Chapter II: Part 2

There is little wisdom in instituting comparisons between objects or facts not essentially analogous; and the idea of God has been so often disfigured by representing Him in the image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of any analogies borrowed from humanity to convey a conception of God. I cannot, however, overlook the fact, that God has created man in his own image, nor can I absolutely refrain from seeking, in nature or the life of man, some type to shadow forth the features of God. Let us consider the human family: the father and mother assist in directing the active development of the child; they watch over it with authority and tenderness; they control its liberty without annulling it, and they listen to its little prayers--now granting them, now refusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a view to the child's main and future interests. {34} The child, without thought or design, by the spontaneous instinct of its nature, recognizes the authority and feels the tenderness of its parents; as it advances in age, it sometimes obeys and sometimes resists their injunctions, using or misusing its natural liberty; but in all the fickleness of its will, it asks, it entreats, full of confidence--joyous and thankful when it obtains from its parents what it desires; yet, when denied, still ready again to ask and to entreat with the same confidence as before.

This is what takes place in the government of the human family when ruled according to the dictates of nature and right. An image we have here, imperfect but still true--a shadowing-forth, faint yet faithful--of Divine Providence. Thus it is that the Christian religion qualifies and describes the action of God in the life of man. It exhibits God as ever present and accessible to man, as a father to his child; it exhorts, encourages, invites man to implore, to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves absolutely the answer of God to that prayer; He will grant, or He will refuse: we cannot penetrate his motives--"The ways of God are not our ways." {35} Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless and ever renewed, the Christian dogma associates the firm hope that "nothing is impossible with God." This dogma is thus in full and intimate harmony with the nature of man; whilst recognizing his liberty, it does homage to his dignity; in tendering to him the resource of an appeal to God it provides for his weakness. In science, it suppresses not the mystery which cannot be suppressed; but, in man's life, it solves the natural problem which weighs upon the soul.

III. Original Sin.

The dogmas of Creation and Providence bring us into the presence of God; it is the action of God upon the world and man that they proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Original Sin brings us back to man; it is the act of man towards God, which stands at the very beginning of the history of mankind.

{36}

In what does this dogma consist? What are the elements and the essential facts which constitute it, and upon which it is founded?

The dogma of Original Sin implies and affirms these propositions:

1. That God, in creating man, has created him an agent, moral, free, and fallible;

2. That the will of God is the moral law of man, and obedience to the will of God is the duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and free agent;

3. That, by an act of his own free will, man has knowingly failed in his duty, by disobeying the law of God;

4. That the free man is a responsible being, and that disobedience to the law of God has justly entailed on him punishment;

5. That that responsibility and that punishment are hereditary, and that the fault of the first man has weighed and does weigh upon the human race.

{37}

The authority of God, the duty of obedience to the law of God, the liberty and responsibility of man, the heritage of human responsibility are, in their moral chronology, the principles and the facts comprised in the dogma of Original Sin.

I turn away my attention for a moment from the dogma itself, its source, its history, the Biblical and Christian tradition of this first step in evil of the human race. And considering man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual and general state, I investigate and verify the moral facts as they manifest themselves at the present day, to the eyes of good sense, amidst the disputes of the learned.

Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral authority, as well as the physical power of the parents who, humanly speaking, created him. Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same time a necessity. This physical necessity and this moral obligation, however ultimately connected with each other, are not one and identical; and the child, in its spontaneous development, instinctively feels the moral obligation long before it is conscious of the physical necessity. {38} The instinctive feeling of the obligation is united with the growing sentiment of affection; and the child obeys the look, the voice of its mother, unconscious of its absolute dependence upon her. As the sentiment of affection and the instinct of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of moral good in the development of the child, so the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom, the first appearance of moral evil. It is with the voluntary disobedience of the child to the will of its mother that the moral infraction commences, and it is in disobedience that it resides. It considers neither the motives nor the consequences of its act; it is simply conscious that it disobeys, and regards its mother with a mingled feeling of restlessness and defiance; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal authority; it strives to be, and especially to appear, independent of the natural and legitimate power which rules it, and which it recognises at the very moment when it opposes its own will to that higher law.

{39}

As the child, so is the man. As man is born free, so he lives free; and as he is born subject, so he lives subject. Liberty co-exists with authority and resists without annulling it. Authority exists before liberty, and as it does not yield to it, so neither does it supersede it. Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys, renders homage to authority by the very fact of his disobedience. Authority, on its side, recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemnation which it passes on him for having misused it; for he would not be responsible for his acts were he not free. In the co-existence of these two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great secret of nature and of human destiny, the fundamental principle of man and of the world.

Let it be clearly understood that I speak here of the moral world, of the world of thought and of will. In the physical world there is neither authority nor liberty; there are merely certain forces, forces acting inevitably and unequally. {40} If the question concerned the material world, could I do better than repeat what Pascal has admirably said: "Man is but a reed--the weakest in nature--but he is a reed which thinks; the universe need not rise in arms to crush him; a vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But were the universe to crush him, man would still be nobler than the power which killed him, for he knows that he dies; and of the advantage which the universe has over him, the universe knows nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, he knows just as well that authority confronts him, as that liberty of action abides with himself. He knows what he does, and he charges himself with the responsibility. Moral order is here complete.

Throughout all times and in all places, in all men, as in the first man, disobedience to legitimate authority is the principle and foundation of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious name, of sin.

{41}

Disobedience has various and complicated sources; it may spring from a thirst for independence, from ambition or presumptuous curiosity, or from giving rein to human inclinations and temptations; but, whatever its origin, disobedience is ever the essential characteristic of that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also the source of the responsibility which accompanies it.

Eminent men, eminently pious men, have combated the doctrine of human liberty; unable to reconcile it with what they term the divine prescience, they have denied the fundamental fact of the nature of man, rather than fully acknowledge the mystery of the nature of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, have limited themselves to raising doubts regarding human liberty, and denying it the value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In my opinion, they have confounded facts essentially different, although intimately blended; they have ignored the special and simple character of the very fact of free will. During a course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of civilization in France, having occasion to examine the controversy of St. Augustine with Pelagius on free will, predestination, and grace, I explained these subjects in terms which I repeat here, finding no others which appear to me more exact and more complete:--

{42}

"The fact which lies at the foundation of the whole dispute," I
said in 1829, "is liberty, free will, the human will. To
comprehend this fact exactly, we must divest it of every
foreign element, and confine it strictly to itself. It is the
want of this precaution that has led to such frequent
misconception of the thing itself; men have not looked simply
at the fact of liberty, and at that alone. It has been viewed
and described, so to speak, _péle-méle_ with other facts,
closely connected to it, it is true, in the moral life of man,
but which are no less essentially different. For example, human
liberty has been said to consist in the act of deliberating
upon and choosing between motives; that deliberation, and that
choice and judgment consequent upon it, have been regarded as
the essence of free will.
{43}
Not so at all. These are acts of the intellect, not of liberty;
it is before the intellect that the various motives of
resolution and action, interests, passions, opinions, and such
like, present themselves; the intellect considers, compares,
estimates, weighs, and judges them. This is a preparatory task,
which precedes the act of volition, but which does not in any
way constitute it. When, after deliberation, man has taken full
cognisance of the motives presented to him, and of their value,
there takes place a process entirely new, and wholly different,
that of free will; man forms a resolution--that is to say, he
commences a series of facts having their source in himself, of
which he regards himself as the author; and these are
effectuated because he wills them; they would have no existence
did he not will it, and would be different if he desired to
produce them otherwise. Now, let us imagine all remembrance of
this process of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the
motives so known and appreciated, forgotten; concentrate your
thought, and that of the man who takes a resolution, upon the
moment when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall do so;
and ask yourself, ask too the man, whether he could not will
and act otherwise.
{44}
Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do, 'Assuredly,' and
this it is that reveals the fact of liberty; it consists wholly
in the resolution which man takes after the deliberation is at
an end; it is the resolution that is the proper act of man,
which is through him and through him alone; a simple act,
independent of all the facts which precede or accompany it,
identical in the most varied circumstances, always the same,
whatever be its motives or its results.

"At the same time that man feels himself free, and is conscious
of the power of commencing by his own will alone a series of
facts, he recognises that his will is subjected to the empire
of a certain law, which takes different names, according to the
circumstances to which it is applied--moral law, reason, good
sense, &c ... Man is free, but according even to man's own way
of thinking, his will is not arbitrary; he may use it in an
absurd, senseless, unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he
uses it a certain rule must govern it. The observance of this
rule is his duty, the task assigned to his liberty."

{45}

It is that act of a will (that is to say of a will strictly brought back to its central and essential limits) acting freely in the intimate recesses of his being, which, in the case of disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility.

Is this responsibility exclusively personal, and limited to the author of the act, or communicated, so to say, by contagion, and transmitted in a certain measure to his descendants?

I am still considering only actual appreciable acts, such as they produce and manifest themselves in the moral life of the human race.

We find the poetry and mythology of nearly all nations expressing the idea of an Utopian state of existence, referred to times remote and primitive, to which they assign different names, as the Golden Age, the Age of the Gods, and which they picture as an epoch when there existed no moral and physical evil in the world,--an era of peace, bliss, and innocence. {46} This is the more remarkable, as it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in any tradition of historical times, however remote; for from the commencement of history, from the time that we can discern any trace of facts at all precise and authentic, it is not the Golden Age, on the contrary, it is the Iron Age which appears--an epoch of violence and ignorance and barbarism, in which war and force are rampant, and which has not in effect the least resemblance to those beautiful dreams of ancient poetry. Without now seeking to establish any relation between these mythological dreams and the Biblical traditions; or, for the moment, drawing from the Golden Age any argument in support of the Garden of Eden; I merely point it out as a great fact, as evidence of a general instinct, so to say, of the human imagination. What is the meaning of this? Whence comes this Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of the human race? {47} To what does this idea of a primal time, without strife, without sin, and without pain, correspond?

But from this cradle of man and this primitive poetry, to revert to the present time, to real life, to the cradle of the infant, why is it that, apart from all personal affection, we so readily term infancy the age of innocence? How is it that we find it so charming to give it this name, and regard it under this aspect? Physical ill is already present, for it begins with the very beginning of life; but moral ill has not yet appeared; life has not yet brought to the soul its trials, nor called forth its failings, and the idea of the soul without spot or stain has for us an inexpressible attraction; we feel a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least its image in the child, when we no longer see it around us, nor find it within ourselves.

What means this universal instinct, which in the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we turn in thought to the cradle of the human race or to that of the infant, leads us to regard innocence as the primitive and normal state of man, and makes us place in the spot where innocence resides that which some term Paradise, and others the Golden Age?

{48}

Manifestly between the soul without spot and the soul tainted with evil, between the creature who is merely fallible and the creature who has sinned, there is a very great change of state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the fall into this abyss; and it is without premeditation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer our thoughts to bear us far--far beyond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous contemplation of a state anterior to the fall. Hence spring, and thus are explained, the power and the charm which the idea of innocence has for us; absolute innocence we have never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to us; and so it appears to us in the cradle of the world, and in the cradle of the infant, and the pleasure is infinite which we derive from the ideal spectacle of purity which they each suggest.

{49}

Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sentiment, to all secret reference to ourselves, the pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator? No: these impressions, which the picture of innocence awakens in us, are connected with and carry us back to ourselves; this change in the state of man, that mysterious Past which has thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it--these were not the lot of the first man alone: the entire human race was, and remains, subject to them. Our present evil does not proceed solely from ourselves; we have received it as a heritage before having brought it upon us as a penalty: we are not merely fallible beings, we are the children of a being who has sinned.

{50}

How can we feel surprise at this inheritance of woe! Have we not daily the example and the spectacle before our eyes? It is an incontestable and undisputed fact, that two elements enter into the moral life of man: on the one side, his innate dispositions, his natural and involuntary inclinations,--on the other, his inmost and individual will. The natural inclinations of a man do not destroy his moral liberty nor enslave his will, but they render its exercise more laborious and more difficult to him; it is not a chain which he carries, it is a burden that he bears. Equally incontestable and undisputed is it that the natural dispositions of men are different and unequally distributed; no one is entirely exempt from evil inclinations; every man is not only fallible, but prone to transgress, and prone not only to transgress, but to transgress in some particular direction or other. Nor can the fact be disputed, although appreciable with more difficulty, that the natural and special dispositions of the individual descend to him in a certain measure from his origin, and that parents transmit to their children such or such moral propensities just as they do such or such physical temperament, or such or such features. Hereditary transmission enters into the moral as well as the physical order of the world.

{51}

This inheritance must take effect, it has done so from the first days of man's existence upon earth, for man has been created complete in his whole nature. And whilst, at the same time as complete, he has been created fallible, I ask, who shall measure the distance between man fallible, but still without fault, and the first transgression? Who shall sound the depth of the fall, and of the change which it brought into the moral condition of its author? Who shall weigh the consequences of this change to the state and the moral dispositions of man's descendants? To appreciate the extent and gravity of this awful fact, of this first appearance and this first heritage of moral evil, we have but one test,--the instinct we still preserve of a state of innocence, and of the immense space which this instinct irresistibly compels us to place between native innocence and man's first transgression; but this test is unexceptionable; it dimly reveals to us, in this fatal transformation, the whole infirmity and responsibility of the human race.

{52}

An objection is raised to this as an injustice: how, it is said, can each man be responsible for a fault which he has not himself committed--for the transgression of another man, separated from himself by so many ages? I consider this objection weak and frivolous. Such an objection would attach to all the inequalities which exist among men, to the inequality of the destinies as well as that of the nature of man, to the inequality of his moral disposition as well as to that of his physical powers. The objection would attach to the solidarity of successive generations, and the controlling influence which the ideas, the acts, the destiny of each of them exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny of those which follow it. The objection would attach to the ties which unite the child with its parents, and which are the cause of its sometimes inheriting their evil dispositions, and sometimes suffering for their faults. It is in short the general order of the world to which such an objection must apply; it is the very existence of evil, and its unequal distribution in a manner wholly independent of individual merit which assumes the character of a monstrous iniquity. {53} And when we come to this point, that we no longer refer the source of evil to the fault and the responsibility of man, placed here on earth in a scene and period of transition and of trial, see to what alternative we are brought. We must either regard evil as natural, eternal, necessary, in the future as in the past, as the normal state of man and of the world; that is to say, we must deny God, the creation, the Divine Providence, human morality, liberty, responsibility and hope; or, on the other hand, it is to God Himself that we must impute evil, and whom we must render accountable.

The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the human mind from this odious and unacceptable alternative: far from being in contradiction either with the history of humanity, or with the facts and instincts which constitute man's moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates, and explains them. {54} The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day, arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of temptation. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, it produces an immense change in the inmost state of man, a change, the mere idea of which seizes upon the human soul, and disturbs it to its very depths; it transports man from the state of innocence to the state of sin. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, the act which produces this change involves and entails the responsibility not only of its author but of his descendants; sin is contagious in time as in space, it is transmitted, as well as diffused. {55} The Christian dogma exhibits the first man created fallible, but born innocent; innocent at the age of man, proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at once, for the first time, of his own will, man disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same in its nature as sin at the present day, for they both consist in disobedience to the law of God, but it is the first in date in the history of man's liberty, and the human source of that evil for which the Christian religion, whilst pointing it out, offers to man the remedy and the cure.

IV. The Incarnation.

All religions have given a prominent place to the problem of existence and the origin of evil; all have attempted its solution. {56} The good and the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahriman among the Persians; God the Creator, God the Preserver, and God the Destroyer--Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva--in India; the Titans overwhelmed by the thunderbolts of Jove while scaling Olympus; Prometheus chained to the rock for having snatched fire from heaven; all are so many hypotheses to explain the conflict between good and evil, between order and disorder in the world and in man. But all these hypotheses are complicated, confused, and encumbered with chimeras and fables; all attribute the derivation of evil to incongruous causes, none assign any term to the conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil. The Christian religion alone clearly states and effectually solves the question; it alone imputes to man himself, and to him alone, the origin of evil; it alone represents God as intervening to raise man from his fall, and to save him from his peril.

{57}

In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era, a great fact appears in history; a breath of reform, religious, moral and social, arises, and spreads from east to west, among all the nations then at all progressing in the path of civilization. Notwithstanding the uncertainties of chronology, it may be said, according to the most recent and accurate researches, that Confucius in China, the Buddha Càkya-Mouni in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Pythagoras and Socrates in Greece, are all included in the limits of this epoch; [Footnote 5] men as dissimilar as they are celebrated, but who have all, in different ways and in unequal degrees, undertaken a great work of reforming both the men and the social institutions of their times.

[Footnote 5: These researches give the following dates:--1.
Confucius, from 551 to 478 B.C.; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to
487, or from 589 to 512 B.C.; 3. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, in the
seventh and sixth centuries B.C. (he died, according to
Burnouf, 543 B.C.); 4. Pythagoras, from 580 to 500 B.C.; 5.
Socrates, 470 to 400 or 399 B.C.]

{58}

Confucius was above all a practical moralist, skilled in observation, counsel, and discipline; Buddha Càkya-Mouni, a dreamer, and a mystical and popular preacher; Zoroaster, a legislator, religious and political; Pythagoras and Socrates, philosophers, bent upon instructing the distinguished bands of disciples whom they gathered around them. There is no doubt, notwithstanding the trials of their life, that neither power nor glory amongst their contemporaries was wanting to them. Confucius and Zoroaster were the favourites and counsellors of kings. Buddha Càkya-Mouni, himself the son of a king, became the idol of innumerable multitudes. Pythagoras and Socrates formed schools and pupils who were an honour to the human mind. By their personal genius and by the excellence of some of their ideas and actions, these men have ensured themselves the admiration of all posterity. Did they act up to their teachings, and accomplish what they attempted? Did they really change the moral and social condition of nations? Did they cause humanity to make any great progress, and open to it horizons which it had not before known? {59} By no means. Whatever fame attaches to the names of these men, whatever influence they may have exerted, what ever trace of their passage may have remained, they rather appeared to have power than really to possess it; they agitated the surface far more than they stirred the depths; they did not draw nations out of the beaten tracks in which they had lived. They did not transform souls. In considering the facts at large, and notwithstanding the political and material revolutions which they underwent, China after Confucius, India after Buddha, Persia after Zoroaster, Greece after Pythagoras and Socrates, followed in the same ways, retained the same propensities, as before. Still more, among these very different nations, stagnation was only be succeeded by decay. Where are these nations at the present day, more than two thousand years after the appearance of these glorious characters in their history? What great progress, what salutary changes, have been effected? What are they in comparison and in contact with Christian nations? {60} Outside of Christianity there have been grand spectacles of activity and force, brilliant phenomena of genius and virtue, generous attempts at reform, learned philosophical systems, and beautiful mythological poems; no real profound or fruitful regeneration of humanity and of society.

A few ages only after these barren efforts among the great nations of the world, Jesus Christ appears among a small, obscure people, weak and despised. He Himself is weak and despised in the midst of his people; He neither possesses nor seeks any social power, any temporal means of action and of success; He collects around Him only disciples weak and despised as Himself. Not only are they weak and despised, they proclaim it themselves, and, far from being troubled at this, they glory in it, and derive from it confidence. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians: "And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. {61} And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. ... Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong." [Footnote 6]

[Footnote 6: 1 Corinthians ii. 13; 2 Corinthians xii. 10.]

And in truth, Jesus Christ, the Master of St. Paul, is strong in his sufferings, and imparts his strength to his disciples; from his cross, He accomplishes what erewhile, in Asia and Europe, princes and philosophers, the powerful of the earth, and sages, attempted without success; He changes the moral state and the social state of the world; He pours into the souls of men new enlightenment and new powers; for all classes, for all human conditions, He prepares destinies before his advent unknown; He liberates them at the same time that He lays down rules for their guidance; He quickens them and stills them; He places the divine law and human liberty face to face, and yet still in harmony; He offers an effectual remedy for the evil which weighs upon humanity; to sin He opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness the door of hope.

{62}

Whence comes this power? What are its source and its nature? How did those who were its witnesses and instruments think and speak of it at the moment when it was manifested?

They all, unanimously, saw in Jesus Christ, God; most of them, from the first moment, suddenly moved and enlightened by his presence and his words; some, with rather more surprise and hesitation, but soon penetrated and convinced in their turn. "When Jesus came into the coasts of Cæsarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say that I the Son of man am? And they said, Some say that thou art John the Baptist; some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom say ye that I am? And Simon Peter answered and said, Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God. {63} And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven." [Footnote 7] Another day, meeting with a similar instance of doubt, Jesus says to Thomas, "If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 7: Matthew xvi. 13-17.]

[Footnote 8: John, xiv. 7-9.]

It has been remarked, that there are certain variations in the language of the Apostles, and certain shades of difference in their leading impressions; and this is indeed true: they call Jesus Christ at one time the Son of God, at another the Son of Man; they regard Him and represent Him now under his divine aspect, at another under his human aspect; they do not present exactly the same image of Him; they do not all equally dwell upon the same traits of his nature, or the same facts of his earthly life. {64} St. Matthew is more a narrator and moralist; it is he who relates with fuller details the birth and childhood of Jesus Christ, and who gives at the greatest length the Sermon on the Mount. St. John is more in the habit of contemplating and depicting the divine nature of Jesus Christ and his relation to God: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. ... No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." [Footnote 9]

[Footnote 9: John, i. 1, 14, 18.]

{65}

It is also St. John who relates the testimony of the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, answering to those who had said to him that all men come to Jesus Christ: "Ye yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am not the Christ, but that I am sent before him. ... He that cometh from above is above all. ... He whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him. ... The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand" [Footnote 10] St. Paul is more systematic, and enters more fully into the questions and principles of the Christian doctrine, and he regards the divinity of Jesus Christ as the first of these principles. He writes to the Philippians: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it no usurpation to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross." [Footnote 11]

[Footnote 10: John iii. 28, 31, 34, and 35.]

[Footnote 11: Philippians ii. 5-6. I have given this verse in
Osterwald's translation, which is also that of the Vulgate;
but my son Guillaume, who is following out a careful course
of study of Latin and Greek philology in sacred and profane
literature, reminds me that the text of this passage presents
a difficulty which furnished a field for the labours of
Erasmus, Cameron, Grotius, Méric Casaubon, in the sixteenth
century, as well as many others before and after them. The
Greek word [Greek text] admits of two meanings, an active and
a passive sense--it may designate the _action of
ravishing, of carrying off by force,_ or the _object
carried off_--the act of depredation, or the spoil.
Substantives derived from verbs frequently waver between
these two acceptations, and the word [Greek text], which is
merely another form of [Greek text], is unquestionably a case
in point. Æschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, have employed it in
the first sense; Æschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, and
Polybius in the second sense. Now, in the passage of St.
Paul, accordingly as one or the other sense is adopted, these
words must either be translated thus: "He did not consider it
a usurpation to be equal to God;" or thus, "He did not
display as a trophy his equality to God;" that is to say: He
did not display His equality with God as the conquerors of
the earth display the spoils and booty which they have
amassed; He did not make use of His divinity to reign, to
triumph, to pride himself in it; He was not the Messiah whom
the carnal Jews expected, a visible king and victorious in
arms; but, on the contrary, "he humbled himself, and took
upon him the form of a servant," etc., etc. This second
interpretation seems more probable; the reasoning on which it
is founded is thus more connected and flowing; and at the
same time, it leaves the doctrine of the Apostle intact; it
changes nothing in his conception or his conclusions. In this
passage, as in many others, St. Paul likewise affirms the
divinity of the Saviour whom he announces to men; and it is
from this majesty, subjected to a voluntary humiliation,
veiled under the form of a servant, obedient unto the death
of the cross, that He presents an august example and an
imperative lesson for Christians of humility and mutual
support. It is thus that this interpretation has been
admitted and defended by two eminent men, a scholar of the
sixteenth and a theologian of the nineteenth century, both of
whom were strongly attached to the dogma of the divinity of
Jesus Christ--I allude to Méric Casaubon (De Verborum Usu,
pp. 138-146, at the end of the letters of his father), and M.
A. Vinet (Homilétique, p. 116).]

{66}

.... It is he "who is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist." [Footnote 12]

[Footnote 12: Colossians i. 15-17.]

{67}

St. Peter and St. John, in their Epistles, speak in the same terms as St. Paul. St. Peter says, "We have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him." [Footnote 13]

[Footnote 13: 2 Peter i. 16, 17.]

{68}

St. John writes: "Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father; but he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also." [Footnote 14] "Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God; and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." [Footnote 14]

[Footnote 13: 1 John ii. 23.]

[Footnote 14: 1 John iv. 2, 3.]

Such is the language of the Apostles; such are, at the same time, its shades of variance and its harmony. They have all evidently the same conception of Jesus Christ, they have all the same faith in Him. St. Matthew, as well as St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul, alike regard Jesus Christ as at once God and man, the representative of God on earth, and the Mediator between God and men--come from God, and re-ascended unto Him as the source and centre of His being. The dogma of the Incarnation, that is to say, of the divinity of Jesus Christ, pervades the Holy Scriptures--the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of the Apostles, the writings of the first Fathers. It is the common and fixed basis, the source and essence of the Christian faith.

{69}

This was affirmed and declared by Jesus Christ himself. What His disciples believed and related of Him, is what He himself told them of himself, as well as what they themselves witnessed and thought of Him: "All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him." [Footnote 15] --"I and my Father are one." [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 15: Matthew xi. 27.]

[Footnote 16: John x. 30.]

And when He approaches the term of His mission, when, after having announced to His disciples that the hour was coming when they would be dispersed, each going his own way, leaving Him alone, Jesus Christ raises His thoughts to God and says, "Father, the hour is come; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee: as thou hast given him power over all flesh, that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast given him. {70} And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was. I have manifested thy name unto the men which thou gavest me out of the world: thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have kept thy word. Now they have known that all things whatsoever thou hast given me are of thee. For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them: I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are." [Footnote 17]

[Footnote 17: John xvii. 1-11.]

{71}

I might multiply these texts; but these surely suffice to show that the words of Jesus Christ in relation to himself, and those of His Apostles, are in perfect unison; He speaks of himself as they speak of Him; He qualifies himself as they qualify Him; He calls God His "Father," as His disciples call Him "the Son of God." He has the same faith in himself, in His nature, and in His mission, as St. Matthew, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had in Him.

It is a great source of error, in the study of facts, not to know how to stop at their general and essential features, and, losing sight of these, to give prominence to partial and secondary features. On the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ, that fundamental principle of the Christian religion, the precise meaning and import of such or such a word may be disputed; such or such an expression may be thought an interpolation, and so eliminated in any particular Gospel, in any particular Epistle; nevertheless there will always remain infinitely more than sufficient evidence of the fact that those who at the present day believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, believe simply what the Apostles believed and said, and that the Apostles themselves only believed and said, nearly nineteen centuries ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to them.

{72}

The opponents of the dogma of the Incarnation and of the divinity of Jesus Christ disregard equally man and history, the complex elements of human nature, and the meaning of the great facts which mark the religious life of the human race.

What is man himself, but an incomplete and imperfect incarnation of God? The materialists who deny the soul, and the naturalists who deny creation, are alone consistent in rejecting the Christian dogma. All who believe in the distinction of spirit and matter, who do not believe that man is the result of the fermentation of matter, or of the transformation of species, are constrained to admit the presence in human nature of the divine element, and they must necessarily accept these words in Genesis: "God created man in his own image;" that is to say, they must acknowledge the presence of God in frail and fallible humanity.

{73}

I open the histories of all religions, of all mythologies, the most refined as well as the grossest; I find at every step the idea and the assertion of the Divine Incarnation. Brahmanism, Buddhism, Paganism, all faiths, all religious idolatries, abound in incarnations of every kind and date, primitive or successive, connected with this or that historical event, adapted to explain this or that fact, to satisfy this or that human propensity. It is the natural and universal instinct of men to picture to themselves the action of God upon the human race under the form of the incarnation of God in man.

{74}

Like all religious instincts, that of the belief in the Divine Incarnation may engender, and has engendered, the most absurd superstitions, the most extravagant hypotheses. In the same way as the natural faith in God has been the source of all idolatries, so the tendency to incarnate God in man has given rise to, and admitted, every kind of strange imagining and spurious tradition. Are we then to pronounce all divine incarnation false, every tradition of it spurious? Rather let us say that it proceeds from the infirmity of the human mind, if we see realities and mere chimeras, truths and errors, in such close proximity, if we find them calling one another by the same names and unceasingly confounding one another's attributes. The pretended incarnation of Brahma, or of Buddha, proves no more against the divinity of Jesus Christ than the adoration of idols proves against the existence of God. Jesus Christ, God and Man, has characteristics which appertain to Him alone. These have founded His power and occasioned the success of His works, a power and a success which belong to Him alone. {75} It is not a human reformer, but God himself, who, through Jesus Christ, has accomplished what no human reformer has ever accomplished, or even conceived,--the reform of the moral and social condition of the world, the regeneration of the human soul, and the solution of the problems of human destiny. It is by these signs, by these results, that the divinity of Jesus Christ is manifested. How was the Divine Incarnation accomplished in man? Here, as in the union of the soul and the body, as in the creation, arises the mystery; but if we cannot fathom the reason of it, the fact not the less exists. When this fact has taken the form of dogma, theology has sought to explain it. In my opinion, this was a mistake; theology has obscured the fact in developing and commenting upon it. It is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all theological controversies. To disregard this fact--to deny the divinity of Jesus Christ--is to deny, to overthrow the Christian religion, which would never have been what it is, and would never have accomplished what it has, but that the Divine Incarnation was its principle, and Jesus Christ--God and Man--its author.

{76}

V. The Redemption.

I enter into the sanctuary of the Christian faith.

God has done more than manifest himself in Jesus Christ. He has done more than place upon the earth and before men His own living image, the type of sanctity and the model of life. The Creator has accomplished, through Jesus Christ, toward man, His creature, an act of His beneficence and at the same time of His sovereign power. Jesus Christ is not only God made man to spread the divine light upon men; He is God made man to conquer and efface in man moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He brings not only light and law, but pardon and salvation. {77} And it is at the price of His own suffering, of His own sacrifice, that He brings these to them. He is the type of self-devotion at the same time as of sanctity. He has submitted to be a victim in order to be a saviour. The Incarnation leads to the Cross, and the Cross to the Redemption.

Here are the supreme dogma and mystery. Here are revealed plainly the sense and the import of Christianity. By what ways did Jesus Christ penetrate the human soul to accomplish this great work? How did He win the human soul to the Christian faith, in order to snatch it from evil and to save it?

When man fails in the duty of which he recognises the law,--when he commits the wrong which he is bound to shun,--when, after sin, repentance arises within him, and a sense of the necessity of expiation is soon joined with this sentiment of repentance, the moral instinct of man teaches that repentance does not suffice to efface the fault, and that it requires to be expiated: reparation supposes suffering.

{78}

And when the religious sentiment is joined to the moral sentiment,--when man believes in God, and sees in Him the author and dispenser of the moral law, he regards himself as guilty of transgression toward God whom he has disobeyed, he feels the need of being pardoned and of being restored to the favour of the Sovereign Master whom he has offended.

Among all nations, in all religions, under all social forms, these two instincts--as to the necessity of expiation to ensue upon the fault, and the necessity of pardon to follow the transgression--appear natural and inherent in the human soul. They have been at all times and in all places, the source of a multitude of beliefs and practices; some pure and touching, others foolish and odious: these may all be briefly comprised in the single expression, _sacrifices_. The histories of all nations, barbarous or civilized, ancient or modern, teem with sacrificial rites of every description, whether they be of a nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild or bloody; rites invented and celebrated either to expiate the sins of man, or to appease the anger of God and regain His favour.

{79}

Nor is this all; we have here to note another moral fact, not less real although it seems stranger to the eyes of superficial reason. Mankind has believed that a fault might be expiated by another than its author, that innocent victims might be efficaciously offered up to influence God, and to save the guilty. This belief has led to sacrifices no less absurd than atrocious: the pretended expiation has become an additional crime: it has at the same time been also the source of heroic acts and sublime examples of self-devotion. Both the domestic records of families and the public histories of nations have furnished us with admirable instances of innocence voluntarily offering itself as a sacrifice, taking upon itself the penalty, the suffering, the death, to expiate the sin of others, and to win from Divine Justice--now satisfied--the pardon of the offender.

{80}

And are we then to regard this merely as a pious, a generous illusion, a devotedness as vain as admirable? Yes, such is the view that all those must adopt who believe neither in Providence nor prayer, nor in the existence of any efficacious relation between the actions of man and the purposes of God; no solidarity between men, no connection between the sacrifice of him who practises the act of self-devotion, and the destiny of him who is its object. But those who have faith in the living God, in His continued presence, and His never-sleeping providence, those who believe that nothing in man, whether it be good or whether it be evil, is in vain, that every moral act bears its fruit visible or invisible, immediate or remote, such as these cannot fail to feel, to have, as it were, a presentiment, that in such self-sacrifice of the innocent for the salvation of the guilty, there exists a mysterious virtue. The secret of this it may not be given them to fathom, but it nevertheless gives life in their bosom to the hope that such sublime devotion will not fail of its object.

{81}