The circular letter is throughout but a development of the ideas recapitulated in the passages of the text which I have cited—a development sometimes so prudent and so little precipitate as to assume the character of extreme circumspection, yet always faithful to the same thought. The writer indulges in no discussion purely theological, makes no pompous display of ecclesiastical authority, engages in no polemics with any class of dissent. When I affirm that we have here the History of Humanity, a correct appreciation of the ideas and behaviour of man in his different stages; Religion in general and Christianity in particular; considered as a grand fact—a fact universal and permanent, traceable everywhere and in all times, even amongst the heathens; a fact which survived all the divisions, the scientific struggles, and the civil wars which took place amongst Christians themselves, particularly amongst Roman Catholics and Protestants, all of whom are Christians, according to the writer, by the same title, if not in the same degree; a fact at once human and divine—human by its accordance with man's nature, divine by the direct and supernatural action of God, of God the creator, personal, free, whose presence and power reveal themselves, now by the general and permanent order of events, now by special miracles, judged by Him necessary for the accomplishment of His designs; the Christian faith thus associated with the whole life of the human race; the principle of the supernatural and miraculous, as well as the dogmas of Christianity, proclaimed aloud, but without controversy, without any appeal made to any external or exclusive dominion; homage rendered to the right of the "conscience simple and upright" at the same time as to the biblical traditions and to the authority of the Church: when I affirm that all this is here, am I not justified in also affirming that Christianity is here presented under an aspect the least likely to shock opponents, the most proper to rally the minds of the hesitating? Is it not in effect, on the part of a Prince of the Church of Rome, the acceptance and pursuit of that great work of harmony between the Christian Religion and Modern Society, which is manifesting itself in so many analogous manners and under banners so very diverse?
The pastor of Alais chooses a subject more limited, but is more vivid in thought and more incisive in manner than the Archbishop of Paris. It is not the general history of Christianity which he traces; it is its actual state, its religious bias and requirements in the nineteenth century which he observes and describes. His Report is no work of philosophy, but is penetrated and animated throughout by a real liberalism. He does not go in search of polemics: on the contrary, he recommends little use to be made of them; but when the occasion or the necessity is there, he does not evade it, but enters upon the arena unhesitatingly and without compromise.
"There are," he says, "exigencies upon which all men concur in insisting, and these depend upon the general state of men's minds in our epoch. Each age has its ideas and its sentiments, its prejudices and its doubts, a certain moral physiognomy which the preacher encounters more or less in our congregations. Our auditors, perhaps we are too prone to forget this, do not live isolated from their contemporaries; they are of their time, they inhale its intellectual and moral atmosphere, they follow its movement, they share in its shortcomings and in its aspirations. We may indeed affirm that now more than ever men are of their time, thanks to the rapidity with which ideas circulate and diffuse themselves. Although men read less in France than in many other countries, they read more than they did formerly. In France, for good or for evil, there are influences at work which have to be taken into account. One of our first duties, as preachers, is, then, to know our age, to be attentive to every symptom which can reveal to us its spirit and its tendencies. To neglect this duty is to expose ourselves to the risk of addressing, so to say, fictitious auditors, that is, men who neither have the ideas nor feel the sentiments, nor think of the objections which we attribute to them.
"In the midst of the discordant voices heard now-a-days, it is easy, alas! to distinguish one high above the others—it is that of incredulity; not as in the last century, marked by a raillery or levity, but by an earnestness and a high tone, occasionally even by a certain melancholy, and being for these very reasons more seductive. It is in favour of the progress of liberty, of the dignity of the soul, that is to say, of everything which is noblest and most sacred to man, that that voice addresses our generation, and invites it to bid for ever adieu to the faith of its infancy. These sad words, which pretend to toll the knell of Christianity, express but too faithfully the incredulity dominant now-a-days in the elevated regions of science and of thought, whence it is diffused over all the classes of society. It is impossible to deceive ourselves; we are now in presence of a fresh and a great conspiracy, not only against the faith of Christ, but against every religious faith. The leaders of incredulity proclaim aloud that the cycle of Religions is definitively closed, and that we have, once for all, to efface God from our thoughts and from our lives, just as if God were an obsolete hypothesis, with which modern science has nothing to do.
"This Atheism is so much the more dangerous and contagious in these days, that it does not appear in the shape of a mere revolt or falling off of the mind, but as a generous doctrine, having for objects the enfranchisement of nations, and their delivery from the yoke of priests and of tyrants, who, it is supposed, are combined in order to prey upon them. One of its principal adepts, Guillaume Marr, exclaimed, a few years ago: 'The faith in a personal and living God is the origin, the fundamental cause of the miserable state of society in which we exist. The idea of a God is the key-stone of the arch of the decayed and worm-eaten civilization. Away with it! The true road to liberty, equality, and happiness, is Atheism. There is no hope for the earth so long as man shall cling to heaven by even a thread. … Let nothing henceforth stand in the way of the spontaneous action of the human understanding. Let us teach man that he has no other God than himself, that he is himself the alpha and omega of all things, the being paramount, and the reality most real.'