Chapter M: Renan's Hibbert Lectures15 (1)

[15]
_Guardian_, 14th April 1880.

I

The object of M. Renan's lectures at St. George's Hall is, as we understand him, not merely to present a historical sketch of the influence of Rome on the early Church, but to reconcile the historical imagination with the results of his own and kindred speculations on the origin of Christianity. He has, with a good faith which we do not question, investigated the subject and formed his conclusions upon it. He on the present occasion assumes these investigations, and that he, at any rate, is satisfied with their result. He hardly pretends to carry the mixed popular audience whom he addresses into any real inquiry into the grounds on which he has satisfied himself that the received account of Christianity is not the true one. But he is aware that all minds are more or less consciously impressed with the broad difficulty that, after all attempts to trace the origin of Christianity to agencies and influences of well-understood human character, the disproportion between causes and effects still continues to appear excessive. The great Christian tradition with its definite beliefs about the conditions of man's existence, which has shaped the fortunes and determined the future of mankind on earth, is in possession of the world as much as the great tradition of right and wrong, or of the family, or of the State. How did it get there? It is most astonishing that it should have done so, what is the account of it? Of course people may inquire into this question as they may inquire into the basis of morality, or the origin of the family or the State. But here, as on those subjects, reason, and that imagination which is one of the forces of reason, by making the mind duly sensible of the magnitude of ideas and alternatives, are exacting. M. Renan's task is to make the purely human origin of Christianity, its origin in the circumstances, the beliefs, the ideas, and the moral and political conditions of the first centuries, seem to us _natural_--as natural in the history of the world as other great and surprising events and changes--as natural as the growth and the fall of the Roman Empire, or as the Reformation, or the French Revolution. He is well qualified to sound the depths of his undertaking and to meet its heavy exigencies. With a fuller knowledge of books, and a closer familiarity than most men with the thoughts and the events of the early ages, with a serious value for the idea of religion as such, and certainly with no feeble powers of recalling the past and investing it with colour and life, he has to show how these things can be--how a religion with such attributes as he freely ascribes to the Gospel, so grand, so pure, so lasting, can have sprung up not merely _in_ but _from_ a most corrupt and immoral time, and can have its root in the most portentous and impossible of falsehoods. It must be said to be a bold undertaking.

M. Renan has always aimed at doing justice to what he assailed; Christians, who realise what they believe, will say that he patronises their religion, and naturally they resent such patronage. Such candour adds doubtless to the literary effect of his method; but it is only due to him to acknowledge the fairness of his admissions. He starts with the declaration that there never was a nobler moment in human history than the beginnings of the Christian Church. It was the "most heroic episode in the annals of mankind." "Never did man draw forth from his bosom more devotion, more love of the ideal, than in the 150 years which elapsed between the sweet Galilean vision and the death of Marcus Aurelius." It was not only that the saints were admirable and beautiful in their lives; they had the secret of the future, and laid down the lines on which the goodness and hope of the coming world were to move." Never was the religious conscience more eminently creative, never did it lay down with more authority the law of future ages."

Now, if this is not mere rhetoric, what does it come to? It means not merely that there was here a phenomenon, not only extraordinary but unique, in the development of human character, but that here was created or evolved what was to guide and form the religious ideas of mankind; here were the springs of what has reached through all the ages of expanding humanity to our own days, of what is best and truest and deepest and holiest. M. Renan, at any rate, does not think this an illusion of Christian prepossessions, a fancy picture of a mythic age of gold, of an unhistorical period of pure and primitive antiquity. Put this view of things by the side of any of the records or the literature of the time remaining to us; if not St. Paul's Epistles nor Tacitus nor Lucian, then Virgil and Horace and Cicero, or Seneca or Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius. Is it possible by any effort of imagination to body forth the links which can solidly connect the ideas which live and work and grow on one side, with the ideas which are represented by the facts and principles of the other side? Or is it any more possible to connect what we know of Christian ideas and convictions by a bond of natural and intelligible, if not necessary derivation, with what we know of Jewish ideas and Jewish habits of thought at the time in question? Yet that is the thing to be done, to be done rigorously, to be done clearly and distinctly, by those who are satisfied to find the impulses and faith which gave birth to Christianity amid the seething confusions of the time which saw its beginning; absolutely identical with those wild movements in origin and nature, and only by a strange, fortunate accident immeasurably superior to them.

This question M. Renan has not answered; as far as we can see he has not perceived that it is the first question for him to answer, in giving a philosophical account of the history of Christianity. Instead, he tells us, and he is going still further to tell us, how Rome and its wonderful influences acted on Christianity, and helped to assure its victories. But, first of all, what is that Christianity, and whence did it come, which Rome so helped? It came, he says, from Judaism; "it was Judaism under its Christian form which Rome propagated without wishing it, yet with such mighty energy that from a certain epoch Romanism and Christianity became synonymous words"; it was Jewish monotheism, the religion the Roman hated and despised, swallowing up by its contrast all that was local, legendary, and past belief, and presenting one religious law to the countless nationalities of the Empire, which like itself was one, and like itself above all nationalities.

This may all be true, and is partially true; but how did that hated and partial Judaism break through its trammels, and become a religion for all men, and a religion to which all men gathered? The Roman organisation was an admirable vehicle for Christianity; but the vehicle does not make that which it carries, or account for it. M. Renan's picture of the Empire abounds with all those picturesque details which he knows so well where to find, and knows so well, too, how to place in an interesting light. There were then, of course, conditions of the time more favourable to the Christian Church than would have been the conditions of other times. There was a certain increased liberty of thought, though there were also some pretty strong obstacles to it. M. Renan has Imperial proclivities, and reminds us truly enough that despotisms are sometimes more tolerant than democracies, and that political liberty is not the same as spiritual and mental freedom, and does not always favour it. It may be partially true, as he says, that "Virgil and Tibullus show that Roman harshness and cruelty were softening down"; that "equality and the rights of men were preached by the Stoics"; that "woman was more her own mistress, and slaves were better treated than in the days of Cato"; that "very humane and just laws were enacted under the very worst emperors; that Tiberius and Nero were able financiers"; that "after the terrible butcheries of the old centuries, mankind was crying with the voice of Virgil for peace and pity." A good many qualifications and abatements start up in our minds on reading these statements, and a good many formidable doubts suggest themselves, if we can at all believe what has come down to us of the history of these times. It is hard to accept quite literally the bold assertion that "love for the poor, sympathy with all men, almsgiving, were becoming virtues." But allow this as the fair and hopeful side of the Empire. Yet all this is a long way from accounting for the effects on the world of Christianity, even in the dim, vaporous form in which M. Renan imagines it, much more in the actual concrete reality in which, if we know anything, it appeared. "Christianity," he says, "responded to the cry for peace and pity of all weary and tender souls." No doubt it did; but what was it that responded, and what was its consolation, and whence was its power drawn? What was there in the known thoughts or hopes or motives of men at the time to furnish such a response? "Christianity," he says, "could only have been born and spread at a time when men had no longer a country"; "it was that explosion of social and religious ideas which became inevitable after Augustus had put an end to political struggles," after his policy had killed "patriotism." It is true enough that the first Christians, believing themselves subjects of an Eternal King and in view of an eternal world, felt themselves strangers and pilgrims in this; yet did the rest of the Roman world under the Caesars feel that they had no country, and was the idea of patriotism extinct in the age of Agricola? But surely the real question worth asking is, What was it amid the increasing civilisation and prosperous peace of Rome under the first Emperors which made these Christians relinquish the idea of a country? From whence did Christianity draw its power to set its followers in inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the world has ever known?

To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age, and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised. German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question. There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.

II[16]

[16]
_Guardian_, 21st April 1880.

M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power, as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul," "Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up," and "Rome the Capital of Catholicism," are the titles of the three lectures in which this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius, at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.

Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_ with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind, was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan's treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all interest, all the sources of influence and power in the Christian religion and Christian Church, from the first moment at Rome. But for Rome the Christian Church would not have existed. The Church is inconceivable without Rome, and Rome as the seat and centre of its spiritual activity. Everything else is forgotten. There were Christian Churches all over the Empire, in Syria, in Egypt, in Africa, in Asia Minor, in Gaul, in Greece. A great body of Christian literature, embodying the ideas and character of Christians all over the Empire, was growing up, and this was not Roman and had nothing to do with Rome; it was Greek as much as Latin, and local, not metropolitan, in its characteristics. Christianity was spreading here, there, and everywhere, slowly and imperceptibly as the tide comes in, or as cells multiply in the growing tissues of organised matter; it was spreading under its many distinct guides and teachers, and taking possession of the cities and provinces of the Empire. All this great movement, the real foundation of all that was to be, is overlooked and forgotten in the attention which is fixed on Rome and confined to it. As in the Roman Catholic view, M. Renan brings St. Paul and St. Peter together to Rome, to found that great Imperial Church in which the manifold and varied history of Christendom is merged and swallowed up. Only, of course, M. Renan brings them there as "fanatics" instead of Apostles and martyrs. We know something about St. Peter and St. Paul. We know them at any rate from their writings. In M. Renan's representation they stand opposed to one another as leaders of factions, to whose fierce hatreds and jealousies there is nothing comparable. "All the differences," he is reported to say, "which divide orthodox folks, heretics, schismatics, in our own day, are as nothing compared with the dissension between Peter and Paul." It is, as every one knows, no new story; but there it is in M. Renan in all its crudity, as if it were the most manifest and accredited of truths. M. Renan first brings St. Paul to Rome. "It was," he says, "a great event in the world's history, almost as pregnant with consequences as his conversion." How it was so M. Renan does not explain; but he brings St. Peter to Rome also, "following at the heels of St. Paul," to counteract and neutralise his influence. And who is this St. Peter? He represents the Jewish element; and what that element was at Rome M. Renan takes great pains to put before us. He draws an elaborate picture of the Jews and Jewish quarter of Rome--a "longshore population" of beggars and pedlars, with a Ghetto resembling the Alsatia of _The Fortunes of Nigel_, seething with dirt and fanaticism. These were St. Peter's congeners at Rome, whose ideas and claims, "timid trimmer" though he was, he came to Rome to support against the Hellenism and Protestantism of St. Paul. And at Rome they, both of them, probably, perished in Nero's persecution, and that is the history of the success of Christianity. "Only fanatics can found anything. Judaism lives on because of the intense frenzy of its prophets and annalists, Christianity by means of its martyrs."

But a certain Clement arose after their deaths, to arrange a reconciliation between the fiercely antagonistic factions of St. Peter and St. Paul. How he harmonised them M. Renan leaves us to imagine; but he did reconcile them; he gathered in his own person the authority of the Roman Church; he lectured the Corinthian Church on its turbulence and insubordination; he anticipated, M. Renan remarked, almost in words, the famous saying of the French Archbishop of Rouen, "My clergy are my regiment, and they are drilled to obey like a regiment." On this showing, Clement might almost be described as the real founder of Christianity, of which neither St. Peter nor St. Paul, with their violent oppositions, can claim to be the complete representative; at any rate he was the first Pope, complete in all his attributes. And in accordance with this beginning M. Renan sees in the Roman Church, first, the centre in which Church authority grew up, and next, the capital of Catholicism. In Rome the congregation gave up its rights to its elders, and these rights the elders surrendered to the single ruler or Bishop. The creation of the Episcopate was eminently the work of Rome; and this Bishop of Rome caught the full spirit of the Caesar, on whose decay he became great; and troubling himself little about the deep questions which exercised the minds and wrung the hearts of thinkers and mystics, he made himself the foundation of order, authority, and subordination to all parts of the Imperial world.

Such is M. Renan's explanation of the great march and triumph of the Christian Church. The Roman Empire, which we had supposed was the natural enemy of the Church, was really the founder of all that made the Church strong, and bequeathed to the Church its prerogatives and its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the lessons they were to learn from it.

Disguised as it may be, M. Renan's lectures represent not history, but scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious explanations as to the way in which the "club" of the Christian Church surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth; felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling still--that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.

We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquished. He still owes something, and owns it, to what he has abandoned--"I am often tempted to say, as Job said, in our Latin version, _Etiam si occident me, in ipso sperabo_. But the next moment all is gone--all is but a symbol and a dream." There is no possibility of solving the religious problem. He relapses into profound disbelief of the worth and success of moral efforts after truth. His last word is an exhortation to tolerance for "fanatics," as the best mode of extinguishing them. "If, instead of leading _Polyeucte_ to punishment, the magistrate, with a smile and shake of the hand, had sent him home again, _Polyeucte_ would not have been caught offending again; perhaps, in his old age, he would even have laughed at his escapade, and would have become a sensible man." It is as obvious and natural in our days to dispose of such difficulties in this way with a smile and a sneer as it was in the first century with a shout--_"Christiani ad leones."_ But Corneille was as good a judge of the human heart as M. Renan. He had gauged the powers of faith and conviction; he certainly would have expected to find his _Polyeucte_ more obstinate.

XIV

RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"[17]

[17]
_Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse_. Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_,
18th July 1883.

The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jésus_. The story of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal Newman's _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M. Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented. He calls his life the "_charmante promenade_" which the "cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety, sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air, and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu'on aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du moyen âge," and on the march of modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up, not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.

The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is passed on from the teaching of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge, full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a "savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology, carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma, he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length beginning to write. Michel Lévy, the publisher, found him out, and opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.

As a mere history of a change of convictions, the _Souvenirs_ are interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account. "Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poésie"--the reflection of states of mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. "Tout est vrai dans ce petit volume, mais non de ce genre de verité qui est requis pour une _Biographie universelle_. Bien des choses ont été mises, afin qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eût permis, j'aurais dû écrire plus d'une fois à la marge--_cum grano salis_". It is candid to warn us thus to read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at Tréguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how, at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing, which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of his own success.

Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgré sa prétention d'être un asile
fermé aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas était a cette époque la
maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait à
pleins bords par les portes et les fenêtres, Paris tout entier,
moins la corruption, je me hâte de le dire, Paris avec ses
petitesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa
force révolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux prêtres
de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathématiques et le latin que
mes nouveaux maîtres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans
lumière et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphère du siècle circulait
librement.... Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout à fait
inconnue m'etait révélée. Les mots, talent, éclat, réputation
eurent un sens pour moi. J'étais perdu pour l'idéal modeste que
mes anciens maîtres m'avaient inculqué.

And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man, were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:--

Adoré de ses élèves, M. Dupanloup n'était pas toujours agréable à
ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocèse,
les choses se passèrent de la même manière, qu'il fut toujours
plus aimé de ses laïques que de ses prêtres. Il est certain qu'il
écrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence même nous attachait;
car nous sentions que nous étions son but unique. Ce qu'il était,
c'était un éveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses
élèves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'égalait.
Chacun de ses deux cents élèves existait distinct dans sa pensée;
il était pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours présent, le motif
de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la
base de la foi. Il répétait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion
de sa faculté d'admirer. Son admiration n'était pas toujours assez
éclairée par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur
d'âme et d'un coeur vraiment possédé de l'amour du beau.... Les
défauts de l'éducation qu'il donnait étaient les défauts même de
son esprit. Il était trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On
eût dit que ses deux cents élèves étaient destinés à être tous
poètes, écrivains, orateurs.

St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes études_"; and the writer thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so. They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup, than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display, and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting of priests:--

Beaucoup de mes jugements étonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils
n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu à Saint-Sulpice, associés à
des idées étroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent
produire en fait de bonté, de modestie, d'abnégation personelle.
Ce qu'il y a de vertu à Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un
monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouvé
ailleurs.

M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness. They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician" education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractère que je suis resté essentiellement l'élève de mes anciens maîtres." He is proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:--

Il me plairait d'expliquer par le détail et de montrer comment la
gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus cléricales, sans la foi
qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont
pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les
plus divertissantes. J'aimerais à raconter toutes les aventures
que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenèrent, et les tours singuliers
qu'elles m'ont joués. Après soixante ans de vie sérieuse on a le
droit de sourire; et où trouver une source de rire plus abondante,
plus à portée, plus inoffensive qu'en soimême? Si jamais un auteur
comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui
demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur;
je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles
qu'il pourrait inventer.

He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks, graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned French politeness--that beautiful instinct of giving place to others, which is perishing in the democratic scramble for the best places, in the omnibus and the railway as in business and society. It is more curious to find that he thinks that they taught him to be modest. Except on the faith of his assertions, the readers of his book would not naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which the good humour never fails. His masters also taught him to value purity. For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology. He saw, indeed, "the vanity of this virtue as of all the others"; he admits that it is an unnatural virtue. But he says, "L'homme ne doit jamais se permettre deux hardiesses à la fois. Le libre penseur doit être réglé en ses moeurs." In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find many followers. An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in France is such as is described in the following passage--a passage which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:--

Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout à fait faux, voit
une sorte de ridicule à être vertueux quand on n'y est pas obligé
par un devoir professionnel. Le prêtre, ayant pour état d'être
chaste, comme le soldat d'être brave, est, d'après ces idées,
presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir à des principes sur
lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus étranges
combats. Il est hors de doute qu'en ce point, comme en beaucoup
d'autres, mes principes clericaux, conservés dans le siècle, m'ont
nui aux yeux du monde.

We have one concluding observation to make. This is a book of which the main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion. But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is. Religion is not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical investigations, of a consistent theology. It is not merely a procession of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be an original and acute critic, a brilliant master of historical representation; but he has never yet come face to face with the problems of religion. His love of truth may be unimpeachable, but he docs not know what he is talking about. M. Renan speaks of giving up his religion as a man might speak of accepting a new and unpopular physical hypothesis like evolution, or of making up his mind to give up the personality of Homer or the early history of Rome. Such an interior attitude of mind towards religion as is implied, for instance, in Bishop Butler's _Sermons on the Love of God_, or the _De Imitatione_ or Newman's _Parochial Sermons_ seems to him, as far as we can judge, an unknown and unattempted experience. It is easy to deal with a question if you leave out half the factors of it, and those the most difficult and the most serious. It is easy to be clear if you do not choose to take notice of the mysterious, and if you exclude from your consideration as vague and confused all that vast department of human concerns where we at best can only "see through a glass darkly." It is easy to find the world a pleasant and comfortable and not at all perplexing place, if your life has been, as M. Renan describes his own, a "charming promenade" through it; if, as he says, you are blessed with "a good humour not easily disturbed "; and you "have not suffered much"; and "nature has prepared cushions to soften shocks"; and you have "had so much enjoyment in this life that you really have no right to claim any compensation beyond it." That is M. Renan's experience of life--a life of which he looks forward to the perfection in the clearness and security of its possible denials of ancient beliefs, and in the immense development of its positive and experimental knowledge. How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a hundred years hence.

But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world. There is another aspect of life more familiar than this, an aspect which has presented itself to the vast majority of mankind, the awful view of it which is made tragic by pain and sorrow and moral evil; which, in the way in which religion looks at it, if it is sterner, is also higher and nobler, and is brightened by hope and purposes of love; a view which puts more upon men and requires more from them, but holds before them a destiny better than the perfection here of physical science. To minds which realise all this, it is more inconceivable than any amount of miracle that such a religion as Christianity should have emerged naturally out of the conditions of the first century. They refuse to settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon, over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not, there _is_ no evidence of the supernatural in the world. To those who measure and feel the true gravity of the issues, it is almost unintelligible to find a man who has been face to face with Christianity all his life treating the deliberate condemnation of it almost gaily and with a light heart, and showing no regrets in having to give it up as a delusion and a dream. It is a poor and meagre end of a life of thought and study to come to the conclusion that the age in which he has lived is, if not one of the greatest, at least "the most amusing of all ages."

XV

LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON[18]

[18]
_Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson_. Edited by Stopford A.
Brooke. _Guardian_, 15th November 1865.

If the proof of a successful exhibition of a strongly marked and original character be that it excites and sustains interest throughout, that our tastes are appealed to and our judgments called forth with great strength, that we pass continuously and rapidly, as we read, from deep and genuine admiration to equally deep and genuine dissent and disapprobation, that it allows us to combine a general but irresistible sense of excellence growing upon us through the book with an under-current of real and honest dislike and blame, then this book in a great measure satisfies the condition of success. It is undeniable that in what it shows us of Mr. Robertson there is much to admire, much to sympathise with, much to touch us, a good deal to instruct us. He is set before us, indeed, by the editor, as the ideal of all that a great Christian teacher and spiritual guide, all that a brave and wise and high-souled man, may be conceived to be. We cannot quite accept him as an example of such rare and signal achievement; and the fault of the book is the common one of warm-hearted biographers to wind their own feelings and those of their readers too high about their subject; to talk as if their hero's excellences were unknown till he appeared to display them, and to make up for the imperfect impression resulting from actual facts and qualities by insisting with overstrained emphasis on a particular interpretation of them. The book would be more truthful and more pleasing if the editor's connecting comments were more simply written, and made less pretension to intensity and energy of language. Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a biography ought to do--it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us the means of forming our own judgment about him. It is not a tame panegyric or a fancy picture.

The main portion of the book consists of Mr. Robertson's own letters, and his own accounts of himself; and we are allowed to see him, in a great degree at least, as he really was. The editor draws a moral, indeed, and tells us what we ought to think about what we see; but we can use our own judgment about that. And, as so often happens in real life, what we see both attracts and repels; it calls forth, successively and in almost equal measure, warm sympathy and admiration, and distinct and hearty disagreement. At least there is nothing of commonplace--of what is commonplace yet in our generation; though there is a good deal that bids fair to become commonplace in the next. It is the record of a genuine spontaneous character, seeking its way, its duty, its perfection, with much sincerity and elevation of purpose, and many anxieties and sorrows, and not, we doubt not, without much of the fruits that come with real self-devotion; a record disclosing a man with great faults and conspicuous blanks in his nature, one with whose principles, taste, or judgment we constantly find ourselves having a vehement quarrel, just after having been charmed and conciliated by some unexpectedly powerful or refined statement of an important truth. We cannot think, and few besides his own friends will think, that he had laid his hand with so sure an accuracy and with so much promise upon the clue which others had lost or bungled over. But there is much to learn in his thoughts and words, and there is not less to learn from his life. It is the life of a man who did not spare himself in fulfilling what he received as his task, who sacrificed much in order to speak his message, as he thought, more worthily and to do his office more effectually, and whose career touches us the more from the shadow of suffering and early death that hangs over its aspirations and activity. A book which fairly shows us such a life is not of less value because it also shows us much that we regret and condemn.

Mr. Robertson was brought up not only in the straitest traditions of the Evangelical school, but in the heat of its controversial warfare. His heart, when he was a boy, was set on entering the army; and one of his most characteristic points through life, shown in many very different forms, was his pugnacity, his keen perception of the "_certaminis gaudia_":--

"There is something of combativeness in me," he writes, "which
prevents the whole vigour being drawn out, except when I have an
antagonist to deal with, a falsehood to quell, or a wrong to
avenge. Never till then does my mind feel quite alive. Could I
have chosen my own period of the world to have lived in, and my
own type of life, it should be the feudal ages, and the life of a
Cid, the redresser of wrongs."

"On the other hand," writes his biographer, "when he met men who
despised Christianity, or who, like the Roman Catholics, held to
doctrines which he believed untrue, this very enthusiasm and
unconscious excitement swept him sometimes beyond himself. He
could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of
ordinary life. Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise
tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer
manhood. He held to his own views with pertinacity. He believed
them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of
the views of others having truth in them also. He was more or less
one-sided at this period. With the Roman Catholic religion it was
war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the
truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error. He
seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have
attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was
startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted."

He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of his friends, that he should prepare for orders. "With a romantic instinct of self-sacrifice," says his biographer, "he resolved to give up the idea of his whole life." This we can quite understand; but with that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have, besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson's "_characteristic self-distrust_ disposed him to believe that he was himself the worst judge of his future profession." This is the way in which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order to say something proper and becoming. Self-distrust was not among the graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson's nature, unless indeed we mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the interval between attempt and achievement.