Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History Part 7

For His own part He wished simply to maintain intact beneath these apocalyptic forms the principle and the inspiration of His inward piety. It was in accordance with these that He interpreted the popular beliefs, adapting them with a perfect sovereignty to the moral aim and nature of His work. As with the Mosaic Law, so with Messianism; He is its Master, not its slave. He uses it, but does not abandon Himself to it. These hopes never trouble the clearness of His religious vision; they do not take away His self-possession, or alter the direction, always exclusively moral, of His acts. He accepts the t.i.tle of Messiah, but only after subst.i.tuting the idea of the suffering and humiliated for the national and triumphant Messiah. If He preaches the kingdom of G.o.d, He takes care to explain the conditions and the true goods of the kingdom--humility, repentance, childlike confidence, righteousness, disinterested love, the joy of serving G.o.d and man. He leaves to men of the flesh the pomp and splendour which dazzle the eyes of the flesh. He admires the grandeur of John the Baptist more than that of Herod. The kingdom of G.o.d will not come with ostentation. It will begin like an unseen seed that a man puts into the ground.

At the outset of His work Jesus encountered a mysterious temptation.

This was the conflict of His consciousness with the seductions of the popular Messianism. He triumphed over it with difficulty; but thenceforth He was always on His guard in that direction. Is it not remarkable that this very temptation returned to Him through the mouth of Peter? Jesus treats as Satan the first of His apostles, and refers to the devil in person and the prince of darkness suggestions of this nature which tend to make Him deviate from the road marked out by the inspiration of His heart. He avoids the t.i.tle Messiah until the day when He is able to join with it the image of the Cross. He disdains the t.i.tle, "Son of David," preferring to all others that of "Son of Man," a t.i.tle that was not open to the same mistakes. On this road of renunciation He must sacrifice not only His ease, His joys, and His repose, but also, at each step, some of the beliefs of Israel, and some of the glories of the Messiah. He never hesitates. His people reject Him, and He turns to His Father and says to Him: "Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in Thy sight." He agonises in Gethsemane, the Messiah agonises in Him, and He prays thus: "Father, not My will, but Thine be done."

Hence comes His freedom of spirit, the elevation of His view in the interpretation of events, as also His pious and trustful reserve in face of the enigmas and obscurities that His glance cannot penetrate.

John the Baptist is beheaded in prison: singular destiny for that formidable Elijah who was to inaugurate by thunder and lightning the Messianic era, the dream of all patriots! Is Jesus offended by it?

Does He hesitate to declare that John at that very moment is "the Elias which was for to come"? What a defiance to the oracles of the popular Messianism! When the sons of Zebedee desire Him to reserve for them the foremost places in His future kingdom, He merely speaks to them of the baptism of martyrdom, and teaches them that they must leave such things at the disposal of the Father. No doubt, He never contradicts apocalyptic predictions; on the contrary He applies to Himself all the promises of glory and of triumph; but always in subjection to the Father's will. Asked as to the date of the Messiah's advent, He answers that He does not know, that they must observe the blossoms on the fig-tree and the signs of the times around Himself; that they must watch and pray, possess their souls in patience, and abandon to the Father the decisions of which He keeps the impenetrable secret.

I speak of freedom of interpretation and of pious reserve, not of hypocritical and sceptical accommodation. We cannot doubt that Jesus accepted at the outset, and shared, at bottom, the Messianic beliefs in which He had been trained like all the children of His race. That His disciples, in reporting His discourses on this point, exaggerated and materialised them, need not be denied. But, on the other hand you can hardly explain the unanimity of the earliest Christian tradition in expecting His return upon the clouds if Jesus had professed entirely opposite ideas. After all, is there anything more astonis.h.i.+ng in His sharing on this matter the hopes of His time than in the fact of His having explained certain mysterious maladies as His contemporaries did by demoniacal possession, or of His attributing Psalm cx., as did certain of the rabbis, to King David; to the first Isaiah the work of the second, and to Moses the redaction of the Pentateuch? These current and traditional ideas, however, which came to Him, not from heaven, but from His race and His environment, never succeeded in corrupting the immutable purity of His inner piety or in falsifying the divine inspirations of His heart. Whenever there was contradiction between the Messianic beliefs or the Law of Moses, on the one hand, and the consciousness of Jesus, on the other, it was not the latter but the former that gave way and were transformed.

The disciples were not so free as the Master. Their faith remained a long time bound to these hopes of the future. Why had they left all and followed Him but because He had appeared to them to be the bearer and the depository of the divine promises? His death, which seemed to belie their beliefs, only served to give them another turn. They corrected prophecy. Instead of one Advent of the Messiah they imagined two, the first in humiliation, the second in glory. The one having been realised, they expected the other with a more ardent confidence.

No one doubted it was near. The apostle Paul lived in this hope as well as the author of the _Apocalypse_, the compilers of the synoptic gospels, and the editors of "The Teaching of the Apostles." The time is short: the Master comes: _Maranatha_. This was the watchword of all the early Christians. This faith in the imminent return of Christ and of the end of the world dominates all the thoughts as well as the feelings of the apostles: it determines and colours their Christology, their theory of Redemption, their ethics, their idea of salvation, so that to expound their writings and estimate the worth of their reasonings, the historian must always read them and explain them in this light. It is for this reason that their Christianity merits the name of Messianic, and could not be, in this Jewish form, an absolute _norm_ for all the ages.

The disciples of Jesus, however, found themselves in a school in which they could not perpetually mistake the lessons. The Christian principle had appeared to be at one with Messianism; it was something altogether different and could not continue for ever to be mixed up with it. Under the contradiction of events and the action of the spirit of Jesus, they soon began to see the dawn of a process of spiritualisation in their apocalyptic beliefs. This progress is manifest in the letters of St. Paul when read in their order and with attention. In the first, he hopes before he dies to witness the advent of the Lord. But, from the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, the image of death and martyrdom begins to interpose itself between his faith and that glorious ideal, which evermore seems to recede into the future. It never entirely disappears, but this preoccupation with the return of Jesus diminishes and occupies a smaller s.p.a.ce in his later epistles. On the contrary, the work of Jesus, considered in the past and in its redemptive efficacy, the Christian life conceived as a life of faith and love, as an imitation of Jesus Christ and an inheriting of His Spirit, receive ever-increasing developments. Insensibly, the centre of gravity of apostolic Christianity changes; from the hypnotising contemplation of the Messianic future, it pa.s.ses to the sanctifying meditation on the pa.s.sion of Christ, on His teaching, and redeeming work. This is best seen in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and in the Fourth Gospel, in which the Jewish Messiah is transformed into the eternal _Logos_, the light of all men here below, and the principle of the universal religion.

The work of emanc.i.p.ation that men alone could not accomplish, G.o.d Himself achieved. The conquests of the Church in the Empire, and especially the double and irreparable ruin of Jerusalem and the Jewish nation under t.i.tus and under Hadrian, opened on the future other prospects. The world continued. It was necessary to settle down and live in it. Montanism was merely a last outburst of fever. By the end of the second century, Jewish Messianism was so nearly dead that its obstinate adherents were regarded as heretics by the Church at large.

Organised into a hierarchy, the Church subst.i.tuted itself resolutely for the ancient people of Israel, and represented itself as heir to the ancient promises. The advent of the kingdom of G.o.d becomes the advent and the victory of the Catholic Church over all the other powers of earth. The Messianic Theocracy is transformed into a Church Theocracy.

Messianism gives place to Catholicism.

3. _Catholic Christianity_

Transplanted from the poor and arid soil of Hebraism into the rich and fruitful loam of Graeco-Roman civilisation, the Christian plant was sure to grow apace and be transformed. Catholicism is as much Pagan as Apostolic Messianism was Jewish--from the same causes, and according to the same law. More Greek in the East, more Roman in the West, it bears always and everywhere the traces of its origin. Study successively all the features of the Catholic Church, and you will find on each of them this indelible mark.

The dogmas of the Councils and the theology of the Fathers, who does not see at the first glance their true character? Who does not see that the material is Greek in form, in colour, in every fibre of its tissue? Whence came those terms and notions, of which Hebraism knew nothing, but which the theologians of all the schools will henceforth bandy to and fro--those abstract concepts, substance and hypostasis, nature and person, essence and accident, matter and form? Whence came the science of the Fathers of the Church, their exegesis, their history, their logic, their psychology, and that lofty metaphysic which has so completely transformed the Prophetic into a Platonic firmament?

All this came from Athens, Ephesus, Samos, and Miletus, _via_ Alexandria and Rome. The Justins, the Athenagorases, the Clements and the Basils, Athanasius even more than Arius, Jerome as well as Augustine, had been nourished from their childhood on Greek and Latin literature. They had read Plato, Herac.l.i.tus, Zeno, Philo, Cicero, Posidonius, and Seneca as much and more perhaps than the Old Testament.

What is there astonis.h.i.+ng in the fact that their theology should have followed step by step the theology of neo-Platonism until this latter, for Augustine, should have become the true introduction to the Gospel, and that in the Middle Ages the names of Plato and Aristotle should have been invested with an authority not less than those of Isaiah, St.

Paul, and St. John?

Or shall we pa.s.s to the const.i.tution of the Church? What is that but the exact counterpart of the const.i.tution of the Roman Empire: the parish modelling itself on the munic.i.p.ality, the diocese on the province, the metropolitan regions on the great prefectures, and, at the top of the pyramid, the bishop of Rome and the papacy, whose ideal dream is simply, in the religious order, the universal and absolute monarchy of which the Caesars had first set the pattern? Or would you consider the moral life and the type of piety? It is true that at the outset, and so long as the persecutions continued, there is a great contrast between Jewish or Christian morals and manners and those of Roman or Greek society. But, with time, the contrast is singularly attenuated. If the Church conquered the world, the world had its revenge within the Church. What is that monkish asceticism imposing celibacy on the clergy, exalting virginity, multiplying pious works of merit, and replacing, by fact.i.tious and sterile duties, the duties dictated by nature and essential to society,--what are all these but survivals of a dualism and the imitation of an ideal which, come from the East, seduced the feverish imagination of an expiring world? The monks, the anchorites and their theology of impotent celibates, did they save Egypt, Syria, and Byzantium?

During this time, what did wors.h.i.+p, adoration, religion, properly speaking, become? Between earth and heaven there reappeared the whole ancient hierarchy of G.o.ds and demi-G.o.ds, of heroes, nymphs, and G.o.ddesses, replaced by the Virgin Mother, angels, demons, saints. Each town, each parish, every fountain, had its patron or its patroness, its tutelary guardian, to whom they addressed themselves more familiarly than to G.o.d in order to obtain temporal blessings and the grace for every day. The saints have their specialities like the minor deities of former times. Some cured fevers, some diseases of the skin. This one had charge of travellers, that of harvests, a third of articles that had been lost, a fourth of needed heirs in families in danger of decay. With this mythology, all the superst.i.tions were revived, down to the grossest fetichism: pilgrimages, chaplets, litanies, the veneration of images, signs of the cross, rites and sacraments conceived after the manner of the ancient mysteries. And all this is done with a sort of unconsciousness, very gradually, and as the effect of a zeal that was supposed to be Christian. The heads of the Church recommend missionaries not to destroy the temples of the false G.o.ds, but to consecrate them to the true one, and to replace their images by images of the saints, and the rites of the old cults by similar ceremonies. Names and etiquettes were thus changed, but not the things themselves. At Rome, beneath the basilica of St. Peter, a superb statue was erected to the Prince of the Apostles. This was formerly a statue of Jupiter. Its great toe has been worn down by the kisses of the faithful. Before Christianity, they kissed the foot of the master of the G.o.ds; now they kiss the foot of Peter. Is the cult of a different order and the devotion of a higher quality?

These, however, are but the forms of Catholicism; let us go deeper and try to reach its generating principle. This principle should be found in the central dogma of the Catholic system, that in it which commands and regulates all the parts, which const.i.tutes its unity and strength.

To designate this central dogma is not difficult. The catechism teaches us that it is the dogma of the Church, of its infallibility and traditional continuity, of its divine origin and supernatural powers.

Protestants affirm that they belong to the Church because they belong to Christ. Catholics reverse the terms: no one is in communion with Christ, no one really belongs to Him, unless he belongs to the Church.

Thus faith in the Church and submission to the Church are put into the forefront and remain the one thing needful and essential. One is a Catholic by the fact of his implicit acceptance of the sovereign authority of the Church; one ceases to be a Catholic when that submission ceases. From which it is easy to conclude that the principle of Catholicism is the realisation of the Christian principle--that is to say, of the reign of G.o.d and of Christ, in the form of a visible inst.i.tution, an organised social body, an external power, exercising itself by means of that which is the very soul of the inst.i.tution--a priesthood endowed with supernatural functions and attributes.

The immediate consequence of this first principle was the rupture of the organic union realised in the Gospel of Christ between the religious element and the moral element. Nothing is more striking in the Sermon on the Mount and in all the Parables of Jesus, nothing better attests the superiority of Christianity to anterior cults, nothing proves with greater force and clearness that it is the perfect and definitive Religion, than that mutual penetration, that fusion, that identification, in a word, of religion and morality, till then separate and often opposed to each other. The Christ did not desire in religion anything that was not in morality, or in morality anything that was not religious. Thus did He bring back piety from without, and made of it the inner inspiration which penetrates and transforms the whole life, a hidden flame, a ferment acting from the centre to the surface, the soul in the body, ever invisible and everywhere present.

He thus founded the absolute autonomy of the religious and of the moral life which no longer are divided, but appear simply as the two sides of consciousness; the one interior and turned towards G.o.d, the other exterior and turned towards the world. In creating in us the sense of our sons.h.i.+p to G.o.d, Jesus did not admit the intervention of any external authority between the Father and the child. The universal priesthood, with which, by His spirit, He invests the least of His disciples, excludes in principle all supernatural priesthood. "Call no man master on earth, for one is your Master in heaven; and all ye are brethren." The children must have free access to the Father.

But, from the moment the Christian principle, instead of entering as divine inspiration into the consciousness, sets itself up as a visible inst.i.tution in society, it is evident that this organic union is broken, and the autonomy of the individual consciousness compromised.

The religious element affirms itself on its own account, and imposes itself from without on the mind of the faithful as a divine authority.

The ancient dualism, which the Gospel surmounted, reappears in a profounder form; it brings in its train a universal supernaturalism--that is to say, a mechanical conception of the relations between G.o.d and the world. Instead of a penetration we have a superposition of two elements. The clergy separates itself from the laity and superposes itself upon it as the necessary intermediary between earth and heaven. Religious society, const.i.tuted under the form of a government, superposes itself upon the civil society that it desires to rule; grace superposes itself upon nature, acting on it from above in the sacraments; the morality of the Church, in so far as it is a supernatural morality, superposes itself upon the natural morality of conscience; revelation upon reason; divine dogmas upon human science; the spiritual power of the priest upon the temporal power of the family and of the State. Everywhere, within and without, the division breaks out, and you see arise in man and in society an intestine struggle which will never end; for these two original forces that it brings into conflict, religion and nature, are equally powerful and eternal.

Catholicism began, then, in the Church of the second century when, under the unconscious action of tradition and of pagan habits, the need was felt of objectivising and materialising the Christian principle in an external fact, of imprisoning the kingdom of G.o.d in a visible inst.i.tution, the immanent revelation of the Holy Spirit in the decisions and acts of a priesthood. This tendency, once born, would be irresistible. Ideal and transcendent as it was at first, the Christian principle would become ever more external and political. Absorbing all Christianity, and holding in its hands all the graces of G.o.d, the Church would naturally present itself to the world as the permanent mediator and the grand magician. It was its part to effect the salvation of sinners, and, for this, it would need, like the ancient priests, to offer daily to G.o.d an agreeable oblation, an expiatory sacrifice of infinite value to atone for the infinite sins of the world. Thus the Church transformed the commemoration of the death of Christ into a _real_ renewal of the sacrifice on Calvary; the Holy Supper became the ma.s.s; the fraternal table was turned into an altar; the elder or presbyter was changed into a priest and pontiff, and the bread of the communion into a divine victim. The dogma of transubstantiation was bound to follow; to the materialisation of Christianity in the Church corresponds the materialisation of G.o.d in the host.

By virtue of the same principle, Christian piety becomes devotion, _i.e._ a ritual and meritorious practice, as in the ancient cults. But we must not be unjust and attribute something to Catholicism that it condemns. It does not say that external practice is sufficient; the Church esteems it vain and even culpable unless accompanied by the affections and the will.

The first and princ.i.p.al act of piety is submission to the Church. Its dogmas may be irrational, contradictory; its commandments may seem arbitrary, foreign to the natural conscience, sometimes in contradiction with it; no matter.

Reason, conscience, all must abdicate, and all submit.... In the Church, the Christian state must always be a state of minority, for the tutelage that it accepts will never cease. And the authority of the Church, being on this point sovereign and indefectible, could not remain invisible and indeterminate. An imperious logic pushed it from the first to incarnate itself in its organs, more and more apparent and simplified. First it was lodged in individual bishops, then in councils, until the Pope when speaking _ex cathedra_ became the sole authority. In 1870 the Council of the Vatican, by promulgating the dogma of Papal infallibility, drew the irresistible conclusion from the premises laid down in previous centuries. The evolution of Catholicism was completed. The transformation of Christianity into a sacerdotal theocracy was achieved. The first is realised and exhausted in the second, and the distinction we established, when speaking of the essence of Christianity, between the Christian principle and its historical realisations, is not merely effaced; it no longer has any meaning.

From which follow two consequences which every day become more clear and patent. The first is that the Catholic Church, notwithstanding the desires of Leo XIII., is fatally condemned to be intolerant and intransigeant towards all others. The second is that it is contradictory to expect any reform in that Church, or even to speak of it; for the Church could not admit the necessity of reform without renouncing all its pretentions. A river never turns back to its source. Catholicism can only exist by struggling for supremacy. It must be all or nothing.

At the same time, things are not so simple as our systems. The logic of ideas does not exhaust the reality of life. Behind abstract principles there are pious souls.... In Catholicism there has always been a latent Protestantism, by which I mean a protest, mute or spoken, direct or indirect, of the Christian principle against the oppressions of external and tyrannical authority.... Without the continuous presence of the Christian spirit in the Catholic Church, the Reformation would have been impossible. Without the triumph of the sacerdotal spirit it would have been unnecessary. Protestantism sprang out of Catholicism because it was virtually contained in it.

4. _Protestant Christianity_

It is strangely to mistake the nature of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century to see in it a sort of semi-rationalism, the inconsistent exercise of free examination, or the revolutionary introduction of a foreign philosophical principle into the warp and woof of Christianity. You have only to read the biography of the Reformers and to make a slight a.n.a.lysis of their soul to form an entirely different idea of their work. The first and almost the only question which preoccupies and troubles them is an exclusively religious and practical question: "What must we do in order to be justified before G.o.d? How may we attain to peace of soul and to the a.s.surance of pardon and of life eternal?" To find this peace, this pardon and salvation, which the Church could not procure for them, they determined to turn back and quench their thirst at the primitive sources of the Gospel. They went back to the original doc.u.ments because they were persuaded that Christianity had been corrupted in the course of centuries; they wished to have it in its purity. Their whole reformation was to consist in this restoration of primitive truth.

But history never recommences. This return to the past and this re-reading of the Bible were accompanied by a religious experience and an act of consciousness which made of their enterprise something essentially new and original, and which rendered it immeasurably fruitful. It is unnecessary to seek elsewhere than in psychological experience the germ of Protestantism. It was in the humble cell of a convent at Erfurt and in the soul of a poor monk that the drama was first enacted from which sprang the revolution that has changed the face of the world.

Luther entered the convent with a faith in the authority of the Church and in the efficacy of its rites as serious and entire as that of any monk. "If it was possible," he said afterwards, "to reach Heaven by monkery, I was resolved to reach it by that road." For years he shrank from nothing that might render G.o.d propitious; he multiplied his acts of devotion and his works of penance. There is a striking a.n.a.logy between the experiences of Luther under the monachal regime and those of Saul of Tarsus under the discipline of the Pharisaic Law. The _denoument_ was the same. For the second time, the system of pious works was found powerless to appease a conscience which roused against itself the rigour of its own ideal. This struggle against an external law could only exasperate the sense of sin to the point of despair.

Paul and Luther, in precisely the same manner, experienced the inward emptiness and radical worthlessness of the religious system in which they had been trained. The more they had tried to realise it in its perfection, the more had they found it wanting. Catholicism, considered as a means of salvation, was rejected by the religious and moral consciousness of Luther, before it was condemned by exegesis and by reasoning. To reach this sentence without appeal the Saxon monk had but to maintain inflexible the demands of the divine law and to measure, without illusion, the abyss that separated him from G.o.d, and that no human works could fill. It was in this way that he found himself shut up to the essence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ; he found the peace that fled from him in the pure and simple acceptance of the glad tidings of the paternal love of G.o.d, in the confidence that He gives gratuitously that which man can never conquer for himself, namely, the remission of sins and the cert.i.tude of eternal life. What then is faith? Is it still intellectual adhesion to dogmas or submission to an external authority? No. It is an act of confidence, the act of a childlike heart, which finds with joy the Father whom it knew not, and Whom, without presumption, it is happy henceforth to hold with both its hands. That is what Luther found in Paul's great words: "The just shall live by faith." In this radical transformation of the notion of faith restored to its evangelical meaning is to be found the principle of the greatest religious revolution effected in the world since the preaching of Jesus.

Let us therefore here set forth the radical opposition between the Catholic principle and the Protestant principle in order that we may thoroughly understand the internecine war that was henceforth to be waged between them. In vain will eminent men in both camps, with the most generous and conciliatory intentions, arise and endeavour to find some middle ground, and effect a pacific reunion of the two halves of Christendom. All compromises, all diplomatic negotiations, will fail, because each of the two principles can only subsist by the negation of the other. Having attained to salvation, to full communion with G.o.d, independently of and in collision with the authority and the discipline of the sacerdotal Church, how could Luther recognise them any longer as divine and submit to them with sincerity and confidence? The ancient edifice had been the more thoroughly ruined, inasmuch as it had become useless and had been replaced. The originality of Luther consisted in this: his religious enfranchis.e.m.e.nt sprang from his own piety, and he founded his freedom on his sense of sons.h.i.+p, on the sense he had of his quality and t.i.tles as a child and heir of G.o.d. How could such a consciousness submit itself to the yoke again without denying itself?

Catholicism, on the other hand, cannot be less intransigeant. To recognise in any degree whatever that it is possible to a Christian to enjoy pardon and the sense of the divine fatherhood apart from its dogmas and its priesthood, would not this be to abdicate all its pretensions, and to transform itself to the point of destruction?

No doubt, in actual life, this opposition is attenuated by the fact that in all Catholicism there is a latent Protestantism, and in all Protestantism a latent Catholicism. Between Port-Royal and Geneva, between Bossuet and Leibniz, between Leo XIII. and the Anglican Church, the distance seems but little. It is an illusion. Like two electricities of the same name, no sooner do they come into contact than they repel each other and separate more widely than before. In Catholicism Christianity tends to realise itself as a theocratic inst.i.tution; it becomes an external law, a supernatural power, which, from without, imposes itself on individuals and on peoples. In Protestantism, on the contrary, Christianity is brought back from the exterior to the interior; it plants itself in the soul as a principle of subjective inspiration which, acting organically on individual and social life, transforms it and elevates it progressively without denaturalising and doing violence to it. Protestant subjectivity becomes spontaneity and liberty, just as necessarily as Catholic objectivity becomes supernaturalism and clerical tyranny. The religious element is no longer separated from the moral element; it no longer a.s.serts itself as a truth or a morality superior to human truth and human morality. The intensity of the religious life is no longer measured by the number or the fervour of pious works or ritual practices, but by the sincerity and elevation of the life of the spirit. All asceticism is radically suppressed. Science is set free along with conscience; the political life of the peoples, as well as the inner life of the Christian. Man escapes from tutelage, and in all departments comes into possession of himself, into the full and free development of his being, into his majority.

This subjective character of a religion strictly moral stamps itself with energy on all the specific doctrines of Protestantism. It would be superfluous to dwell upon the doctrine of justification by faith; its subjective character is evident. No doubt the term justification has a legal colour and awakens the idea of a tribunal. But it must not be forgotten that this tribunal is nothing but the inner court where man and G.o.d meet each other face to face, where man is accused by his own conscience, and where the sentence which absolves him is the inward witness of the Holy Spirit, heard by him alone.

The doctrine of the sovereign authority of Scripture in matters of faith might seem at first sight to set up an external authority. And it is very true that certain Protestants have often understood it in the Catholic sense, and have employed it to exercise some violence on their own conscience or on the conscience of their brethren. But they never succeed for long; they soon fall into a too flagrant contradiction. The authority of the Bible is never separated in Protestantism from the right of the individual to interpret it freely, and from the personal duty of a.s.similating the truths he discovers in it. What therefore are those Protestants doing who attempt to set up a confession of faith as absolute and obligatory truth but imposing on their brethren their own subjective interpretation, and, consequently, denying to others the right which they exercise themselves? Nor let it be forgotten, on the other hand, that the obligation laid on each Christian to read the Bible and draw from it his faith is a perpetual and fruitful appeal to the energy of thought and to the autonomy of the inner life. The authority of Scripture, so far from being a menace to Christian liberty, is its invincible rampart. Not only has the Protestant Christian in the name of the Bible triumphed over eighteen centuries of tradition, but it is the Bible, an appeal to the Bible ever better understood, which has saved Protestant theology from scholasticism, which has prevented it from congealing in a confession of faith, and which, leaving the principle of the Gospel in an ideal transcendence in relation to all its historical expressions or realisations, has maintained, and still maintains, the spirit of reform in the Churches of the Reformation.

The doctrines of grace and of predestination, which are at the centre of Calvinism, have no other meaning. Souls religiously inert see in these doctrines nothing but an abuse of blind power, a sort of divine _fatum_, breaking every spring in the human soul. Nothing appears to be more oppressive or more immoral. But this is only an appearance.

There is really no predestination for irreligious souls. This doctrine is but the expression of the inner basis of all true piety, which is nothing if it is not the sense, the feeling, of the presence and the sovereign and continuous action of G.o.d in each soul and in all the universe. No other sentiment gives so much spring and vigour to the human will, nothing raises it to such a height or makes it so invincible to all a.s.saults from within and without. "If G.o.d be for us, who can be against us?" etc. (Rom. viii. 31-39). How is it that the Calvinistic Puritans of New England were the founders of modern liberty, and the Jesuits, those admirable theorisers on freewill, the precursors of all the servitudes? It is with predestination as it is with religion itself. Conceived as exterior to the life of the soul, it gives birth, no doubt, to a crus.h.i.+ng despotism; conceived as an inward inspiration, sustaining the initiative and even the liberty of the individual, it becomes, in the Christian soul, the source of a force which nothing can break or subdue.

But the point at which the ant.i.thesis between Protestantism and Catholicism becomes most patent is the doctrine of the natural priesthood of all Christians as opposed to that of the supernatural priesthood of a privileged clergy. The free and perpetual communion of believing souls with the Father is the foundation of the independence of each and of the fraternal equality of all. The tap-root of clericalism is cut. The individual is a priest before the interior altar of his conscience; the father is a priest in his household; the citizen, if so he wills, in the city.

The Catholic notion of dogma vanishes with all the rest. To speak of an immutable and infallible dogma, in Protestantism, is nonsense; that is to say, if we accept the dictionary definition of dogma--the promulgation by the Church of an absolute formula. The decision of a Church cannot have more authority than that Church itself. Now, no Protestant Church holds itself, or can hold itself without denying itself, to be infallible. How then could it communicate to its definitions an infallibility that it did not itself possess?

Protestant confessions of faith are always conditioned in time, and can never be definitive; they are always revisable, consequently they are always liable to criticism and to reform. Thus ceases the solidification of traditional dogma. The old ice melts beneath the breath of knowledge and of piety. The river takes again its natural course, and evolution, under the control of a perpetual criticism, becomes the law of religious thought, as of all other human activities.

From these observations and a.n.a.lyses (necessarily abridged) the true nature of Protestantism will have become sufficiently clear. It is not a dogma set up in the face of another dogma, a Church in compet.i.tion with a rival Church, a purified Catholicism opposed to a traditional Catholicism. It is more and better than a doctrine, it is a method; more and better than a better Church, it is a new form of piety; it is a different spirit, creating a new world and inaugurating for religious souls a new regime. It is equally evident that Protestantism cannot be imprisoned in any definitive form. It leads to variety of formulas, rites, and a.s.sociations as necessarily as the Catholic principle leads to unity. No limit can be set to its development. Always interior, invisible, ideal, the religious principle that it represents accompanies the life and activity of the spirit into all the paths that man may pursue and in all the progress he may make. Nothing human is alien to it; nor is it alien to anything that is human. It solves the problem of liberty and authority as it is solved by free and ordered governments; it does not suppress either of the terms, but conciliates them by reducing authority to its pedagogic _role_, and by making the Christian spirit the soul and inner rule of liberty.

By very reason of its superiority, and of the conditions of general culture that it presupposes, this form of Christianity could only appear after all the others. The spirit can only become self-conscious by distinguis.h.i.+ng itself from the body in which at first it seems as if diffused, and by opposing to it an energetic moral protest. "That is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterwards that which is spiritual" (1 Cor. xv. 46. Cf. Gal. iv. 1-5). This divine plan, which the apostle discovered in the ancient history of humanity, is repeated in the history of Christianity. The Messianic form corresponds to infancy, to that brief, happy age in which the impatient imagination nourishes itself on dreams and illusions which the experience of life soon dissipates without killing or even enfeebling the immortal hope at the heart of it. The Catholic form, which succeeds it, endures longer and corresponds to the age of adolescence, in which education is painfully prosecuted, and it demands a strict external discipline and masters whose authority must not be questioned or discussed. It was in this way that Catholic discipline and authority conducted the slow, laborious education of the pagan and barbarian world up to the sixteenth century.

But a moment must arrive when the work of education had succeeded, when the leading strings essential to childhood began to be a bondage and a hindrance. The pedagogic mission of the Church, like that of the family itself, had its limit and its term in the very function it fulfilled. That function was to make adult Christians and free men, not men without rule, but Christians having in themselves, in their conscience and their inner life, the supreme rule of their thought and conduct. This new age of autonomy, of firm possession of self, and of internal self-government, is that which Protestantism represents, and it could only commence in modern times--that is to say, with that general movement which, since the end of the Middle Ages, is leading humanity to an ever completer enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, and rendering it more universally and more individually responsible for its destinies.

It may be remarked that by this evolution, and under its Protestant form, the Christian principle was only returning to its pure essence and its primitive expression. It could only recognise itself, take cognisance of its true nature, separate itself from that which was not itself; it could only disenc.u.mber itself of every material, temporary, or local element, of all by which it had become surcharged in the course of ages, and which was neither religious nor moral, by remounting to its source, and by renewing its strength, through reflection and criticism, at its original springs. That is why Protestantism has taken the form of this return to the past, for in it Christianity does not surpa.s.s itself; it simply tries to know itself better and to become more faithful to its principle. In the consciousness of Christ, what did we find was the essence of the perfect and eternal piety? Nothing more than moral repentance, confidence in the love of the Father and the filial sense of His immediate, active presence in the heart: the indestructible foundation of our liberty, of our moral dignity, of our security, in face of the enigmas of the universe and the mysteries of death. Is it not to this eternal gospel that we must always return? To finish its course and complete its work, will humanity ever discover another viatic.u.m that will better renew its courage and its hope?

5. _Conclusion_

Here I must stop. At the outset I spoke of a personal confession, and it seems to me as if it were nearly complete. In sketching the broad outlines of the religious history of humanity, I have had but one object; I have wished to show the men of my generation why I remain religious, Christian, and Protestant. I am religious because I am a man and do not desire to be less than human, and because humanity, in me and in my race, commences and completes itself in religion and by religion. I am Christian because I cannot be religious in any other way, and because Christianity is the perfect and supreme form of religion in this world. Lastly, I am Protestant, not from any confessional zeal, nor from racial attachment to the family of Huguenots, although I thank G.o.d daily that I was born in that family, but because in Protestantism alone can I enjoy the heritage of Christ--that is to say, because in it I can be a Christian without placing my conscience under any external yoke, and because I can fortify myself in communion with and in adoration of an immanent Deity by consecrating to Him the activity of my intellect, the natural affections of my heart, and find in this moral consecration the free expansion and development of my whole being.