Chapter IV (2)

Over and above free-thinkers, properly so called, there exists in every country a class of men who understand perfectly the defects in the religions in force about them, but have not the power of mind necessary to lift them above revealed dogma generally, and every form of external cult and rite. They begin accordingly to dabble in the religions of neighbouring peoples. A religion which is not in force in one’s immediate neighbourhood always possesses the advantage of being seen from a distance. At a distance its faults are scarcely distinguishable, and the imagination freely endows it with all excellent qualities. How many things and persons gain thus by aloofness! When one has seen one’s ideal, it is sometimes good not to approach it too near if one is to preserve one’s reverence for it. A number of Englishmen, indignant at the aridity of the hard and blind fanaticism of the extreme Protestants, cast envious glances across the Channel, where a religion seems to reign that is more friendly to art,—at once more æsthetic and more mystical, capable of affording a completer satisfaction to certain human needs. Among those who are thus favourable to a properly understood Catholicism may be cited Matthew Arnold and Cardinal Newman; and one might even add the Queen of England herself. In France, as might be expected, quite the opposite disposition obtains. Wearied of the Catholic Church and of its intolerance, we should gladly escape its dominion: compared with the objections against Catholicism which assail our eyes, the objections against Protestantism appear to us as trifling. And the same notion has occurred simultaneously to a number of distinguished Frenchmen: why should France remain Catholic, at least in name? Why should not France adopt the religion of the more robust people who have recently vanquished her; the religion of Germany, of England, of the United States, of all the young, strong, and active nations? Why not begin again the labour interrupted by the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the Edict of Nantes? Even if one should not succeed in converting the masses, it would suffice, according to the partisans of Protestantism, to propagate the new religion among the élite of the population very sensibly to modify the general course of our government, of our national spirit, even of our laws. The laws regulating the relations of Church and State would promptly be corrected; they would be reconstructed so as to offer protection to the development of the Protestant religion, as they at this moment do in a thousand ways to the outworn religion of Catholicism. Ultimately Protestantism would be declared to be the national religion of France; the religion, in other words, toward which she ought to endeavour to move, and which constitutes her real ideal, her sole hope of the future, the sole means open to Latin nations to escape death, and to outlive, in some sense, themselves. Add that, in the judgment of the authors of this hypothesis, the Protestant religion, once fairly entered in the lists against Catholicism, must inevitably and speedily win the day; the iron pot would make short work of the earthen pot. The partisans of Protestantism invoke history in support of their conclusions; Protestantism was vanquished among us by force, and not by persuasion; its defeat is therefore not definitive. Wherever Catholicism has not employed violence, persecution, and crime to maintain itself, it has always succumbed; its only tenable argument has been to put its opponents to death; to-day this comfortable method of backing the syllogism by the sword is out of date, and Catholicism is condemned the instant it is attacked. It contains, moreover, an essential and irremediable vice, auricular confession. By the confessional it excites the open or secret hostility of every husband and every father, who sees the priest interposing between him and his wife, between him and his children. The confessor is a supernumerary in every family; a member who has neither the same interests nor the same ideas, and who, nevertheless, is perfectly informed of everything the other members do, and can, in a thousand ways, oppose their projects, and, at the moment when they least expect it, bar their path. When one takes into consideration the mute state of war which so often exists between the married man and the Catholic priest; when one analyzes the other causes of dissolution which are working in Catholicism; when one considers, for example, that the dogma of infallibility is simply inacceptable to anyone whose conscience is not absolutely distorted, one must admit that the project of Protestantizing France, how strange soever it may seem at first glance, is worthy of serious attention.

[Sidenote: Proposal to Protestantize France.]

It is not astonishing that it should have won to its side a number of partisans, and should have provoked a certain intellectual fermentation. Michelet and Quinet were desirous that France should become Protestant, at least transitorily! In 1843, during a journey to Geneva, Michelet discussed with some clergymen the means of accelerating the progress of Protestantism in France and of creating a really national church. Two men, whose names are known to all those who have laboured in philosophy or in social science, MM. Renouvier and De Laveleye, are among the promoters of this movement. Convinced free-thinkers, like M. Louis Ménard, acquiesce in it, making use of the names of Turgot and Quinet; and M. Pillon also has sustained the project. Many Protestant ministers have turned the whole of their activity in this channel, have founded journals and written for the reviews; pamphlets, works often remarkable in their kind, have been composed and circulated. Protestants are more disposed than Catholics to propagandism, because their faith is more personal. They feel that in a number of provinces they form an important nucleus which may grow in time like a snowball. A number of villages, of Yonne, la Marne, l’Aude, etc., have already been converted; in spite of all the obstacles raised by the civil and religious authorities, in spite of vexations and annoyances of every sort, the neophytes have finally succeeded in establishing a Protestant pastor among them. Materially considered, these results are small; their consequences, however, may some day be of great importance. One never suspects how many people there are ready to listen and to believe; how many people there are ready to preach and to convert. It need not be a matter of surprise, some day or other, to see Protestant clergymen fairly rise out of the soil and overrun our country districts. The Catholic clergy, who present an almost unbroken front of incapacity, will scarcely be able to hold their own against a new and ardent adversary.

[Sidenote: Contrary to the tendency of French history.]

The most serious opposition to Protestantism in France is not to be looked for from the Catholics, but from the free-thinkers. It is in the name of free-thought that we shall consider the following question: Ought France really to accept as its ideal any religion whatsoever, even though it be superior to the one professedly in possession at the present day? Is not the acceptance of any religion as an ideal precisely contrary to the whole movement of the French mind since the Revolution?

[Sidenote: French Revolution still being accomplished.]

It has been said that, if the French Revolution was put down before it had produced all of the results which were expected of it, the reason was that it was undertaken, not in the name of a liberal religion, but in antagonism to all religion. The nation rose as a body against Catholicism, but it had nothing to offer in its stead; it was an effort in the void and resulted necessarily in a fall. To address such a reproach to the Revolution, is precisely to fail to recognize its distinguishing peculiarity. Theretofore religion had usually been involved in the political discussions of men; the English Revolution, for example, was in part religious. And when an uprising was, as it happened, wholly religious, its purpose was to pull down one cult and set up another; the aid of a new God had to be called in to expel the old; but for Jesus or some other unknown divinity, Jupiter would still have been enthroned on Olympus. Also the result of these religious revolutions was easy to predict; at the end of a certain number of years some new cult was bound to carry the day, to intrench itself, and to become quite as intolerant as its predecessor; and the revolution was achieved—that is to say, everything was practically in the same state that it was before. A determinate end, close at hand, had been pursued and attained; a little chapter in the history of the universe had been written, and one was ready to close it with a period and to say that was all. What drives the historian to despair in the case of the French Revolution, is precisely the impossibility of writing a peroration, of reaching a final stop, of saying, “That is all.” The great fermentation persists, and passes on from generation to generation. “The French Revolution has come to nothing,” it is said; but the reason is perhaps simply that it has not miscarried. The French Revolution is still in its earliest stages; if we are still unable to say where it is leading us, we may at least affirm with confidence that it is leading us somewhere. It is precisely the incertitude and the remoteness of their aim that constitute the nobility of certain enterprises; if one wants something very big, one must be resigned to want something a little vague. One must be resigned also to a settled discontent with everything that is offered one as a substitute for the fleeing ideal that constitutes one’s aim. Never to be satisfied—behold a comparatively unknown state of mind in many parts of the world! Some thousands of years ago there were a number of revolutions in China, which brought forth results so precise and so incontestable that they have come down in a state of absolute preservation to the present day. Is China the ideal of those who wish a people to achieve once for all a state of satisfaction, of stable equilibrium, of established environment, of unalterable outline and form? Certainly the bent of the French mind is precisely the opposite of that of the Chinese. Horror of routine, of tradition, of the established fact in the face of reason, is an attribute that we possess to a fault. To carry reason into politics, into law, into religion was precisely the aim of the French Revolution. It is no easy thing, it is even futile, to attempt to introduce simultaneously logic and light into everything; one makes mistakes, one reasons ill, one has one’s days of weakness, one succumbs to concordats and empires. In spite, however, of so many temporary divergences from the straight path, it is already easy to recognize the direction toward which the Revolution tends, and to affirm that this direction is not religious. The French Revolution affords an example, for the first time in the world, of a liberal movement disassociated from religion. To wish, with Quinet, that the Revolution should become Protestant is simply not to understand it. Republican in the sphere of politics, the Revolution tends to enfranchise man, in the sphere of thought also, from every species of religious domination, and of uniform and irrational dogmatic belief. The Revolution did not achieve this end at the first attempt; it was guilty even of imitating the intolerance of the Catholics; therein lay its prime fault, its great crime; we suffer from it still. But the remedy does not consist in adopting a new religion, which would simply be a disguised return to the past.

[Sidenote: Advantages of Protestantism.]

Let us examine, however, the substantial apology for Protestantism, presented by M. de Laveleye. He maintains the superiority of Protestantism principally in regard to three points: 1. It is favourable to education; 2. It is favourable to political and religious liberty; 3. It does not possess a celibate clergy living outside of the family, and even outside of the country. Let us pass these different points in review. In Protestantism the need of instruction, and therefore of a knowledge of how to read, is inevitable, for the reason that, as has been often remarked, the reformed religion is founded on the interpretation of a book, the Bible. The Catholic religion, on the contrary, rests upon the sacraments and certain practices, such as the confession, and the Mass, which presuppose no knowledge of reading. Luther’s first and last word was, “God commands you to educate your children.” In the eyes of the Catholic priest an ability to read is not, so far as religion is concerned, an unqualified advantage, it exposes the possessor to certain dangers, it is a path that may lead to heresy. The organization of popular instruction dates from the Reformation. The consequence is that Protestant countries are far in advance of Catholic countries in the matter of popular instruction.[77] Wherever popular instruction attains its height, labour will be directed with more intelligence, and the economic situation will be better; Protestantism therefore gives rise to a superiority not only in instruction, but in commerce and industry, in order and in cleanliness.[78]

[77] In Saxony, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Scotland (not
England), illiteracy is at a minimum. Even in the most favoured
Catholic countries, such as France and Belgium, at least a
third of the population are illiterate. In this comparison race
goes for nothing; Switzerland proves as much; purely Latin but
also Protestant cantons Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva are on a
level with the Germanic cantons of Zürich and Bern, and are
superior to such as Tessin, Valais, and Lucerne.

[78] In Switzerland the cantons of Neuchâtel, Vaux, and Geneva
are strikingly in advance of Lucerne, Valais, and the forest
cantons; they are not only superior in matters of education,
but in matters of industry, of commerce, and of wealth; and
their artistic and literary activity is greater. “In the United
States,” says De Tocqueville, “the majority of the Catholics
are poor.” In Canada the larger order of business interests,
manufacturing, commerce, the principal shops in the cities, are
in the hands of Protestants. M. Audiganne, in his studies on
the labouring population in France, remarks on the superiority
of the Protestants in respect to industry, and his testimony
is the less suspicious because he does not attribute that
superiority to Protestantism. “The majority of the labourers
in Nîmes, notably the silk-weavers, are Catholics, while the
captains of industry and of commerce, the capitalists in a
word, belong to the Reformed religion.” “When a family has
split into two branches, one of which has clung to the faith
of its fathers, while the other has become Protestant, one
almost always remarks in the former a progressive financial
embarrassment, and in the other an increasing wealth.” “At
Mazamet, the Elbœuf of the south of France, all the captains of
industry with one exception are Protestants, while the great
majority of the labourers are Catholics. And Catholic working
men are, as a class, much less well educated than Protestant
working men.” Before the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
members of the Reformed church had taken the lead in all
branches of labour, and the Catholics, who found themselves
unable to maintain a competition with them, had the practice of
a number of different industries in which the latter excelled
forbidden them by a series of edicts beginning with the year
1662. After their expulsion from France the Huguenots carried
into England, into Prussia, into Holland, their spirit of
enterprise and of economy; and enriched the districts in which
they settled. The Germans owe some portion of their progress
to Huguenot exiles. Refugees from the Revocation introduced
different industries into England, among others the silk
industry; and it was certain disciples of Calvin who civilized
Scotland. (See M. de Laveleye _De l’avenir des peuples
catholiques_.)

[Sidenote: Protestantism favours self-government.]

Similarly in civil and political matters, Protestants have always been partisans of self-government, of liberty, of local autonomy, and of decentralization. Side by side with the advance of the Reformation in Switzerland, in Holland, in England and America there went a dissemination of the principles of liberty which later became the articles of faith of the French Revolution. Calvinists, notably, have always been inclined to an ideal of liberty and equality which has rightfully rendered them objects of suspicion to the French monarchy; they realized this ideal only beyond the seas in the American Constitution, which may be regarded, in some sort, as the product of Calvinistic ideas. As early as the year 1633 an American, Roger Williams, proclaimed universal liberty, and liberty of conscience in particular; he proclaimed the complete equality of all modes of religious worship before the law, and on these principles founded the democracy of Rhode Island and the town of Providence. The United States, with the local autonomy and decentralization which characterize its government, still forms the type of the Protestant state. In such a state the widest liberty exists only, to say the truth, within the limit of Christianity: the founders of the American Constitution scarcely foresaw the day when a wider tolerance would be necessary. And it would be to form an extremely false idea of the United States to imagine that the civil power and religion are wholly disassociated. The separation between Church and state is far from being as absolute in America as is often supposed, and M. Goblet d’Alviella very justly corrects the too enthusiastic assertions, on this point, of M. Guizot and M. de Laveleye.[79]

[79] “Public institutions are still deeply impregnated with
Christianity. Congress, the State legislatures, the navy, the
army, the prisons, are all supplied with chaplains; the Bible
is still read in a large number of schools. The invocation of
God is generally obligatory in an oath in a court of law, and
even in an oath of office. In Pennsylvania the Constitution
requires that every public employee shall believe in God, and
in a future state of reward and punishments. The Constitution
of Maryland awards liberty of conscience to deists only. The
laws against blasphemy have never been formally abrogated.
In certain States, more or less stringent Sunday laws are
enforced. In 1880 a court declined to recognize, even as a
moral obligation, a debt contracted on Sunday, and a traveller,
injured in a railway accident, was refused damages on the
ground that he was travelling on the Lord’s Day. And, finally,
church property and funds are in a considerable degree exempt
from taxation.” (M. Goblet d’Alviella, _Évolution religieuse_,
p. 233.)

Similarly, in Switzerland, in the month of February, 1886, the
criminal court of Glaris, the chief place in a canton of 7000
inhabitants, at 130 kilometers from Bern, rendered a singular
judgment. A mason named Jacques Schiesser, who was obliged to
work in water of an excessively low temperature, shivering
with cold, his hands blue, made a movement of impatience
at the cold, and uttered irreverential words toward God. A
_procès-verbal_ was made out against him. He appeared before
the judges, who condemned him for blasphemy to two days’
imprisonment. It is surprising to see Switzerland carried,
actually by Protestantism, back to the Middle Ages.

[Sidenote: Intellectual and moral superiority of Protestant clergy.]

Finally, to the political superiority of Protestantism must be added the intellectual and moral superiority of its clergy. The obligation to read and interpret the Bible has given rise, in the universities of Protestant theology, to a work of exegesis which has resulted in a new science, the Science of Religion. The Protestant clergymen are better educated than our priests, and have moreover families and children, and lead a life like that of any other citizen; they are national, because their church is a national church; they do not receive orders from abroad, and, more than all, they do not possess the terrible power which the Catholic priest owes to the confessional; a power which cost France the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and so many other deplorable measures.[80]

[80] “By means of the confessional,” says M. de Laveleye,
the “priest holds the sovereign, the magistrates, and the
electors, and through the electors the legislative chamber, in
his power; so long as the priest presides over the sacraments,
the separation of Church and State is only a dangerous
illusion. The absolute submission of the entire ecclesiastical
hierarchy to a single will, the celibacy of the clergy, and
the multiplication of monastic orders, constitute a danger in
Catholic countries of which Protestant countries know nothing.”

[Sidenote: But Protestantism is not a necessary step toward free-thought.]

The several advantages which Protestantism enjoys by comparison with Catholicism are so incontestable that, if one must absolutely choose between the two religions, one could not hesitate. But such a choice is not necessary; one can avoid both horns of the dilemma. Free-thought is even more intimately dependent upon, and more disposed to favour, science than Protestantism is, for free-thought absolutely depends upon science. Free-thought is more intimately dependent upon practical and civil liberty than Protestantism is, by the very fact that free-thought is the complete realization of liberty in the sphere of theory. Finally free-thought renders the clergy superfluous, or rather to reinstate a mediæval term it tends to replace the priest by the _clerk_, that is to say by the _savant_, the professor, the man of letters, the man of culture, to whatever state of society he may belong. The best thing that has been said about Protestantism in France is M. de Narbonne’s remark to Napoleon. “There is not enough religion in France to make two.” Instead of a national religion we possess in France a national non-religion; that very fact constitutes our claim to originality among the nations. In France two-thirds at least of the male population live outside the limits of religious tradition. In the country, as in the town, there is scarcely one man for every ten women to be found in church, sometimes not more than one for a hundred, and sometimes none at all. In the majority of the departments, scarcely one man can be found fulfilling his religious duties. In the great cities, the labourer is the avowed enemy of religion, in the country the peasant is simply indifferent. The peasantry displays a certain respect for the exterior forms of worship; but the reason is that the peasantry comes in contact with the priest, its intercourse with him is constant, it generally fears or esteems him enough not to laugh at him, except behind his back. The results of the French Revolution cannot be arrested in this country; sooner or later they will suffice to give birth to a complete religious, political, and civil liberty: even to-day in politics it is not in the direction of a lack of liberty that our failure lies, it is quite the reverse. For the French, it is useless to talk of adopting Protestantism under the pretext that it is favourable to civil and political liberty, to diffusion of modern ideas and science.

[Sidenote: No sufficient evidence that Protestant countries are more moral than Catholic.]

There remains the consideration of public morality in France. But it is impossible to demonstrate that the morality of Protestant people is superior to that of Catholics; nay, in respect to a certain number of items, statistics tend rather to prove the contrary, if anything can be proved of morality by statistics. Drunkenness, for example, is a much less terrible scourge among Catholic peoples who inhabit climates in which alcohol constitutes a much smaller temptation. Illegitimate births are much more frequent in Germany than in France; no doubt because of the laws that regulate marriage. The average of crimes and offences is not very variable from country to country, and such variations as there are, are attributable to difference of climate, of race, of greater or less density of population, and not to differences of religion. To-day, on account of the increasing perfection of means of communication, vice tends to find its level. Vices spread like contagious diseases: everyone whose system is in a state which is favourable to poison becomes contaminated, to whatsoever race or whatsoever religion he may belong. The effect of any given religion upon the morality of any given people is certainly not to be overlooked, but it is altogether relative to the character of the people in question, and proves nothing as to the absolute moral quality of the religion itself. Mohammedanism is of great service to barbarous tribes, because it prohibits drunkenness, and travellers generally agree as to the moral superiority of Mohammedan tribes as compared with tribes converted to Christianity; the first are composed of shepherds and relatively honest merchants, the second are composed of drunkards, whom alcohol has transformed into beasts and pillagers. Does it follow that we must all become converted to Mohammedanism, or even that the prohibitions of the Koran, all-powerful as they are over the savage mind, would act with the same force upon a drunkard of Paris or of London? Alas, no! and in the absence of any such possibility one may take refuge in this means: sobriety is even more important for the masses of the people than continence, its absence borders more nearly on bestiality; moreover the labouring man and especially the peasant possesses less opportunity to run to excesses of incontinence than of drink, for the simple reason that women cost more than drink. Even among the followers of Mohammed, the poor are obliged to restrict themselves to one wife.

[Sidenote: And religion is not the sole factor that determines morality.]

And finally religion does not constitute the sole cause of morality; still less is it capable of re-establishing a morality which is on a decline; the utmost it can do is to maintain morality somewhat longer in existence than it otherwise would be, to confirm custom and habit by a backing of faith. The power of custom and of the accomplished fact is so considerable that even religion can scarcely make head against it. When a new religion takes possession of a people it never destroys the mass of the beliefs which have taken root in their hearts; it fortifies them rather by adapting itself to them. To conquer paganism, Christianity was obliged to transform itself: it became Latin in Latin countries, German in German countries. Mohammedanism in Persia, in Hindustan, in the island of Java serves simply as a vestment and a veil for the old Zoroastrian, or Brahman, or Buddhistic beliefs. Manners, national characters, and superstitions are more durable than dogmas. The character of northern peoples is always hard and all of a piece, to an extent that produces a certain external regularity in their lives, a certain submission to discipline, sometimes also a certain savageness and brutality. The men of southern Europe, on the contrary, are mobile, malleable, open to temptation. The explanation is to be looked for in their climate, not in their religion. The rigid fir-tree grows in the north; flexible, tall reeds in the south. The discipline of the Prussian army and administration does not result from the religion of Prussia, but from the worship of discipline. Throughout the whole life of the north there runs a certain stiffness which shows itself in the smallest details, in the manner of walking, of speaking, of directing the eyes; and the northern conscience is brusque and rough, it commands, and one must obey or disobey; in the south of Europe it argues. If Italy were Protestant, there would probably be few Quakers. We believe therefore that the effect is often taken for the cause, where a preponderant influence is attributed to the Protestant or Catholic religion on public or private morality, and, that is to say, on the vital power of a people. This influence formerly was enormous, it is diminishing day by day, and it is science to-day which tends to become the principal arbiter of the destinies of a nation.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Is the possession of a religion indispensable for the best interests of humanity.]

If it be so, what must one think of the doubts, as to the future of France, which seem to be entertained in certain quarters? Those who regard religion as the condition _sine qua non_ of life and of superiority in the struggle for existence among nations, must naturally consider France as in danger of disappearing. But is this criterion of national vitality admissible?

[Sidenote: Matthew Arnold’s theory.]

We find ourselves here once more in the presence of Mr. Matthew Arnold. In his judgment, the modern world has been made what it is by the influence of two peoples, the Greeks and the Jews, representing respectively two distinct and almost opposed ideas, which are contending with each other for the possession of the modern mind. For Greece—the brilliant, but in spite of its subtlety of spirit, somewhat superficial Greece—art and science fill the measure of life. For the Hebrews life might be summed up in one word, justice. And by justice must not be understood a rigid respect for the rights of others, but a willingness to renounce one’s own interest, one’s own pleasure, a self-effacement in the presence of the eternal law of sacrifice personified in Javeh. Greece and Judea are dead; Greece faithful to the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of art and science, Judea faithless at the last moment to its belief in the all-sufficiency of justice, and falling by reason of that very infidelity. Mr. Matthew Arnold finds the two nations symbolized in an Old Testament story. It was before the birth of Isaac, the veritable inheritor of the divine promise, who was humble but elect. Abraham looked upon his first son Ishmael, who was young, vigorous, brilliant, and daring, and implored God: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” But it could not be. Greece, the Ishmael among nations, has perished. Later the Renaissance appeared as its successor; the Renaissance was full of vitality, of future; the dream, the sombre nightmare had passed away, there was to be no more religious asceticism, we were to return to nature. The Renaissance held in horror the tonsured and hooded Dark Ages, whose spirit was renouncement and mortification. For the Renaissance itself the ideal was fulness of life, growth of the individual, the free and joyous satisfaction of all our instincts, of art and science; Rabelais was the personification of it. Alas! the Renaissance fell, as Greece fell, and the natural successor of the Renaissance, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s judgment, is George Fox, the first Quaker, the open contemner of arts and sciences. Finally, in our days, a people in Europe has taken up the succession; the modern Greece, dear to the enlightenment of all nations, the friend of art and science, is France. How often, and with what ardour, has this prayer in its favour been raised to God in heaven: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” France is the average sensual man, and Paris is his city, and who of us does not feel himself attracted? The French possess this element of superiority over the Renaissance, that they are more balanced than other peoples, and though France has aimed to liberate mankind and to enfranchise them from the austere rule of sacrifice, she has not conceived man as a monster, nor liberty as a species of madness. Her ideas are formulated in a system of education which lies in the regular, complete, and harmonious development of all the faculties. Accordingly the French ideal does not shock other nations, it seduces them; France is for them the land of tact, of measure, of good sense, of logic. We aim in perfect confidence at developing the whole human being without violence to any part of it. It is in this ideal that we have found our famous gospel of the rights of man. The rights of man consist simply in a systematization of Greek and French ideas, in a consecration of the supremacy of self, as against abnegation and religious sacrifice. In France, Mr. Matthew Arnold says, the desires of the flesh, and current ideas, are mistaken for the rights of man. While we are pursuing one ideal, other peoples, more tightly chained to Hebraism, continue to cultivate that justice which is founded on renouncement. From time to time they look with envy out of their own austere and dull life, and with admiration upon the French ideal which is so positive, so clear, so satisfying; they are half inclined at times to make a trial of it. France has exerted a charm on the entire world. Everyone at some period or other of his life has thirsted for the French ideal, has desired to make a trial of it. The French wear the guise of the people to whom has been intrusted the beautiful, the charming ideal of the future, and other nations cry: “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee!” And Ishmael seems to grow more and more brilliant each day, seems certain of success, is on the point of making the conquest of the world. But at this moment a disaster occurs, the Crisis, the Biblical judgment arrives at the moment of triumph; behold the judgment of the world! The world, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, was judged in 1870: the Prussians were Javeh’s substitute. And once more Ishmael, the spirit of Greece, the spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of France, free-thought, and free conduct were conquered by Israel, by the spirit of the Bible, by the spirit of the Middle Ages. A brilliant but superficial civilization was crushed beneath the weight of the barbarous and unyielding asceticism of a more or less naïve faith. Javeh is even in the present century the god of battles, and woe to the individuals who do not believe, with the ancient Jew, that abnegation constitutes three-fourths of life, and that art and science together barely fill the other fourth.

[Sidenote: Victorious superiority of Hellenism.]

Rightly to estimate this philosophy of history let us occupy Matthew Arnold’s point of view, which is not without some shade of truth. Assuredly Greece and Judea, although their ideas dissolved into and became a part of Christianity, are, so to speak, two antithetical nations representing respectively two opposed conceptions of life and of the world. These two nations have unceasingly struggled against each other in intellectual battle, and one may accept as most honourable for France the rôle that Mr. Arnold has assigned to her, that of being the modern Greece, of representing the struggle of art and science against mystical and ascetic faith. Greece and France were conquered, it is true, but it does not follow from that fact that the spirit of Greece and France, of art and science, has been conquered by faith. The battle is on the definitive issue still uncertain. If one must trust to a calculation of probabilities, all the probabilities are in favour of science; if the French were conquered in 1870, it was not by German religion but by German science. In general it is very difficult to say that a doctrine is inferior because the people who maintained it have been vanquished in history. History is a succession of events whose causes are so complex that we never can affirm that we know absolutely all of the reasons which produced any given historical fact. There are, moreover, in the life of any people a number of currents of thought running side by side, and sometimes in opposite directions. The land of Rabelais is also that of Calvin. More than that, in other nations we see a species of official doctrine professed by a series of remarkable thinkers, which seems more or less in opposition to the more unconscious doctrine of the people, in which the conduct and thoughts of the great multitude may be regarded as summarized. What, for example, is to be considered as the true doctrine of the Jewish people? Is it the passionate faith of Moses, of Elijah, or of Isaiah; is it the scepticism of the Ecclesiast, already foreshadowed in the book of Job; is it the explosion of sensuality in the Song of Songs? It is difficult to decide; it may be affirmed with some show of truth that the temperament of the Jewish people as a whole is rather more sensual than mystic. The official doctrine handed down to us in the Bible may be regarded as a reaction against popular tendencies; a reaction whose violence is the measure of the strength and stubbornness of the tendencies against which it was directed. The great days of the Hebrew people were rather those when, under the reign of Solomon, the arts of ease and life were flourishing than those when the prophets were bewailing the disappearance of so much splendour. Or what was really the spirit of the people in the Middle Ages? Is it to be found in the mystical books of the monks of the times? And are the Middle Ages, apart from the Renaissance, to be regarded as constituting a great and completed epoch? Even if we supposed, with Mr. Matthew Arnold, that every brilliant age, such as the Renaissance, every age of art and science, harbours in its own bosom the germs of death, does that fact constitute a reason for lowering one’s estimate of such epochs of intense life, and is it not better for a people to have lived, even though but for a few years, than to have slept through centuries?

[Sidenote: Analogy between life of nation and that of individual.]

Nothing is eternal. When a nation has enjoyed a brilliant life during a certain number of years or centuries, when it has produced great artists or great scholars, there necessarily comes a period of comparative exhaustion. Religions also are subject to the law of birth, maturity, and decay. Where does the responsibility lie? On the very laws of life, which do not permit plants to blossom eternally, and which in general provide, in all the kingdoms of the natural world, that there shall be nothing so fragile as a flower. But if all human things are transitory, to labour for the efflorescence of intelligence, to regard art and science as the supreme aim of life, is precisely to pursue that which is least perishable. Art, science, the last achievements of the human mind do not decay; man alone, the individual disappears, and the ancient adage is eternally true: “Art is long, and life is short.” As to true justice, it also is surely eternal; but if by true justice be understood the hard law of Jehovah, the worship of this law has always fallen upon the insignificant epochs of history, and precisely upon the epochs of injustice and barbarism. Therein lies the explanation of the fact that that cult has flourished at periods when nations were the most robust and difficult to subdue. The manners of such nations are ferocious, their life at bottom is quite contrary to the ideal of justice, and their religious faith resembles their manners, and is violent and savage, and inclines them to intolerance, to fanaticism, to massacre; but all these elements of injustice none the less constitute, in the people that unites them all, so many additional chances of victory over other people. Later, when manners become more civilized, when faith diminishes and art and science are born, a nation often becomes weaker, directly as it becomes nobler; the finer an organism is, the more delicate it becomes, the easier it is to break. Renouncement of self, submission of the weak to the strong, and of the strongest to an all-powerful priest, the species of hierarchy that obtained in Judea, in India, and Europe during the Middle Ages, formerly gave a people a superiority in the struggle for existence, like that of a rock over a vegetable, of an oak over a sensitive plant, of a bull or an elephant over man; but is precisely that kind of effectiveness the ideal of humanity, and the aim to be proposed to human effort? To raise art and science to their highest possible development exacts a considerable expense of force; art and science fatigue and exhaust the people who give them birth. After epochs of effervescence, follow epochs of repose and of recuperation, epochs, so to speak, of intellectual lying fallow. These alternations of repose and productivity, of sterility and fecundity will continue to recur until some means be found of maintaining the human mind continuously in its state of highest vitality, as one fertilizes the earth, and, so to speak, thus secures a constant flow of sap and a perpetual efflorescence. The day perhaps will come when the psychic analogue of the rotation of crops may be discovered. However that may be, the greatness of a people has in the past too often exhausted it. But it does not follow, from that fact, that history must be read backward, and that periods of mere preparation and barbarism and despotism must be regarded as those which are the incarnation of the law of justice and have saved the race of mankind.

[Sidenote: Hellenism contains the cure of its own evils.]

If greatness kills it is beautiful to die for greatness; but when it is the death of a nation that is in question, mortality is never complete. Which is the more completely alive to-day, whatever Mr. Matthew Arnold may say, Greece or Judea? Which will be more alive to-morrow, France, which to-day seems trampled underfoot, or the nations which seem to be France’s superiors? If we were perfectly sure that France, better than any other nation, represents art and science, we might affirm with perfect certitude that she will possess the future, and say with confidence that Ishmael will live. It is true that, in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion, Ishmael represents not only the man of intellect but the man of the senses, of the desires of the flesh. Of a truth it is strange to see anyone regarding the conquerors of France as Quakers, and Paris can lay no better claim than London or Berlin to being dubbed the modern Babylon. Mr. Matthew Arnold’s mystic terrors in this connection are really deserving of raillery. What is just in his position is that the French, even in the pursuit of pleasure, display a certain moderation and measure, display a degree of art that is unknown to other people; and by that very fact they achieve, if not the substance, at least the form of morality, which is, as Aristotle has said, a just mean between two vicious extremes. In Mr. Matthew Arnold’s judgment, however, this specious morality serves simply as a cloak for the lowest degree of immorality, that namely of seeking one’s rule of life not in God but in human nature, with all its diverse tendencies, high and low. This immorality constitutes in its turn a sort of social danger, that of a softening or enfeeblement of the national character of a people. This danger appears to us illusory, or rather, if one may so speak, it is a question which belongs rather to hygiene than to morals; what is really wanted is that science itself should discover in the matter a rule of conduct. In reality, genuine men of science actually are those who know best how to direct themselves in life, and a whole people of men of science could leave little to desire on the score of conduct; and that fact shows that science itself contains an element of practical wisdom and morality. Note also that there exists an antagonism between cerebral labour and the violence of the physical appetites. The prohibitions which are based upon a mystical law too often season desire simply, as it is easy to prove by examples drawn from the clergy of the Middle Ages. A much more certain method may be employed, namely, to extinguish desire, to substitute a sort of intellectual disdain in place of religious terror. The Mohammedan religion prohibits the use of wine; but it is very easy to distinguish between wine and alcohol, which Mohammed did not formerly forbid for the sufficient reason that he was unacquainted with its existence. Moreover, religious faith is not only subject to subtleties of interpretation, it is subject to periods of weakness; but if, on the contrary, you issue no mystical prohibition but cultivate a man to a certain degree of intellectual development, he will simply not desire to drink; education will have transformed him more perfectly than religion could have done. Far from diminishing the value that individuals set upon pleasure, religions in reality frequently augment it considerably, because, over and against such and such a pleasure, and, as it were, holding the balance level against it, they establish an eternity of pain. When a religious devotee yields to temptation, he conceives the desired indulgence as, in some sort, of an infinite value, as condensing into an instant such an eternity of joy as may compensate an eternity of suffering. This conception, which unconsciously dominates the entire conduct of the believer, is fundamentally immoral. Fear of chastisement, as psychologists have frequently remarked, lends a certain additional charm to the forbidden pleasure; magnify the chastisement, you heighten the charm. Therein lies the explanation of the fact that, if a devotee is immoral at all, he is infinitely more so than a sceptic; he will indulge in monstrous refinements in his pleasures, analogous to the monstrous refinements in which his god indulges, in the item of punishments; and his virtue, consisting largely in fear, is itself fundamentally immoral. In epochs of scientific development this mystical and diabolical heightening of pleasure will disappear. The man of science is acquainted with the causes of pleasure, they fall into place in his scheme of things, in the general network of causes and effects; a pleasure is a desirable effect, but only in so far as it does not exclude such and such another equally desirable effect. The pleasures of the senses take their legitimate rank in the classified and subordinated list of human aims. A man of large intelligence holds desire in check by means of its natural and sole all-powerful antagonist—disdain.

[Sidenote: Hellenism more just than justice.]

To sum it all up, Ishmael is quite capable of regulating his own conduct without Jehovah’s help. Justice is salvation, said the Hebrew people; but science also is salvation, and justice too, and justice not infrequently more just and more certain than any other kind. If Ishmael sometimes strays into the desert, sometimes loses his way and falls, he knows how to get up again; he has strength enough in his own heart to help himself, and to make him independent of Jehovah, who left him alone in infinite space without even sending to his aid the angel mentioned in the Bible. If France has really, as Mr. Arnold says, formulated the new gospel of Ishmael, this profoundly human gospel is indubitably destined to outlive the other, for there is often nothing more provisional, more unlasting, more fragile, than what men have crowned with the adjective divine. The surest method of finding what is really eternal is to look for the best and most universal elements in the human character. But the gospel of the rights of man, Mr. Arnold objects, is the ideal of the average, sensual man only. One wonders what the meaning of the word “sensual” in this place can be, and what sensuality can have to do with an unwillingness to disregard the rights of other people or to have one’s own rights disregarded by other people. As if the rights of man had anything to do with sensuality! Mr. Arnold forgets that the word “right” always implies some measure of sacrifice. But the sacrifice is precisely proportionate—it is not the sacrifice of all for the benefit of one or of the few; it is not a sterile sacrifice, it is not a vain expense of force, it is the partial sacrifice of all for the benefit of all, it is the renunciation in our own conduct of everything which might interfere with like conduct on the part of other people; so that, instead of being a waste of social power, it is in the best sense an organization and an increase of social power. The people who first truly realize the gospel of the rights of man will not only be the most brilliant, the most enviable, the happiest of peoples, but also the justest of peoples, with a justice which will be not only national and passing, but, so to speak, universal and indestructible; not even the hand of Jehovah will be able to shiver its power, for what is really divine in power will dwell in its own heart. The French Revolution was not so purely sensual and earthly as Mr. Matthew Arnold affirms. It was an uprising not in the name of the senses but of the reason. The Declaration of Rights is a series of formulæ _a priori_, constituting a sort of metaphysics or religion of civil government, founded upon a revelation by the human conscience. It is easily comprehensible that positive and empirical thinkers, such as Bentham and John Stuart Mill and Taine, should have a word of blame for this novel species of religious Utopia; but a person like Mr. Matthew Arnold, who prides himself on being religious, ought not to draw back from it, ought even to admire it. Theodore Parker, a Christian not less liberal than Mr. Matthew Arnold, did so. Writing on the subject of the French Revolution, Theodore Parker said: that the French were more transcendental than the Americans. To the intellectual conception of liberty and to the moral conception of equality they joined the religious conception of fraternity, and thus supplied politics as well as legislation with a divine foundation as incontestable as the truths of mathematics. They declare that rights and duties precede and dominate human law. America says: “The Constitution of the United States is above the President; the Supreme Court is above Congress.” France says: “The constitution of the universe is above the Constitution of France!” That is what forty millions of men declare. It is the greatest proclamation that a nation has ever made in history.

[Sidenote: Good and evil sides of French gaiety.]