious intolerance appears from its own point of view, we must remember with what perfect calm we forbid and punish acts that are directly contrary to the actual conditions of our social life (for example, the public outrage of good morals, etc.). Now we know that all religion superposes another society upon the actual one; it conceives men’s life as enveloped and bounded by the life of the gods; it must therefore seek to maintain the conditions of this supernatural society with not less energy than we employ to maintain our human society, and the conditions of this superior society lead to the multiplication of all the prohibitive rules that we have previously imposed on our existence with our fellows; imaginary walls cannot avoid being added to the walls and ditches already impeding circulation on the earth’s surface; if we live with the gods, we must expect to be jostled by them, and curbed in their name. This state of things cannot disappear entirely until we cease to believe we are co-members of a society with the gods, until we see them transmuted into simple ideals. Ideals never necessitate the exclusiveness and intolerance that realities do.

[Sidenote: Tolerance highly intellectual.]

On the whole, one must distinguish two kinds of virtue on which religion has influence. The first are the virtues that may be called positive and active, of the heart and of instinct, like charity and generosity; at all times and in all countries they have existed among men; religion exalts them, and to Christianity the honour is due of having developed them to their highest degree. The second category includes the purely intellectual virtues, whose operation consists rather in checking and confining than in extending the sphere of one’s activity—the virtues of self-possession, of abstinence, and of tolerance, which are quite modern really and the result of science, which has brought about a clearer knowledge of its own limitations even. Tolerance is a very complex virtue, much more intellectual than charity; it is a virtue of the head rather than of the heart; the proof of it is that charity and intolerance are often found together, forming an alliance rather than opposing each other. When tolerance is not philosophical and wholly reasoned, it takes on the aspect of a simple good-humour that greatly resembles moral weakness. Really to demonstrate the greatness of tolerance, one must put to the front the objective reasons drawn from the relativity of human knowledge and not the subjective reasons drawn from our own hearts.[53] Up to the present time tolerance has been founded on _respect_ for the person and the will of another: “It is necessary,” it is said, “for man to be free—free to deceive himself and to do evil, if need be;” and nothing is truer, but there is another source of tolerance which is more substantial and tends to gain ground more and more rapidly as dogmatic faith disappears. This source is distrust of human thought and conscience, which are not free not to deceive themselves, and to which every article of absolute _faith_ must necessarily be also an article of error. So that, at the present day, tolerance is no longer a virtue, but simply an affair of the intelligence; the further one goes, the more one sees that one does not in the least understand; the more one sees that the beliefs of one’s neighbour are a complement to one’s own, that no one of us can be right alone, to the exclusion of all others. By the mere development of the intelligence which makes us aware of the infinite variety of the world and the impossibility of any one solution of eternal problems, each individual opinion comes to have a value in our eyes: it is nothing more nor less than a bit of evidence bearing on the theory of the universe, and it goes without the saying that no one item of evidence can be made the basis of a definitive judgment, a dogmatic conclusion, without appeal.

[53] See A. Fouillée, _Systèmes de morale contemporains_.

_II. Broad dogmatic faith._

[Sidenote: Conflict between intelligence and dogmatism.]

“The aim of most men,” as an English writer says, “is to pass through life with as little expenditure of thought as possible:” but what is to become of those who think, and of intellectual men in general? Even without suspecting it, one will ultimately allow an interpretation more or less broad of the texts to which one has seemed to cling in a narrow and _literal_ faith. There is almost no such thing as a perfectly orthodox believer. Heresy enters by one door or another, and strange to say it is that precise fact that keeps traditional faith alive in face of the progress of science. An absolute and immutably literal faith would be too offensive to last long. Orthodoxy either kills the nations in which it entirely stifles freedom of thought or it kills faith in itself. Intelligence can never stand still; it is a light that moves, like that cast by the sun on the dripping oars as the boat is being lustily rowed along.

[Sidenote: Dogmatism doubly irrational.]

The partisans of literal interpretation and authority seem sooner or later to accept two irrational hypotheses instead of one; it is not enough for them that there have been certain revelations from on high, they insist that the very terms in which the divine thought is incorporated shall be divine, sacred, and immutable, and of an absolute exactitude. They divinize human language. They never think of the difficulties that someone might feel who was not a god but simply a Descartes, a Newton, or a Leibnitz, to express his great thoughts in an unformed and half-savage tongue. Genius is always superior to the language that it makes use of, and the words themselves are responsible for many of the errors in its thoughts; and a “divine inspiration,” brought down to the level of our language, would be perhaps more embarrassed than an even purely human inspiration. Nothing therefore can be stranger, to those who examine the matter calmly, than to see civilized nations seeking for a complete expression of the divine thought in the literatures of ancient peoples and semi-barbarous nations, whose language and intelligence were infinitely inferior to ours; their god, talking and dictating, would nowadays hardly be given a certificate of competency in a primary examination. It is the grossest anthropomorphism to conceive a divinity not in the type of an ideal man but in the type of a barbarous man. Also, it is not simply that a literal faith (the primitive form of all revealed faith) ultimately appears to be entirely irrational; it is that this characteristic becomes constantly more marked, for the reason that faith stands still, or tries to stand still, while humanity marches on.

[Sidenote: Dogmatism is intellectual indifference or death.]

But for a certain number of heresies born and circulated among them, but for a constant stream of fresh thought, people holding by a literal religion would be a _caput mortuum_ in history, a little “like the faithful Tibetians of Dalaï-lama,” as Von Hartmann says. Literal religions cannot last and perpetuate themselves except by a series of compromises. There are always in the minds of the sincere and intelligent believer periods of advancement and of reaction, steps forward followed by a recoil. Confessors know these sudden changes well, and are prepared to deal with them and keep them within certain limits. They themselves are subject to such changes; how many of them have thought they believed and been suspected of heresy! If we could see into the bottom of their minds what reconciliations should we not perceive, what secret accommodations and compliances! There is in every one of us something that _protests_ against literal faith, and if this protestation is not explicit, it is often none the less real. No one can hope to read more exactly than he who reads between the lines. When one venerates and admires everything, it is generally what one simply does not understand. Very many minds positively like vagueness and accommodate themselves to it, they believe in gross and arrange the details to suit themselves; sometimes even, after accepting a thing as a whole, they eliminate one by one all its parts. Generally speaking, those who aspire to literal faith nowadays are divisible into three classes: the indifferent, the blind, and unconscious Protestants.

[Sidenote: Protestantism and liberty of conscience.]

The Protestantism of Luther and Calvin was a compromise replacing a despotism; it was a broad faith, although it is at the same time intolerant and orthodox; for there are certain things even in Protestantism which do not admit of compromise; it contains _dogmas_ that it is impious to reject, and which, to the free-thinker, seem scarcely less contrary to calm reason than the dogmas of Catholicism; it contains a system of metaphysical or historical theses regarded not as merely human, but as divine. The most desirable thing in a religion that is to be progressive is that the sacred texts should be ambiguous; and the text of the Bible is not ambiguous enough. How are we to doubt, for example, the divinity of Christ’s mission? How doubt the miracles? A belief in the divinity of Christ, and the genuineness of the miracles, are the very foundation of the Christian religion; Luther was obliged to accept them, and in our day even they bear down with their full weight on orthodox Protestantism. So that what seemed at first a generous concession to liberty of thought amounts in the end to little. The circle one moves about in is so contracted! Protestants, too, are fettered; the chain is simply longer and more flexible. Protestantism has rendered services of great importance to law and to liberty of conscience; but alongside of the concessions to liberty that it enforced, it contains dogmas from which the use of “charitable constraint” may logically be deduced. These dogmas which are essential to true Protestantism are: original sin, conceived as even more radical than it appears in Catholicism, and as destructive of freedom of the will; the redemption, which recognizes the death of God the Son as necessary to redeem man from the vindictiveness of God the Father; predestination in all its rigour; grace and election in their most fatalistic and mystical form; and last and most important, an eternity of suffering without purgatory! If all these dogmas are simply philosophical myths, Christian is a purely verbal title, and one might as well call one’s self a heathen, for all the myths of Jupiter, Saturn, Ceres, Proserpine, and the “divinities of Samothrace,” are also susceptible of becoming symbols of higher metaphysics; we refer the reader to Jamblicus and Schelling. We must thus assume that orthodox Protestants believe in hell, redemption, and grace; and if so, the consequences that we have deduced from these dogmas become inevitable. Also Luther, Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, have preached and practised intolerance for the same reasons as did the Catholics. They claimed the right of private judgment for themselves alone, and only in so far as they felt need of it; they never raised it to the level of an orthodox doctrine. Calvin burned Servetius, and the Puritans in America in 1692 punished witchcraft with death.

[Sidenote: Every heresy serves liberty of conscience.]

If Protestantism has in the long run served the cause of liberty of conscience, the reason is simply that every heresy is an instance of liberty and of that enfranchisement which brings in its train a series of additional heresies. In other words, heresy is the victory of doubt over faith. By doubt Protestantism serves the cause of liberty; by faith it would cease to serve it and would menace it—if it were logical. But the characteristic of certain minds is precisely to come to a halt halfway between freedom and liberty, between faith and reason, between the past and the future.

[Sidenote: Protestantism a mark of logical feebleness in those who hold it.]

Over and above the dogmas admitted in common, the true Protestant demands further some fixed objective expression of his belief: he attempts—he also—to incorporate it in a certain number of customs and rites which create the need they satisfy and incessantly give fresh life to a faith incessantly on the point of a decline; he demands temples, priests, a ceremonial. In the item of ceremonial as well as in the item of dogmas, orthodox Protestants nowadays feel themselves to be much superior to Catholics; and they have really rejected a considerable number of naïve beliefs and of useless rites not infrequently borrowed from paganism. You should hear an excited Protestant, in a discussion with a Catholic, speak of the Mass, that degrading superstition in which “the most material and barbarous interpretation possible” is put upon the words of Christ—_He that eateth me shall live by me_. But does not this same Protestant admit with the Catholic the miracle of the redemption, of Christ sacrificing himself to save mankind? If you admit one miracle, what reason is there to stop with that or any succeeding miracle? “Once more in this order of ideas,” says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “and what can be more natural and beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose sacrifice saves him.” A beautiful conception, you acknowledge, for a legend, but you refuse to put faith in it on the ground that it shocks your reason; very good, but you reject in the same breath all the rest of the irrationalities that are part and parcel of Christianity. If Christ sacrificed himself for the human race, why should not he sacrifice himself for me? if he came to a world that did not call him, why should he not come to me who call upon him and pray to him? if God once took on a form of flesh and blood, if He once inhabited a human body, why find it strange that He should be present in my flesh and blood? You want miracles, on condition that you are not to see them; what is the meaning of such false modesty? When one believes a thing, one must live in the heart of this belief, one must see it and feel it everywhere; when one possesses a god, it is in order that he may walk and breathe on earth. He whom we adore must not be relegated to a corner of the heavens, or forbidden to appear in our midst; and they must not be made sport of, who see him, and feel him, and touch him. Free-thinkers may laugh, if they have the courage, at the priest who believes that God is present in the Host that he holds in his hands, and present in the temple when he officiates. They may laugh at the peasant children who believe that Saints or the Virgin present themselves before them to listen to their wants, but a true believer cannot do otherwise than take all this seriously. Protestants take baptism very seriously, and think it absolutely necessary to salvation. Luther certainly believed in the devil; he saw him everywhere, in storms, in fires, in the tumult that his passage along the streets often excited, in the interruptions that occurred in his sermons; he challenged, and threatened all devils, “were they as numberless as the tiles of the roofs.” One day he even exorcised the Evil One, who had been vociferating in the person of the audience, so efficiently that the sermon, which opened in the midst of the greatest disturbance, was finished in peace; the devil had been frightened. Why, then, do orthodox Protestants, especially in our day, so genuinely wish to stop arbitrarily short in their faith? Why believe that God or the devil appeared to men two thousand years ago, and at no time since? Why believe in the Gospel cures and not in the naïve legends that are related of the Communion, or in the miracles at Lourdes? All things hold together in a faith, and if you propose outraging human reason, why not do it thoroughly? As Mr. Matthew Arnold observes, the orthodox Protestant doctrine, in admitting that the Son of God could substitute himself as an expiatory victim for man, condemned for the fault of Adam,—in other words that he could suffer for a crime that he had not committed for men who had not committed it either,—is only to accept the following passage literally and rudely: “The son of man is come to give his life as a ransom unto many.” From the moment that one holds literally to a single text, why not do the same in regard to others? In introducing a certain share of liberty into their faith, the Protestants have also introduced a spirit of inconsequence; this is its characteristic and its defect. Someone said to me once: “If I should try to believe everything, I should end by believing nothing.” This was Luther’s reasoning; he wished to make some allowances for enlightenment; he hoped to preserve the faith by minimizing it. But the limits are artificial. Only listen to Pascal, who possesses the French talent for logic, and is at the same time a mathematician, making light of Protestantism. “How I detest such nonsense!” he cries: that is, not to believe in the Eucharist, etc. “If the Gospel is true, if Jesus Christ is God, what difficulty is there in all that?” Nobody saw more clearly than Pascal the things that, as he says, are “unjust” in certain Christian dogmas, that are “shocking,” are “far-fetched,” the “absurdities”; he saw it all and accepted it all. He accepted everything or nothing. When one makes a bargain with faith, one does not pick and choose; one takes all and gives all. It was Pascal who said that atheism was a sign of strength of mind, but a strength displayed in one direction only. One might turn that round and say that Catholicism implies strength of mind, at least on one point. Protestantism, though of a higher order in the evolution of belief, remains to-day a mark of a certain weakness of mind in those who, having made the first step toward freedom of thought, rest there; it is a halt midway. At bottom, however, the two rival orthodoxies, over which nowadays civilized nations dispute, are equally astonishing to those who have passed beyond them.

_III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society._

[Sidenote: Dogmatic faith distanced by science.]

Can a dogmatic faith, whether narrow or broad, indefinitely coexist with modern science? We think not. Science consists of two portions: the constructive and the destructive. The constructive portion is already far enough advanced, in modern society, to provide for certain desiderata which dogma undertook formerly to supply. We have to-day, for example, more extended and detailed information about the genesis of the world than is found in the Bible. We are attaining by degrees a certain number of facts relating to the affiliation of species. And all the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which strike the eye are already completely explained. The definitive _why_ has not been given, no doubt; we even ask ourselves if there is one. But the _how_ has already been in a great part dealt with. Let us not forget that religions in the beginning took the place of physics; that physical theories constituted for a long time an essential and preponderant part of them. Nowadays physics and religion have been distinguished, and religion has lost by the separation a large part of its power, which has passed over to science.

[Sidenote: And undermined.]

The dissolvent and destructive aspect of science is not less important. The first to present it in high relief were the physical sciences and astronomy. All the ancient superstitions about the trembling of the earth, eclipses, etc., which were a constant occasion of religious exaltation, are destroyed, or nearly so, even among the populace. Geology has overturned with a single stroke the traditions of most religions. Physics has done away with miracles. The same almost may be said of meteorology, which is so recent and has such a brilliant future. God is still to a man of the people too often the sender of rain and good weather, the Indra of the Hindus. A priest told me the other day, in the best faith in the world, that the prayers of his parishioners had brought the country three days of sunshine. In a religious town if rain falls the day of a religious procession, and stops shortly before the time of setting out, the people unhesitatingly believe that a miracle has been performed. Sailors, who depend so entirely on atmospheric perturbations, are more inclined to superstition. The minute the weather can be more or less accurately foretold and guarded against, all these superstitions are doomed. It is thus that fear of thunder is rapidly subsiding at the present day; this fear formed an important factor in the formation of the ancient religions. By inventing the lightning-rod, Franklin did more to destroy superstition than the most active propaganda could have done.

[Sidenote: Experiment in miracles.]

As M. Renan has remarked, we might even in our day demonstrate scientifically the non-existence of miraculous interference in the affairs of this world and the inefficiency of requests to God to modify the natural course of things; one might, for example, minister to patients according to the same methods, in two adjoining rooms of a hospital; for the one set of patients a priest might pray, and one might see whether the prayer would appreciably modify the means of recovery. The result of this sort of experiment on the existence of a special providence is moreover easy to foretell, and it is doubtful whether any educated priest would lend himself to it.

[Sidenote: Religion and physiology and psychology.]

The sciences of physiology and psychology have explained to us in a natural way a multitude of phenomena of the nervous system which we were forced until recently to attribute to the marvelous, or to trickery, or to divine influence, or to the devil.

[Sidenote: Religion and history.]

Finally, history is attacking not only the object of religion, but religions themselves, by displaying all the sinuosities and uncertainties of the thought that constructed them; the primitive contradictions, corrected for better or for worse at some later period, the genesis of the precisest dogmas by the gradual juxtaposition of vague and heterogeneous ideas. Religious criticism, the elements of which will sooner or later find their way into elementary instruction, is the most terrible weapon that could be used against religious dogmatism; it has produced and will produce its effect in Protestant countries, where theology passionately engages the multitude. Religious faith tends to give place to curiosity about religion; we understand more readily the things we do not so absolutely believe, and we can be more disinterestedly interested in the things that no longer fill us with a sacred horror. But the explanation of positive religion seemed destined to be absolutely the opposite of its justification: to write the history of religions is to write a damaging criticism of them. When one endeavours to come to close quarters with their foundation in reality, one finds it retire before one little by little and ultimately disappear like the place where the rainbow rests upon the earth: one believes that one has discovered in religion a bond between heaven and earth, a pledge of alliance and hope; it is an optical illusion which science at once corrects and explains.

[Sidenote: Religion undermined by primary instruction.]

Primary instruction, which is sometimes made, nowadays, a subject of ridicule, is also an altogether recent institution of which in former times there scarcely existed a trace, and which profoundly modifies all of the terms of every social and religious problem. The modicum of elementary instruction that the modern schoolboy possesses, in especial if one adds some few notions of religious history, would alone suffice to put him on his guard against a great many forms of superstition. Formerly it was the custom for a Roman soldier to embrace the religion of any, and of every country, in which he was stationed for a considerable space of time; on his return home he would set up an altar to the distant gods that he had made his own: Sabazius, Adonis, the goddess of Syria, or Asiatic Bellona, the Jupiter of Baalbec, or the Jupiter of Doliche. To-day our soldiers and mariners bring back from their travels little more than an incredulous tolerance, a gently disrespectful smile in relation to gods in general.

[Sidenote: And by the perfection of the means of communication.]

The perfection of means of communication is also one of the great obstacles to the maintenance of a dogmatic faith; nothing shelters a belief like the abyss of a deep valley or the meanderings of an unnavigable river. The last surviving believers in the religions of antiquity were the peasants—_pagani_; whence the word pagan. But to-day the country is being thrown open, mountains are being pierced, the perpetually increasing activity in the movement of things and of people results in the circulation of ideas, in a lowering of the pretensions of the faith, and this levelling down must inevitably continue step by step with the progress of science. In all times it has been observed that the effect of travelling alters one’s beliefs. To-day one travels standing still: the intellectual horizon changes for one, whether one will or not. Men like Papins, Watts, Stephenson, have done as much for the propagation of free-thought as the boldest of philosophers. Even in our days the piercing of the Isthmus of Suez will probably have done more for the enlightenment of the Hindus than the conscientious efforts of Râm Mohun Roy or of Keshub.

[Sidenote: And by the development of commerce and industry.]

Among the causes which will tend in the future to eliminate the dogma of a special providence, let us note the development of the arts—even the art of commerce and of industry, which is still in its very beginnings. Merchants and workmen, equally, have learned already to rely upon no one but their own individual selves, to rely each upon his own initiative, his personal ingenuity; he knows that to work is to pray, not in the sense that his labour possesses some sort of mystical value but because its value is real and within his reach; and he acquires by that very fact a vivid and increasing sense of responsibility. Compare, for instance, the life of a pointsman (that of a working-man) with the life of a soldier, and you will see that the conduct of the first is of necessity reflective, and develops in him a sense of responsibility, whereas the second—accustomed to march he knows not where, to obey, he knows not why, to vanquish or be vanquished he knows not how—lives among circumstances which naturally inspire in him a conception of irresponsibility, of divine chance, or of hazard. Moreover, whenever industry does not treat the workman like a machine but forces him to act consciously and with reflection, its natural effect is to enfranchise the mind. And the same thing is true of commerce; although in commerce a more important rôle is played, by mere lying in wait—mere passivity; the merchant waits for a purchaser, and his coming or not coming depends upon something else. The superstitions of commerce, however, will grow feebler as the functions of personal initiative and activity become more extensive. Thirty years ago in a very religious town there existed a number of small merchants who looked upon it as a matter of duty not to examine their account book till the end of the year: it would be, they said, a distrust of God to ascertain too often whether they were losing or gaining; it would bring bad luck; the less attention you pay to your income the greater it grows. Add that, thanks to this sort of reasoning, which for the rest was not altogether without a certain naïve logic, the merchants spoken of did not do an especially brilliant business. In modern commerce the “positive” spirit—restless intelligence and calculation outstripping chance—tends to become the true and sole element of success; as to the risks which, in spite of every precaution, still remain, they are covered by insurance.

[Sidenote: And by the practice of insurance.]

Insurance, then, is a conception altogether modern, whose operation is to substitute the direct action of man for the intervention of God in private affairs, and which looks to the recompense for a misfortune before it has happened. It is probable that insurance, which dates only some few years back and is spreading rapidly, will be applied some day to almost every form of accident to which man is liable, will be adapted to every circumstance of life, will accompany us everywhere, will envelop us in a protecting net; and agriculture and navigation, and those pursuits generally in which human initiative plays the smallest part, in which one must dance attendance upon the special benediction of heaven and ultimate success is always contingent, will become increasingly independent and free. It is possible that the notion of a special providence will some day be completely eliminated from the sphere of economics; everything that in any manner whatsoever is capable of being estimated in terms of money will be covered by an insurance, shielded from accident, made independent of divine favour.

[Sidenote: And the progress of medical knowledge.]

There remains the purely personal sphere, the physical and moral accidents which may befall us, the maladies that may come upon ourselves and those who belong to us. That is the sphere in which the majority of men feel their will most feeble, their perspicacity most at fault. Listen to a member of the lower classes on the subject of physiology or medicine, and you will understand how deep is the abasement of their intelligence in this matter; and often, indeed, even men of a more extended education are possessed of no more knowledge than they on such points. Speaking generally, our ignorance of hygiene and the most elementary notions of medicine is such that we are helpless in the presence of physical evil; and it is because of this helplessness, at the very spot precisely where we most need help, that we seek for an outlet for an embarrassed volition and a restless hope and find it in a petition addressed to God. Many people never think of praying except when ill, or when they see persons dear to them ill. As always, so here, a sense of an absolute dependence provokes a return of religious sentiment. Just in proportion as instruction spreads, just in proportion as the natural sciences become of service, we feel ourselves armed with a certain power, even in the face of physical accident. In more than usually pious families, the physician scarcely assumed formerly any other character than that of an instrument of special providence; one had confidence in him, less on the score of his talent than of his sanctity; that confidence was absolute; one washed one’s hands of all responsibility, as primitive people do in the presence of the sorcerers and “priest physicians.” Nowadays, however, the physician is beginning to be looked upon as a man like another, who must rely upon himself, who receives no inspiration from on high, and who must, in consequence, be chosen with care, and aided and sustained in his task. It is understood that the remedies employed by him are innocent of mystery, that their operation is uniform, that the matter is altogether one of intelligence in their use; and instead of putting one’s self, like so much brute matter, into the physician’s hands, one does one’s best to co-operate with him. When we hear someone calling for help and are free to run to him, does it ever occur to us nowadays to fall upon our knees? No; we should even consider a passive prayer as an indirect form of homicide. The epoch is past when Ambroise Paré could say modestly: “I poulticed him, God cured him.” The fact is, God does not cure those whom the physician does not poultice properly. The progress of natural science will result really in a sort of preventive insurance, no longer confined wholly to the sphere of economics; and we shall be able some day to insure ourselves, not simply against the economical consequences of such and such an accident, but against the accident itself; we shall foresee it and avoid it, as we not infrequently nowadays foresee and avoid poverty. And finally, in respect even to unavoidable evils, it will occur to no one to rely upon anything but human science and human effort.

[Sidenote: Progress in matters of belief since heathen antiquity and the Middle Ages.]

Owing to the causes above enumerated, how far we have travelled since the time of the ancients and the Middle Ages! In the first place we no longer lend credence to oracles or to predictions. The law at least no longer goes the length of lending credence to them, and even punishes those who endeavour to speculate upon a naïveté of their more innocent neighbours. Soothsayers at the present day are no longer lodged in Temples. And in no case are philosophers and higher personages among their clients. We are far from the time when Socrates and his disciples made a pilgrimage to consult the oracle, when the gods spoke, and gave advice, and regulated the conduct of men, and took the place of attorneys, of physicians, of judges, and decided upon peace and war. If it had been affirmed to a pagan that the day would come when man would find the oracle at Delphi a superfluity, he would have been as frankly surprised as a Christian is to-day when he hears it affirmed that cathedrals, priests, and religious ceremonies will some day become a superfluity.

[Sidenote: Tendency toward simplicity and uniformity.]

The rôle which prophecies played in the religion of the Hebrews is well known. In the Middle Ages certain prophecies, such as that of the millennium, were publicly and miserably put to the proof. Since that time dogmatic religion, in the fear of compromising itself, has stood aloof from oracles and prophecies, preferring increase of security to extent of influence. Thus by degrees authoritative religion has come to renounce its sway over one of the most important portions of human life, which it pretended formerly to possess a knowledge of, and to regulate—the future. It contents itself to-day with the present. Its predictions, ever vaguer and more vague, nowadays bear only on the period beyond the grave; it contents itself with promising heaven to the faithful—which the Catholic religion indeed goes the length of in some measure securing for them by absolution. And one may recognize in the confessional a certain substitute for the divination of former times. The hand of the priest opens or shuts the door of heaven for the believer kneeling in the shadow of the confessional; he wields a power in some respects greater than that of the Pythoness who might determine with a word the fate of battles. Confession itself, however, has disappeared in the stronger and younger offshoots of Christianity. In orthodox Protestantism one is one’s self the judge of one’s own future, and possesses no other clew to one’s destiny than the dictum of one’s own conscience, with all its uncertainty upon its head. Owing to this transformation dogmatic faith in the word of a priest or a prophet tends to become a simple reliance on the voice of conscience, which becomes ever less and less authoritative, ever more and more feeble in the face of doubt. Faith in oracles and in the visible finger of Providence in this world has become to-day simply a somewhat hesitating reliance upon an inner oracle and an together transcendental Providence. This is one of the items in respect to which religious evolution may be considered as already something like complete, and religious individualism as on the point of replacing obedience to the priest, and the negation of the marvellous as substituted for antique superstition.

[Sidenote: Belief in God falls with belief in devils.]

The strength of the belief in a personal God has been in all times proportionate to the strength of the belief in a devil—we have just seen an illustration of it in the case of Luther. In effect these two beliefs are correlatives; they are the opposite faces of one and the same anthropomorphism. Well, in our days, belief in the devil is incontestably becoming feebler; and this enfeeblement is even especially characteristic of the present epoch; there has at no other time been anything to equal it. There is not an educated person to be found in whom the notion of a devil does not excite a smile. That, believe me, is a sign of the times, a manifest proof of the decline of dogmatic religion. Wherever the power of dogmatic religion by an exception to the general course of things has retained its vitality, and retained it, as in America, even to the point of giving birth to new dogmas, the fear of the devil has subsisted in its entirety; wherever, as in more enlightened regions than America, this fear no longer exists except as a symbol or a myth, the intensity and the fecundity of the religious sentiment decline inevitably in the same degree. The fate of Javeh is bound up with that of Lucifer; angels and devils go hand in hand, as in some fantastic mediæval dance. The day when Satan and his followers shall be definitively vanquished and annihilated in the minds of the people, the celestial powers will not have long to live.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Results.]

To sum up, in all these relations, dogmatic faith—and in especial, such as is narrow, authoritative, intolerant, and at enmity with a spirit of science—seems on every account destined to disappear, or to survive, if at all, among a small number of believers. Every doctrine, no matter how moral or how elevating, seems to us nowadays to lose these attributes and to become degraded from the moment it proposes to impose itself upon the human mind as a dogma. Dogma happily—that crystallization of faith—is an unstable compound; like certain complex crystals, it is apt to explode, under a concentrated ray of light, into dust. Modern criticism supplies the ray. If Catholicism, in pursuit of religious unity, logically results in the doctrine of infallibility, modern criticism in the course of its establishment of the relativity of human knowledge and of the essential fallibility of intelligence in general, tends toward religious individualism and toward the dissolution of every universal or “Catholic” dogma. And on that score orthodox Protestantism is itself menaced with ruin, for it also has preserved in its dogmas an element of Catholicity, and by that very fact of intolerance, if not practical and civil, at least theoretical and religious.