VIII. French Infidelity

The close contact, during a peace of half a century, between England and France has established in the two countries a continuity of sympathy, intelligence, and language; and this fact by itself is enough to make it our duty to observe with vigilance the intellectual tendencies of French literature. For good or for evil it must powerfully affect our educated classes; and the rise of certain intellectual maladies in France may he taken as premonitory symptoms of evils which will in the end attack ourselves. More than twenty years ago Neander, in his sketch of the late Dr. Arnold's life, described him as the herald of the critical treatment of Holy Scripture, which had already swept over Germany, and would sooner or later pass over England. We see this prophecy fulfilling in our days. In like manner it is certain that the intellectual aberrations described in this work will sooner or later arise among ourselves. Indeed, we shall presently see that they are already silently, at least in sporadic cases, working in the midst of us.

The Bishop of Orleans, in his work entitled L'Athcismc et le Peril Social, has abundantly and powerfully justified his assertion that the peril of France at this time is Atheism. He does not hy this intend that the French people are Atheists, or that the Christianity and faith of France is not vigorous and dominant, but that there exists in France a school of writers able, cultivated, restless, and incessant in their endeavours to drive the idea of God out of the reason, conscience, science, morals, of society; that their anti-Christian conspiracy against God and the Christian order of the world is organised, extensive, and extending; that it commands a large number of public organs and controls a large proportion of the press; that its effects are appreciable upon the educated classes; and that its in fluences readily descend among the people. The Bishop affirms that during the last ten years many journals which defended religion in France have been suppressed, and very many authorised, of which, with rare exceptions, almost all arc (hautement antichrctiens) openly anti-Christian. He names especially the Sii'dc, the Debats, the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Opinion Rationale, the Avenir National, the Temps, the Independance Bclye, as propagating without scruple Atheism, Materialism, Pantheism, and anti-Christianism.1 He adds that, besides these, there are journals expressly founded as organs of Atheism, such as the Revue Germanique, the Morale Indepcndantc, the Courrier Fran^ais, the Libre Conscience, the Alliance Religicuse Universcllc, the Libre Pensec, and the Revue

1 p. 98.

dii Proyrcs.'2 He adds that an official report of the Minister of the Interior in 1852 showed that of nine millions of books sold in the towns and villages of France eight millions were immoral.

To any one who desires to appreciate the character of this school I would earnestly recommend Pere Gratry's work, Les Sophistes et la Critique, which, for intellectual power and transparent clearness, is a very attractive book. He says: ' There is at this time in Europe a society of minds which, if they are not unmasked and subdued by public attention, are leading us back into barbarism. In this second half of the nineteenth century, we have before our eyes in France a psychological phenomenon very rare and very new. It is the existence of an intellectual monstrosity which appears for the second time in the his tory of the human intelligence.'3 ' I affirm, then, that there exists at this day in France a school of writers who merit the name of Sophists, because they deny the first axioms of the reason — a very strange event in our age; for since Aristotle and Plato, who destroyed the Sophists of Greece, there has never been in the Greek or Roman world another attempt to revive the Sophists.' He further adds: ' We have before our eyes a sect of Atheists and Sophists. Such is the fact. I desire to mark the fact: I am bound to say, a sect of Atheists and Sophists.... The Sophists are those who do not admit, either in speculation or in practice, the fundamental and necessary axiom of the reason, namely, that it is impossible to affirm and to - p. 99. 3 Les Sophistes, &c. pp. 10, 11.

deny the same thing at the same time, in the same sense, and under the same relations. This axiom is evidence in itself. The contrary is the proper formula of absurdity.'4 The following is the application of this philosophy: ' Everything reveals, affirms, and demon strates God; a straw as well as the world.' ' But if God be only an idea, the existence of God hangs on the existence of a thinking being. Suppress humanity, God exists no longer.... Why deny it? You see clearly enough now in these questions to be no longer dupes of words.'5

Such is the school which the Bishop of Orleans has exposed with copious evidence to a just reprobation. I shall not, therefore, attempt to reproduce the matter of the Bishop's pages except to give a brief outline of the tenets of this sect, so as to identify the existence of the same forms of error already appearing among ourselves. He distinguishes the atheistic school into three kinds-Positivism, Pantheism, and Materialism. And of each the following are samples:

Positivism rejects as unphilosophical and false all theology, including God and the soul as superstitions; and all metaphysics, such as law, cause, effect, &c., as imaginations; confining science to facts and phenomena, or, in other words, to the sphere of sense.

Comte, the founder of this intellectual monstrosity, declared in 1851, 'in the name of the past and of the future, all those who believe in God to be irrevocably excluded from the direction of affairs, as being behind hand and hinderers, whether Catholics, Protestants, and « Let Sophistes, &c. pp. 17-41. * Ibid. p. 83.

Deists.' As to the God of the past, he says ' that He has rendered provisional services. But there is an end of it. Humanity takes the place of God.' 'Humanity alone must compensate for the impotence of God.' ' The idea of God has become in these days anarchical and retrograde.' But M. Comte held that man could not live without a religion, nor a religion exist without a worship, nor a worship without an object. But as there was an end of the ' God of the past,' the first step was to create the Divinity. And that Divinity could be no other than the ' Great Being ' who has taken the place of God, namely, Humanity. Not indeed this or that particular man, nor mankind as it exists now in this mortal state, nor as it will exist in immortality, because, as there is no God, so there is no soul; but ' the Great Being is the assemblage of beings, past, present, and future;'6 and yet not all such enter into the composition of the ' Grand Etre,' but only those who freely co-operate towards the perfection of the ' Universal Being.' Such are the ' Etres convergents,' the convergent beings; and Positivism defines humanity ' the continuous assemblage of convergent beings.' Such is the object of worship, for which he proposed to set apart the Church of S. Genevieve; that is, as he says, to ' consecrate the Pantheon to its true destination.' He proceeds to re-christen the months of the year and the days of the week, and to frame a calendar of feasts in which all states of humanity should be worshipped, with one omission — unmarried women, who have deserved well of humanity, to whom, as an after-thought, he assigns

0 Catechism of Positive Religion, pp. 63-74.

the odd day in Leap Year. There are in the Positive religion ten sacraments, of which one is retirement from puhlic life, to be administered and received at the age of sixty. A worshipper of this religion wrote to the French newspapers, dating by the calendar, Paris, 17 Shakespeare 78; that is, to us who are lying in darkness, September 24, 1866. In that letter he describes the spread of Positivism in France, America, and Eng land. Of the last fact we have proof in a sermon pub lished some four or five years ago in London, and dated 17 Moses 72; that is, as I learn, our January seventy-two years after the great world-epoch of the advent of M. Comte among men. It is hard to say whether folly or impiety predominate in this delirium.

As for Pantheism, the following samples will suffice: ' God, Providence, soul, immortality, — good old words; a little heavy perhaps, which Philosophy will interpret in senses more and more refined.'7

' For my part, I do not think that there is in the universe an intelligence superior to that of man.' ' On a certain day, in virtue of natural laws which had before presided over the development of things, without intervention from without, the thinking being appeared.' ' This strange phenomenon, in virtue of which an animal species (that is man) assumed a decisive superiority over the others.' By a coup d'etat, we must suppose. ' Absolute perfection, to treat things in rigour, would be non-existence.' ' The infinite exists only where it puts on a finite form.' 'Absolute justice and reason re-

1 M. Kenan's Etudes d'Histoirc Religieuse, p. 419. Ptril Social, p. 75.

gardetl out of humanity is an abstraction; regarded in humanity is a reality.' When humanity has become perfect, ' Dieu sera complet,' — ' God will be completed.' This is the M. Renan whose Life of Jesus competes in editions with Voltaire, and is read by unsuspecting simple hearts in England.

Lastly, as to Materialism: a few samples will complete their Summa Thcoloyica impietatis.

The first proposition we meet with is, ' There is nothing real but the body.' God and the soul are * metaphysical entities, bubbles of soap.' ' We may well be the fruit of successive modifications, wrought upon ancestors far less perfect than we are, and even next in order to great apes.' Investigations are en chasse t to find ' the man -ape, ' the animal which according to them must have been the transition between apes and man.' ' God, banished from science, took refuge in metaphysics... The idea of God is already well shaken. We must still give it the last blow.' ' The name soul must be reserved for the assemblage of faculties of the central nervous system taken as a whole.' ' Thought is inherent in the substance of the brain only as it is nourished, like the contractile power of the muscles, &c.' ' An idea is the product of a combination analogous to formic acid; thought depends on the phosphorus con tained in the substance of the brain; virtue, devotedness, and courage are organic currents of electricity.' ' Virtue and vice are products, like sugar and vitriol.' Perhaps this is enough. And yet it may be well to give a resume in the words of a M. Moleschott, who appears for the regeneration of Italy to have been honoured with a professor's chair at Turin. He says, with a gravity worthy of Moliere's doctor of physic, ' The will is the necessary expression of a state of the brain produced by external influences. There is no such thing as a free will. A crime is the logical result, direct and inevitable, of the passion which animates us. Without phosphorus, no thought, — Sans phoaphorc point dc penscc.... Thought is a movement of matter.' ' Conscience is also a property of matter.' It is, I imagine, of this M. Moleschott and his impieties that an author in Turin wrote as follows: ' Si preconizza dalle Cattedre... 1' uomo bestia, la Materia Dio, il fato-providenza, il fosforo-pensiero, 1' autorita chimera, la fede impostura.' One more passage must suilice. M. Renan says, ' No limit can be traced for the mind of man.... Nothing is above the reach of man.' He thinks that some day there will be found * a predestined chemist who will transform all things; an omniscient biologist who will finally make himself master of life itself.' ' Who knows,' he says, ' in a word, whether infinite science will not bring with it infinite power?' ' We may affirm that the final resurrection will be accomplished by science.' What wonder that to M. Renan our Divine Lord should appear as ' an interesting enthusiast'?

The Bishop of Orleans then gives an outline of the activity and organisation of the sect. It already has the * Societes des Affranchis et des Solidaires;' and still more recently an international society has been founded in Germany, the members of which bind themselves to receive no sacrament of any religion, neither baptism nor marriage, nor at the hour of death; and to give directions to others to hinder their families from giving them Christian burial.

Such may be called the dogmatic theology of this school. Now for the moral. It is called la morale independante; that is to say, ' morality has no existence but in humanity.' It does not come from God; for there is no God. It is not the law of His will, nor the tran script of His perfection. We have seen already that 'conscience is a movement of matter.' ' Virtue and vice are products, like sugar and vitriol.' If so, it is hardly worth while to say that Christian morality is ' arbitrary, because it has not been freely sanctioned by man, which sanction is necessary in order to bind man towards God;' and that 'it is impossible that God should judge and punish a creature who has not sanctioned the altogether arbitrary law which God has been pleased to impose upon him.' I will not stain these pages by transferring to them the immoralities of this literature. It is more than enough to read them for once in the eloquent and indignant context of Mgr. Dupanloup. The immediate bearing of all this upon the personal morality of individuals and the collective morals of society is self-evident. ' We are engaged,' say these guides of men, ' on the subject of morality; that is, the restoration of the flesh to its estate in a moral point of view.' It is healthy and consoling after all to read such words as the following passage, dictated by the unerring instinct of anti-Christian libertinage and enmity against the morality of the Christian Church: ' Take care, Messieurs les Clericaux;... we shall know how, if need be, to confound you; we shall be able, if the slow work of science is not enough, to inscribe upon our standards, and to put in execution, the great idea of the last century, " Ecrasons I'lnfame."

Such is the first part of Monseigneur Dupanloup's work. The second, on the social peril, is an application of the first. He says truly, ' Free thought brings free morality; will not free morality bring free practice and revolution? To this there is no limit but law and society.' But it is especially this which is now being sapped and corrupted at its base by the propagation of these anti-Christian and anti-social impieties. M. Renan says, * The future of humanity is entirely a question of doctrine. Philosophy alone can solve it. The really efficacious revolution which will give form to the future will be a revolution in religion and morals. The work is passing more and more into the hands of men of thought.' ' In politics, as in philosophy, the younger school of Hegel professed the most radical doctrines. The year 1848 came, and the extreme left of the Hegelians became the extreme left of the revolution — Atheism and Socialism joined hands.' And this revolution is not that of the people, but of the * thinkers.' Even universal suffrage is to be put aside as suspect. France is the field of predilection; but France is not to be polled, but only Paris. And Paris has already once before terrified and deluged France with blood under the sway of a handful of ' thinkers,' varying in age from twenty-two to thirty-five years — Sophists and Atheists— men of the inde pendent morality, of vitriol, sugar, and blood. And to this the people of France are invited once more, ' through transformations still more radical than those of '89.' ' Socialism is the religion of the disinherited classes.' But into this part of the subject I will not now enter. I would only commend to the careful attention of the reader the chapter in which the Bishop sketches the preludes and the course of the first French revolution; the facility with which these materialist and atheistic doctrines may become popular, and their direct tendency to become political. Any one who has watched the state of this country in the last five years, and the close international organisation which is growing up between certain classes which, both in Eng land and on the Continent, are most exposed to the action of social and political discontent, will find reason to reflect with anxiety upon the future of our own country. But into this it is impossible now to enter. I will however, before I conclude, add a few words on the symptoms which have already appeared among us of the same intellectual aberrations.

During the last ten or fifteen years the doctrines of M. Comte have attracted the attention of a small number of our English metaphysicians. But he had hardly so much as one thorough disciple among us — certainly not a school. Several writers, such as Mr. Lewis and Mr. Mill, have treated of Positivism; but neither appear to adopt it as a whole. Nevertheless the tendency of both metaphysics and science in Eng land is to eliminate the supernatural and to limit the basis of philosophy to the span of sense and of experiment. "We have some Positivism among us, little or no Pantheism, but abundance of Materialism. The English mind is positive by nature, not indeed scientifically, but by its immersion in material interests and material production. We are so practically material that scientific materialism makes little way with us. The Germans are speculative, the French logical, the English as a people are neither. We are thoroughly traditional and insular, and we hold out obstinately against all invasions whether of armies or of philosophies. Nevertheless ideas penetrate subtilely; and one by one, an idea deposited in the mind of a people is like a seed wafted by the wind or dropped by a bird. It will spring up and reproduce itself. For this reason we have need to watch carefully over a part of our national education, which perhaps more than any other is kft without direction, that is, mental philosophy. Christendom has a tradition of philosophy as well as of Faith; and in that tradition truth, both natural and supernatural, is combined in perfect unity, symmetry, and harmony. Philosophy and theology are the upper and the nether springs of truth. Philosophy may be called the theology of reason; theology the philosophy of revelation. They belong respectively to the natural and supernatural worlds, and they belong also to each other as integral parts of one perfect whole. In the confusion of these later centuries they have been divorced from each other, and set in opposition to each other. Philosophy has taken up an attitude of defiance to theology; and theology, in condemning a false philosophy, has been thought to be uuphilosophical. The existence of God, the spirituality of the soul, the laws of morals, are truths of philosophy; and yet modern philosophy has confounded them with theology, and rejected them with disdain. Materialism and independent morality are the direct product of that rejection. Again, philosophy teaches that the nature of man is composed of soul and body, reason and sense; and that in the knowledge and discovery of truth the whole nature, with its faculties and sensations, discovers by a single intelligent activity. Modern philosophy has disintegrated the nature of man, and placed the criterion of truth either in the reason generally or in the sense, from which have come two distinct philosophies, both false because both partial — the rationalism which in Germany has generated Pan theism, and the sensuous which in England and Scot land has generated not complete Materialism, but a philosophy which is sense-bound and mutilated as to the higher truths of the intellectual order. The pro positions — that the existence of God cannot be proved by reason; that God is not an object of knowledge; that morality in us is diverse from the moral perfection of God; that our knowledge of things is not proper but relative and arbitrary; that the will is not free, and the like — are intellectual aberrations from which the traditional philosophy of the Christian Church and of the Christian world would have preserved us.

But these questions are too speculative to become popular, and among us are confined to so small a class of literary men that their action on society is both limited and superficial. It would seem as if the atmosphere of England were unfavourable to the growth

•2 K FRENCH INFIDELITY.

of abstractions, whether false or true. A remarkable instance of this is the sudden popularity and as sudden oblivion of a book which represents more systematically perhaps than any other in a popular form, some of the worst errors of the positive and material philosophy, Buckle's History of Cirilisation. The author is no longer among us, and I am informed by his friends that he was of an estimable nature. I would not wound his memory, but I cannot spare the book. If I rightly understand it, the theory on which it is based is as follows: The actions of men are determined by the motives which prompt them. If we knew the motives we could predict the actions of any individual. Society is made up of individuals. If we knew the motives of each individual, we could predict the collective action of society. Statistics prove the same. We find every year so many suicides in such a population; and of suicides, so many by drowning, so many by laying violent hands on themselves. Again, the number of letters put into the post without direction, bears a proportion to the population; and so on in various examples. From this he infers that the laws or motives which govern individuals are fixed and proportionate, and that society has a fixed and predetermined course or evolution. The writer adds, with much simplicity, that he knows of only two objections to this theory — the one, Divine Providence; the other, the freedom of the human will. The idea of Providence he dismisses as a superstition of the infant state of man. The savage goes out to the hunting fields, one day he finds game, another day he finds none. Chance becomes Providence, and

Providence the benign action of a Divine Being. The freedom of the will is a ' sensation' having no higher basis than our consciousness. But what higher certainty there can be for the ultimate facts of the human mind, or what greater evidence can be found for our personal identity, he does not tell us. This dreary, mechanical, and superficial philosophy of society is but Positivism applied to Sociology. It fell dead; and the book has disappeared.

Thus far our social peril would not seem to be from speculative Positivism, Pantheism, or Materialism. Nevertheless we are perhaps practically the most material of nations, and the influence of the supernatural over the society of England is becoming feebler year by year. The only safety for our country is in those old words, which may be a little heavy perhaps, ' but living and powerful' — God, the soul, and immortality. These are the salt of the earth. Whosoever shall reinvigorate and extend their influence over the minds and wills of our people will do the highest work of a Christian and of a citizen, and promote not only the stability of our social order, but the eternal welfare of mankind. We are in a century of revolutions. The principles of 1789 have pervaded Europe, and have laid the seed of revolution in every country. The year 1848 exhibited a revolution in every capital of Europe, hardly subdued in some, dominant in others. In the last eighteen years these local revolutions have become confluent, and the revolution now is not many but one. In the future the social peril of one country will be the social peril of all; and we, though the last to yield to

VOL. I. P the contagion, will, unless God in His mercy avert it, be involved in the movements which are visibly converging on the Continent to a vast and wide-spread conflict of Socialism against the Christian order of the world.

IX. 1KELAND.