Such are the consequences of scepticism for the leaders of a people. What will those consequences be for the people themselves? The spirit of indifference paralyzes the sources of generous sentiments, and ends in the same results as the spirit of cowardice. And do you not know the part which cowardice has played in history? If I may venture to call up here the most mournful recollections of modern times, do you not know that during the Reign of Terror, two or three hundred scoundrels instituted public massacres in the Capital of France, in the midst of a population shuddering with fright, but who let things go? Now the characteristic of indifference is the letting things go. If fanaticism has something to do with persecution, indifference has a great deal to do with it. The crimes which minds paralyzed by doubt allow to be perpetrated have besides a sadder character than those which are perpetrated by passions, which, wild and erring though they be, have a certain nobleness in their origin. If I must be bound to the stake, I had rather burn with the blind assent of a fanatical crowd, than in the presence of an indifferent populace who came to look on. For just as sceptics find all doctrines equally good, so they find all spectacles equally instructive and curious.[35]
I have felt it necessary to insist on these considerations. Direct attacks upon religious truth are perhaps less dangerous than the efforts by which modern infidelity endeavors to estrange us from God, by persuading us that doubt is the guarantee of liberty, and that belief rivets the chains of bondage. Many consciences are disturbed by these affirmations. It concerns us therefore to know that God is the great Liberator of souls, and that forgetfulness of God is the road to slavery. The faith which seeks to propagate itself by force inflicts upon itself the harshest of contradictions. The spirit of doubt, in order to become the spirit of violence, has only to transform itself according to the laws of its proper nature.
And now to sum up. One of the noblest spectacles that earth can show, is that of a community animated with a true and profound faith, in which each man, using his best efforts to communicate his convictions to his brethren, respects the while that which belongs to God in the inviolable asylum of the conscience of others. But woe to the society formed by sophists, in which opinion, benumbed by doubt and indifference, arouses itself only to devote to hatred or to contempt every firm and noble conviction!
To unsettle the idea of God, is to dry up its source the stream of the veritable progress of modern society; it is to attack the foundations of liberty, justice, and love. The material conquests of civilization would serve thenceforward only to hasten the decomposition of the social body. The pure idea of God is the true cause of the great progress of the modern era; religion, in its generality, is, as Plutarch has told us, the necessary condition to the very existence of society. This is what remains for us to prove.
"How sacred is the society of citizens," said Cicero, "when the immortal gods are interposed between them as judges and as witnesses."[36] Let us raise still higher this lofty thought, and say: "How sacred is human society, when, beneath the eye of the common Father, the inequalities of life are accepted with patience and softened by love; when the poor and the rich, as they meet together, remember that the Lord is the Maker of them both; when a hope of immortality alleviates present evils, and when the consciousness of a common dignity reduces to their true value the passing differences of life!" Take away from human society God as mediator, and the hopes founded in God as a source of consolation, and what would you have remaining? The struggle of the poor against the rich, the envy of the ignorant directed against the man who has knowledge, the dullard's low jealousy of superior intelligence, hatred of all superiority, and, by an almost inevitable reaction, the obstinate defence of all abuses,—in one word, war—war admitting neither of remedy nor truce. Such is the most apparent danger which now threatens society.
When I consider these facts with attention, I am astonished every day that society subsists at all, that the burning lava of unruly passions does not oftener make large fissures in the social soil, and overflow in devastating torrents, bearing away at once palace and cottage, field and workshop. This standing danger is drawing anxious attention, and we hear the old adage repeated: "There must be a religion for the people." There are men who wish to give the people a religion which they themselves do not possess, acting like a man who, at once poor and ostentatious, should give alms with counterfeit money. And what result do they attain? We must have a religion for the people, say the politicians, that they may secure the ends they have in view, and conduct at their own pleasure the herds at their disposal. We must have a religion for the people, say the rich, in order to keep peaceably their property and their incomes. We must have a religion for the people, say the savants, in order to remain quiet in their studies, or in their academic chairs. What are they doing—these men without God, who wish to preserve a faith for the use of the people? These savants,—they say, and print it, that religion is an error necessary for the multitudes who are incapable of rising to philosophy. Where is it that they say it, and print it? Is it in drawing-rooms with closed doors? Is it within the walls of Universities, or in scientific publications which are out of the reach of the masses? No. They say it in political journals, in reviews read by all the world; they print it at full in books which are sold by thousands of copies. Their words are spreading like a deleterious miasma through all classes of society. Thoughtless men! (I am unwilling to suppose a cool calculation on their part of money or of fame which should oblige me to say—heartless men), thoughtless men! they do not see the inevitable consequences of their own proceeding. The people hear and understand. The intellectual barriers between the different classes of society are gradually becoming lower: this is one of the clearest of the ways of Providence in our time. Do you believe that the people will long consent to hear it said that they only live on errors, but that those errors are necessary for them? Do you not see that they are about to rise, and answer, in the sentiment of their own dignity, that they will no longer be deceived, and that they intend to deliver themselves also from superstition? Then, all restraining barriers removed, passions will have free course; and believe me, the rising floods will not respect those quiet haunts of study in which they will have had one of their springs. The proof of this has been seen before. Some men of the last century wished to destroy religion amongst decent folk, but not for the rabble: they are Voltaire's words, who had too much good sense to be an atheist, but whose pale deism is sometimes scarcely distinguishable from the negation of God. "Your Majesty," thus he wrote to his friend the King of Prussia, in January, 1757, "will render an eternal service to the human race, by destroying that infamous superstition, I do not say amongst the rabble, which is not worthy to be enlightened, and to which all yokes are suitable, but amongst honest people." A religion was necessary for the people; but Voltaire and the King of Prussia, the German barons, the French marquises, and the ladies who received their homage, could do without it.
Voltaire died before eating of the fruit of his works; and Alfred de Musset could only address to him his vengeful apostrophe at his tomb:
Sleep'st thou content, and does thy hideous smile
Still flit, Voltaire, above thy fleshless bones?[37]
Voltaire was dead; but many of his friends and disciples were able to meditate, in the prisons of the Terror and as they mounted the steps of the scaffold, on the nature of the terrible game which they had played—and lost.