They are right; we have indeed here an evil greater, when we consider what is the mission of our epoch, than perhaps even those believe it to be who deplore it. The Emperor Napoleon said, in a phrase marked by all the clear and forcible colouring of his habitual language:—"I do not fear conspirators who rise at ten o'clock in the morning, and who cannot do without a fresh shirt." [Footnote 13]
[Footnote 13: "Je ne crains pas les conspirateurs qui se lèvent à dix heures du matin, et qui ont besoin de mettre une chemise blanche.">[
There is no question of conspirators here, and for the soul to be vigorous it is not essential that the care of the person should be neglected. What concerns those who would be free, whether individuals or nations, is that they should not have their attention essentially absorbed by considerations affecting merely their material prosperity, or their petty personal comforts; they have especially to guard themselves against selfishness and Epicureanism. Whether his tastes be refined or gross, the Epicurean does not readily resign himself to make either effort or sacrifice; but he is not difficult to content if he is permitted to enjoy his pleasures and his repose. Selfishness, even where it is sober and gentle, is a cold and sterile passion, it owes its empire to its success in enervating and lowering a man's nature. Liberty calls for a character of more strength, higher aspirations, greater power of resistance; a state of soul offering freer action to moral sympathy and disinterested motives. It is precisely here that Christianity can supply modern society with that of which it stands in need. Christianity teaches all men, the great and the small, the rich and the poor, not to devote all their lives to material things; she summons them to more elevated regions, and whilst she inspires them with a purer ambition, she opens to them a fairer hope even of happiness. The Christian, whether his station be powerful or humble, and his aspirations ambitious or modest, can never find an exclusive object of attention, or an exclusive motive to action, even in that principle of interest which politicians, using the word in its best sense, vainly imagine to be a panacea. Man, whether towards his fellow-creatures, or on his own account, has another object to pursue, other laws to accomplish, other sentiments to display and to satisfy: he can neither be an Epicurean nor an Egotist.
This is the first and the greatest of the services which Christianity can and does render in our days to every society which aspires to Liberty. I proceed to mention a second service.
There is no liberty without a large measure of license. They are dreamers who hope to enjoy the benefits of the one without incurring the risk, and undergoing the inconveniences, of the other. They, too, are dreamers who believe that license will ever be effectually repressed by penalties, courts of justice, or measures of Police. Two things are certain; the one is, that it is idle to attempt to repress license completely in a free country; the other, that the moral and preventive forces of society itself are alone to be relied upon, both by governments and nations, to enable them to support that license which they cannot suppress. Christianity is the most efficacious, the most popular, and the most approved of these forces. It is efficacious against license for two reasons and in two ways. In principle, Christianity maintains to Authority its right and its rank intact; without humbling it before Liberty, Christianity yet recognises the rights of Liberty, and demands that these should be admitted; in fact Christianity inspires men with a sentiment, with which authority cannot dispense, respect. The absence of respect is the most serious danger to which authority is exposed; authority suffers much more from insult than from attack; it is precisely to the task of systematically insulting and debasing authority, that its most ardent opponents, in our days, address themselves with most passion and with most art. There exist licentious, turbulent, and insolent persons in Christian societies, just as such exist in other societies; but Christian principles and Christian habits make and maintain friends to Order in the great mass of the people as well as in the higher classes, friends to order, who respect order both in law and in morals, men whom licentious and insulting; conduct shock as much as they terrify, and who, equally free, appeal in their own favour to the maxims and the arms of Liberty. History supplies us on this subject with conclusive examples. The nations of Christendom are the only nations to which license has not brought as a final consequence anarchy and despotism,—the only nations which, although they have on different occasions and by salutary reactions experienced the excesses both of power and of liberty, have not succumbed under them morally and politically. Neither the states of Pagan Antiquity nor those of the East, whether Bouddhist or Mussulman, have stood such trials; these have had their days of healthy vigour and even of glory; but when the evils which license or tyranny generated have once come upon them, they have fallen irretrievably, and all their subsequent history has merely been that of a decline more or less rapid, more or less stormy, more or less apathetic.
It is the honour of the Christian Religion that it has within it that which can cure states of their maladies, as well as individuals of their errors; and that, by the belief which it generates, and the sentiments which it inspires, it has already more than once furnished, sometimes to the friends of Order, and sometimes to the friends of Liberty, a refuge in their reverses, as well as strength to recover lost ground.
It would be as imprudent as ungrateful in these days for the friends of Liberty to ignore this grand fact and its salutary admonishment. They are called to a work much more difficult than any that they have hitherto had to accomplish: their task is no longer merely to search after guarantees for Liberty against the encroachments of pre-existent Power, or the accidental and transient ebullition of License. They have to reconcile the normal and constitutional dominion of Democracy with Liberty, and with the regular action and permanence of Liberty. Until modern times, political liberty, wherever it has existed, has been the result of the simultaneous presence and of the conflict of different forces of society, no one of them strong enough to rule alone, but each too weak to resist efficaciously the attack of the others; at one time the Crown, at another the Aristocracy, at another the Church, each previously powerful and independent, have lived side by side with Democracy when Democracy has had limits and restrictions imposed upon its power and success; but at the present day, there are amongst us no distinct surviving influences which are powerful enough to play a similar part in society and in the government. The Crown, the Aristocracy, and the Church are no longer anything but frail wrecks of the past, or instruments created by the Democracy, and indebted to it for a borrowed force. Is this to be henceforth the permanent condition of human society, or is it only a phase, more or less transitory, of a series of ages and of revolutions, which fresh ages and fresh revolutions will hereafter profoundly modify? Futurity must decide. In any case, it is only under the exclusive dominion of a single force, Democracy, that in these days free institutions can be founded.
That every dominant force when single is tempted to commit abuses and to become tyrannical, is a truth so much in accordance with the lessons of experience and with the conclusions of reason, that no pains need be taken to insist upon it. Not to speak of the dangerous acclivity upon which Democracy, in common with all other forces, is placed, it has peculiar characteristics which are not of a nature to set the friends of Liberty at their ease. Democracy derives its origin and power from the right of every human will, and from the majority of human wills. Truth and error press so very closely upon each other in this system, that Liberty is placed in a position of great peril. Man's volition is entitled to every respect; but it is not all its law to itself, nor is it in itself essentially a law at all: it is bound to another law, which does not emanate from itself, and which comes to it from a higher source than man, and which it is as unable to abrogate as it was to create. The law paramount is the moral law,—the law laid down by God, to which all wills of men, whatever their number, are bound to submit. Democracy, essentially busied with the wills of men, is always inclined to attribute to them the character and the rights of divine law. Man occupies so much space in this form of government, and has so elevated a position there, that he easily forgets God—easily takes himself for God. The result is a sort of political polytheism, which, unless it appeals to a gross, material arbitrament, and to the majority of human wills, is incapable of arriving at that unity of law and of action, with which no society or government can dispense. I do not say that the individual man, and that numbers of men, are the only principles, but I do say, that they are principles characteristic of Democracy; it is against the absolute dominion of these two principles that Democracy has, in the interest of its own honour and of its own safety, to be incessantly admonished and defended. A royal sage enjoined that he should be saluted every morning with the words, "Remember thou art man." This sublime and prudent admonition is no less needful for Democracy than for Royalty, and it is precisely the salutary service which is rendered to it by Christianity. In Christianity there is a light, a voice, a law, a history, which does not come from man, but which, without offending his dignity, sets him in his proper place. No belief, no institution, exalts man's dignity so highly, and at the same time so effectually represses his arrogance. The more democratic a society is, the more it is important that this double effect shall take place within it. Christianity alone has this virtue.