Part 3 (1/2)

[24] Apology.

[25]

Si mon coeur, fatigue du reve qui l'obsede, A la realite revient pour s'a.s.souvir, Au fond des vains plaisirs que j'appelle a mon aide, Je trouve un tel degout que je me sens mourir.

PART II.

_SOCIETY._

We have just studied what life without G.o.d would be for the individual.

Let us now direct our attention to those collections of human beings which form societies. We shall not speak here of the relations of civil with ecclesiastical authorities,--a complex question, the solution of which must vary with times, places, and circ.u.mstances. Let us only remark that the distinction between the temporal and spiritual order of things is one of the foundations of modern civilization. This distinction is based upon those great words which, eighteen hundred years ago, separated the domain of G.o.d from the domain of Caesar.

Religion considered as a function of civil life; dogma supported by the word of a monarch or the vote of a body politic; the formula of that dogma imposed forcibly by a government on the lips of the governed--these are _debris_ of paganism which have been struggling for centuries against the restraints of Christian thought.[26] The religious convictions of individuals do not belong to the State; religious sentiments are not amenable to human tribunals; and it would be hard to say whether it is the spiritual or the temporal order of things which suffers most from the confusion of these distinct domains.

Religion should have its own proper life, and its special representatives; civil life ought to be set free from all tyranny exercised in the name of dogma; but religion is not the less on that account, by the influence which it exerts over the consciences of men, the necessary bond and strength of human society.

”You would sooner build a city in the air,” said Plutarch, ”than cause a State to subsist without religion.” Some have contested in modern times this opinion of ancient wisdom. The philosophy of the last century, as we have said already, wished to separate duty from the idea of G.o.d. It pretended to give as the only foundation for society a civil morality, the rules and sanction of which were to be found upon earth. The men of blood who for a short time governed France, gave once as the order of the day--_Terror and all the virtues_: this was a terrible application of this theory. Virtue rested on a decree of political power, and, for want of the judgment of G.o.d, the guillotine was the sanction of its precepts. Healthier views begin now to prevail in the schools of philosophy. One of the members of the _Inst.i.tut de France_, M. Franck, has lately published a volume on the history of ancient civilization,[27] with the express intention of showing that the conception which a people has of G.o.d is the true root of its social organization. According to the worth of the religious idea is that of the civil const.i.tution. Before M. Franck, twenty years ago, a man of the very highest distinction as a public lecturer, indicated this movement of modern thought. M. Edgard Quinet, in his Lyons course, taught that the religious idea is the very substance of civilization, and the generating principle of political const.i.tutions. He announced ”a history of civilization by the monuments of human thought,” and added: ”Religion above all is the pillar of fire which goes before the nations in their march across the ages; it shall serve us as a guide.”[28] Benjamin Constant exhibits in the variation of his opinions the transition from the stand-point of the last century to that of the present. He had at first conceived of his work upon religion as a monument raised to atheism, he ends by seeking in religious sentiments the condition necessary to the existence of civilized societies.[29] Here is a real progress; and this progress brings us back to the thought above quoted from Plutarch. In fact, take away the idea of G.o.d, and the first consequence will be that you will sacrifice all the conquests of modern civilization; the next, that you will soon have rendered impossible the existence of any society whatever. I am going to ask your close attention to these two points successively.

History does not offer to our view an uninterrupted progress, as certain optimists suppose; still less does it present the spectacle of an ever-increasing deterioration, as misanthropes affirm; and lastly, it is not true, as we hear it said sometimes, that all epochs are alike, as good one as another. There are times better than those which follow them; and there are epochs less degraded than those which precede them.

Human societies fall and rise again; their march exhibits windings and retrograde steps, because that march is under the influence of created liberty; but when their destinies are regarded at one view, it is clearly seen that they are advancing to a determined end, because while man is in restless agitation, G.o.d is leading him on. The conquests of modern civilization are great and sacred realities. What are these conquests? Let us not stay at the surface of things, but go to the foundation. Societies fallen into a condition of barbarism have for their motto the famous saying of a Gallic chief: Woe to the vanquished!

In inst.i.tutions, as in manners, the triumph of force characterizes barbarous times. The right of the strongest is the twofold negation of justice and of love; and what characterizes civilization, issuing from the barbarous condition, the fragments of which it so long trails after it, is the establishment of that justice which founds States, and, upon the basis of justice, the development of the benevolence which renders communities happy. These are the two essential conditions of social progress. These conditions are necessary even to the progress of industry and of material welfare.

Modern civilization,--that, namely, which we so designate, while we relegate, so to speak, into the past the contemporaneous societies of the vast East,--modern civilization possesses a power unknown to antiquity. Justice has a foundation in the conscience, benevolence has natural roots in the heart; but a moment has been when justice and love appeared in the world with new brightness, like rays disengaged from clouds. Modern civilization was then deposited on the earth in a powerful germ, of which nothing was any more to arrest the growth. That moment was when the idea of G.o.d appeared in its fulness: modern civilization was born of the Gospel. The knowledge of G.o.d strengthens justice, and the thought of the common Father develops benevolence.

These theses are well known; let us confine ourselves to a few rapid ill.u.s.trations.

There exists an inst.i.tution in which has been embodied the negation of social justice--Slavery. Slavery is at length disappearing before our eyes from the bosom of Christendom; and its final retreat is doing honor to Russia, and bathing America in blood. This is perhaps the greatest of the events which the annals of history will inscribe on the page of the nineteenth century. Now slavery was, in the past, an almost universal inst.i.tution. The finest intellects of Greece devoted a portion of their labors to its justification. Rome, at the most brilliant period of its civilization, caused slaves to kill one another, in savage spectacles intended to delight the populace, or during sumptuous banquets for the amus.e.m.e.nt of wealthy debauchees![30] How has slavery disappeared little by little! How has man been rediscovered beneath that living _thing_ of which was made, one while an instrument of labor, and another while the sport of execrable pa.s.sions? Inquire into this history. You will find the reason and the heart making their protests heard in antiquity, but without becoming efficacious. One day all is changed, and the foundations of slavery begin to shake. At that memorable epoch you will meet with a written doc.u.ment, the first in which is shown in its germ the great social fact which was about to have birth. It is not an emperor's decree, it is not the vote of a body politic, it is a letter a few lines long written by a prisoner to one of his friends. The substance of this letter was: ”I send thee back thy slave; but in the name of G.o.d I beg of thee to receive him as thy brother; think of the common Master who is in heaven.” This letter was addressed--”To Philemon;” the name of the writer was Paul. It is the first charter of slave emanc.i.p.ation. Ponder this fact, Gentlemen: contemplate the ancient inst.i.tution of slavery shaken to its foundations, without being the object of any direct attack, by the breath of a new spirit. You will then understand how historians can tell us that the relations of states, belligerent rights, civil laws, political inst.i.tutions, all these things of which the Gospel has never spoken, have been, and are being still, every day transformed by the slow action of the Gospel. G.o.d has appeared; justice is marching in His train.

Justice is the foundation of society; but without the spirit of love, justice remains crippled, and never reaches its perfection. Justice maintains the rights of each; love seeks to realize the communication of advantages among all. Justice overthrows the artificial barriers raised between men by force and guile; love softens natural inequalities and causes them to turn to the general good. Need I tell you that the knowledge of G.o.d is a light of which the brightest ray is love to men?

Benevolence, that feeling natural to our hearts, is strengthened, extended, transfigured, by becoming charity;--charity, that union of the soul with the Heavenly Father, which descends again to earth in loving communion between all His children. The soul separated from G.o.d may be conscious of strong affections: but study well the character of a virtue which is nourished from purely human sources; you will see that it may for the most part be expressed in these terms--”To love one's friends heartily, and to hate one's enemies with a generous hatred; to esteem the honest and to despise the vicious.” But that virtue which loves the vicious while it hates the vice, that virtue which will avenge itself only by overcoming evil with good, that virtue which, while it draws closer the bonds of private affections, makes a friend of every man, that virtue which we call divine, by a natural impulse of our heart--what is the source from which it flows? The following fact will sufficiently answer the question. On the facade of one the hospitals of the Christian world, are read these Latin words, the brief energy of which our language cannot render: _Deo in pauperibus_, ”This edifice is consecrated to G.o.d in the person of the poor.” Here is the secret of charity: it discerns the Divine image deposited in every human soul.

But do not mistake here: we cannot love, with a love natural and direct, the rags of squalid poverty, the brands of vice, the languors and sores of sickness; but let G.o.d manifest Himself, and our eyes are opened. The beauty of souls breaks forth to our view beneath the wasting of the haggard frame, and from under the filth of vice. We love those immortal creatures fallen and degraded; a sacred desire possesses us to restore them to their true destination. Has an artist discovered in a ma.s.s of rubbish, under vulgar appearances, a product of the marvellous chisel of the Greeks? He sets himself, with a zeal full of respect, to free the n.o.ble statue from the impurities which defile it. Every soul of man is the work of art Divine, and every charitable heart is an artist who desires to labor at its restoration. Henceforward we can understand that love of suffering and of poverty, that pa.s.sion for the galleys and the hospital, which have at times thrown Christians into extravagances which our age has no reason to dread. G.o.d in the poor man, G.o.d in the sick man, G.o.d in the vicious man and the criminal; this, I repeat, is the grand secret of charity. Charity pa.s.ses from the heart of men and from individual practice into social customs and inst.i.tutions. Charity it is which, by degrees, takes from law its needless rigors, and from justice its useless tortures; which subst.i.tutes the prison in which it is sought to reform the guilty for the galley, which completes the corruption of the criminal; it is charity that opens public asylums for all forms of suffering; and that will realize, up to the limits of what is possible, all the hopes of philanthropy. If G.o.d ceases to be present to the mind and conscience of men, justice and love lose their power. Without the powerful action of justice and of love, society would descend again, by the ways of corruption, towards the struggles of barbarism. Observe, study well, all that is going on around us. Does our civilization appear to you sufficiently solid to give you the idea that it can henceforth dispense with the foundations on which it has reposed hitherto?

The sentiments of justice and of benevolence which form the double basis of the progress of society, suppose a more general sentiment which is their common support--the sentiment of humanity. The idea that man has a value in himself, that he is, in virtue of his quality as man, independently of the places which he inhabits and of the position which he occupies in the world, an object of justice and of love;--this idea includes in itself all the moral part of civilization. Social progress is only the recognition, ever more and more explicit, of the value of one soul, of the rights of one conscience. Now, the idea of humanity has the closest possible connection with the knowledge of G.o.d, considered as the Father of the human race. Ancient wisdom, superior to the wors.h.i.+p of idols, had gained a glimpse of the fact that the philosopher is a citizen of the universe; and that famous line of Terence: ”I am a man, and I reckon nothing human foreign to me,” excited, it is said, the applause of the Roman spectators. But these were mere gleams, extinguished soon by the general current of thought. It was the pale dawn of the idea of humanity. Whence came the day?

I will limit the question by defining it. The idea of humanity is the idea of the worth and consequently of the rights of each individual man.

It is the idea of liberty; not of liberty interpreted by pa.s.sion and selfishness as the inauguration of the license which violates right, but of liberty interpreted by reason and conscience as the limit which the action of each man encounters in the right of his neighbor. We are not speaking here of the equality of political rights, which is not always a guarantee of veritable liberty. We are speaking of a social condition such that man, in the exercise of his faculties, in the manifestation of his thoughts, in his efforts for the causes which he loves, so long as he does not violate the rights of others, does not meet with an arbitrary power to arrest him. Still farther to limit our subject, we shall speak of the most important manifestation of that liberty--liberty of conscience, of which religious liberty is the most ordinary and most complete manifestation. This is only one of the points of the subject, but it is a point which in reality supposes and includes all the rest.

This liberty--whence does it come?

It does not come from paganism. Paganism, with its national religions, could only produce fanaticism or doubt. Each people having its own particular religion, to exterminate the foreigner was to serve the cause of the G.o.ds of the country. A war-cry descended from the Olympus of each several nation--that Olympus which the G.o.ds quitted, in case of need, to take part in the quarrels of men. Did reason perceive the nothingness of these national divinities? Then scepticism appeared. The idea of the supreme G.o.d being unsettled with all, and wholly obscured for the crowd, when men ceased to believe in the G.o.ds of the nation, they lost all belief whatsoever. For this cause doubt prevailed so widely at the decline of the ancient world. Those pantheons in which all religions were received, welcomed, protected, are the ever-memorable temples of scepticism. Now you know what voice made itself heard, when the ancient civilization was enfeebled by the spirit of doubt: ”Henceforth there is neither Greek nor barbarian, bond nor free. Ye are all brethren, and for all there is one G.o.d, and one truth:” here behold the root of scepticism severed. And the same voice added: ”This only G.o.d is the lawful Owner of His creatures; and when you presume to do violence to the consciences which belong to Him, you know not by what spirit you are animated:” here behold the fountain of fanaticism dried up. G.o.d is acknowledged; He is the Master of souls: faith founds liberty.

The Witness to universal truth appears before Rome as represented by a deputy of Caesar. He is a fanatic, says the Roman; then he goes his way, and leaves Him to be put to death. But ere long, a dull hoa.r.s.e murmur of the nations, extending through all the length and breadth of the mighty empire, gives token that He who was dead is alive again, and is speaking to the general conscience. Then Rome starts from her sleep; Rome; the politic tolerant Rome, sheds rivers of blood. Her tolerance allowed men to believe everything, but on condition that they believed seriously in nothing. Rome was directed by the sure instinct of despotism. She did not fear the G.o.ds of the Pantheon, because she could always place above them the statue of the Emperor: whereas what was now in question was, while leaving to Caesar the things which were Caesar's, to place a Sovereign above the Emperor, and to raise a legislation above the legislation of the empire. Therefore the Roman city determined to give a death-blow to Christianity,--to the idea of universal truth, because if that idea gained entrance into the understanding, the cause of the liberty of souls was gained. So it was that indifference became ferocious, and that doubt led back to fanaticism.

I have told you whence liberty does not come; but whence comes it?

Whence comes liberty? Ask any scholar of the Lyceums of France; he will answer you, without hesitation: Liberty comes from the French revolution!--No doubt, whispers an older comrade in his ear; but do not forget the philosophy of the eighteenth century which developed the principles which the revolution put in practice.--That is all very well, a Protestant will say; but let us consider the grand fact of the Reformation: it is from the sixteenth century that liberty has its date.--Well and good, adds an historian; but do you not know that the Germans were they who poured a generous and free blood into the impoverished blood of the men who had been fas.h.i.+oned by the slavery of the empire? I contest nothing, and I am not sufficiently well-informed to p.r.o.nounce with confidence upon the action of all these historic causes. But this I venture to affirm,--that if any one thinks to fix definitely the hour when liberty was born in history, he is mistaken: for it has no other date than that of the human conscience, and I will say with M. Lamartine:

Give me the freedom which that hour had birth, With the free soul, when first in conscious worth The just man braved the stronger![31]

Liberty had birth the first time that, urged by his fellow men to acts which wounded his conscience, a man, relying upon G.o.d, felt himself stronger than the world. That Socrates had not studied, I fancy, in the school of the Encyclopedists, and was no German either, that I know of, who said to the judges of Athens, with death in prospect: ”It is better to obey G.o.d than men.” And when those words were repeated by the Apostles of the universal truth, the death of Socrates, that n.o.ble death which has justly gained for him the admiration of the universe, was reproduced in thousands and thousands of instances. Children, women, young girls, old men, perished in tortures to attest the rights of conscience; and the blood of martyrs, that seed of Christians, as a father of the Church called it,[32] was not less a seed of liberty.