220 



CHRISTIANITY 



of this renewed theocracy which breaks with all 

 modern progress from a social point of view by its 

 attempt to enchain thought and the conscience 

 to a sacerdotal power. Wherever Catholicism 

 is the dominant religion it is taken as the true 

 representative of Christianity itself. Hence is pro- 

 pagated the erroneous idea that there is an opposi- 

 tion between the religion of Christ and social 

 progress, seeing that all the grand principles of 

 justice, of law, and of brotherhood, come in reality 

 from him who has raised man in every sense by 

 reconciling him with God. Human brotherhood 

 with all that it implies can come only from the 

 divine fatherhood. 



We are thus right in affirming that the victory 

 of the Catholic theocracy has been the surest means 

 of actually turning away recent generations from a 

 Christianity ill understood and misrepresented, and 

 that it has in this way facilitated the progress of 

 anti-Christianity. Happily Christianity has had 

 other representatives wno have shown it in its 

 true character. We must recognise that even in 

 the bosom of Catholicism are to be found grand 

 and lofty Christian men like Lacordaire, P. Gretry, 

 Montalembert, and Dollinger, who have not ad- 

 mitted the divorce of the religion of Christ from 

 political and social progress, of the gospel from 

 liberty. They have opposed with energy the party 

 of religious absolutism ; their eloquent testimony 

 endures in their books, and their thought remains 

 like leaven within the Church which they have 

 adorned, though they failed to persuade her. We 

 may hope that this movement for true liberty will 

 revive sooner or later in her, all the more that 

 the fall of the temporal power will finally bring 

 about important moral conseqtiences. 



Whatever there may be in such forecasts of the 

 future, really evangelical Christianity has shown 

 itself wherever the Reformation has been planted, 

 as the initiator and propagator of true liberalism. 

 It is easy to prove that it was to its influence, dis- 

 torted indeed and indirect, that the French Revol- 

 ution of 1789 owed everything that it contained 

 of what was true and fertile for the future. Its 

 first adherents had breathed the air of freedom in 

 Anglo-Saxon countries. Besides, the French Pro- 

 testants, by their resistance to the intolerable 

 persecutions of which they had been the object, had 

 preserved in their own persons the most important of 

 all liberties that of the conscience. It is more 

 important to-day than ever, in face of the rising 

 flood of democracy, that Christians, in order to 

 dissipate the misunderstanding which in its opposi- 

 tion to the gospel and to liberty favours contem- 

 porary anti-Christianity, should delight to place 

 themselves in t*he van of political and social pro- 

 gress, and should especially take to heart the 

 elevation of the labouring classes. This is what 

 true Christians are now doing more and more in 

 every country. We gladly recognise that Catholics 

 and Protestants are vicing with one another in 

 their zeal for this great social task, which is the 

 foremost duty of our age. We may perhaps add 

 that the gradual disappearance of state religions, 

 with their authoritative constitutions defining the 

 identities between the spiritual and the temporal, 

 need not at all tend to the disadvantage of Chris- 

 tianity, since it will render for ever afterwards 

 impossible all recourse to force for maintain- 

 ing the authority of doctrine, thus putting final 

 end to an intolerance which was the most flagrant 

 contradiction of its most essential principle. We 

 must not forget to make allowance for the 

 modern cessation of compulsion in religion in our 

 estimation of the actual manifestations of anti- 

 Christianity, which in former times was compelled 

 to save itself by concealment or in hypocrisy, 

 although it was possible for it to exist in large 



proportions within a state, though all unseen. 

 But now the time has come for that which wa* 

 whispered low to be proclaimed upon the house- 

 tops. Yet positively the truth has everything t 

 gain in that freedom, which, however irreverent- 

 it sometimes may be, is still due to a state of 

 things through which the great opprobrium of a 

 persecuting religion has been made to disappear 

 a result for which we can hardly congratulate our- 

 selves too highly. 



The secularisation of the state entails upon us 

 great responsibilities, especially in what concerns 

 the young, who are the more judiciously intrusted 

 to the care of the Church, because everywhere they 

 are called to form their faith without any help from 

 the state. The vast and glorious development of 

 the natural sciences has largely contributed to 

 develop unbelief in the domain of speculation, 

 under the influence of that pantheistic or mate- 

 rialistic philosophy which had preceded it. In 

 the intoxication of all their scientific discoveries, 

 men imagined that they could put God and the 

 spirit out of the world, and recognise therein 

 only the play of mechanical forces, the evo- 

 lution of motion producing a series of exist- 

 ences comprising thought, conscience, and soul. 

 The adversaries of Christianity have divided them- 

 selves more and more into two great schools r 

 Agnostics, denying the possibility of obtaining the 

 least knowledge of what is beyond our own con- 

 sciousness, and dogmatic Materialists from what- 

 ever cause produced. We have a right to affirm 

 that Christianity has striven victoriously against 

 both the one and the other. First of all, it numbers 

 in the domain of science more than one illustrious 

 representative who has actually shown that we 

 may enrich science while believing firmly in God. 

 Next and this is still more important it has 

 brought about the most salutary enlargement in 

 intellects within the bosom of the most earnest 

 Christianity. The most eminent among Christian 

 thinkers have proclaimed the reciprocal independ- 

 ence of science and religion. They have recognised 

 that the first is sovereign in its own sphere, that 

 God has not revealed what man can discover, and 

 that in consequence religion has not to link itself 

 with such or such a conception of the past, as if it 

 had therein a revealed system of science. By the 

 happiest coincidence, illustrious savants with abso- 

 lutely no connection with the churches, as Du Bois- 

 Reymond and Virchow, have refused the natural 

 sciences the right to make excursions out of their 

 oAvn domain, and to settle questions like those of 

 the origin of life or of man. They have thus, 

 declared a perfectly rational scientific agnosticism 

 about what concerns that problem of origins, which 

 is specially the problem of religion. It follows from 

 this that there may exist other processes of dis- 

 covery and of experiment than those of the natural 

 sciences in that which transcends their province. 

 It is for Christians so to employ these as to establish 

 the reality of a spiritual and divine world, and 

 such of its successive manifestations in religious 

 history as come to centre themselves in Christ. 



We may say that in this way a work of great 

 importance to apologetics has been accomplished : 

 it nas happily reflected light upon the very con- 

 ception of a doctrine which is ever the more 

 widened the less it is allowed to be shut in within 

 any formulas of the orthodoxies of the past, in order 

 to grasp ever the more closely the living object of 

 belief, which is Christ, and understand the better 

 that eternal gospel, which as we have established, 

 is essentially a fact and a person. That enlarge- 

 ment which we can verify in all churches freed 

 from the yoke of outward authority, is not only 

 favourable to the true progress of the Christian 

 conception, but also to its preservation. One oi 



