Three words, "Rights of Man" inscribed upon the banners of the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his humanity. Three other words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, have served as a commentary upon the three former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.
Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the good also to perish.
It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself, the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state, where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles, Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life, constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant precept of the Christian religion. It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom. Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of earthly power, the appellation, brethren, never ceased to be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear themselves greeted as brethren.
The Christian faith has not only exercised a political influence in the state by changing the relations in which individuals stand to the political authorities, or in which the different classes stand to one another: it has also introduced a change in the constitution of the primary natural and imperishable association, called family. There, also, it has caused to disappear, at one time, the despotism of husband and father; at another, the degradation of wife, and the brutal or licentious independence of children. If we give ourselves the trouble to compare the Christian family as religion, laws, and morals have made it, with the family of antiquity which was most strongly constituted, namely, the Roman family,—we shall not need to examine long before we discern clearly on which side order really is, on which side the just appreciation of natural sentiments, the respect for right and liberty.
I have said that at the same time that Christianity proclaims and puts in practice all that is true and healthy in the popular maxims of our times, man's rights and liberty, his equality and fraternity, it condemns and rejects all that they contain of false and deplorable. There is one very striking fact in the history of the foundation of Christianity, a fact traceable not merely in the records of a few years, but through three centuries. Christianity began with resisting absolute power, and with laying claim to liberty of conscience. It owed its establishment to the same cause. In the Roman world no one any longer made even a show of resistance; every kind of oppression was in force, every claim to freedom abandoned: the Christians again raised high the banner of right, and of resistance in the name of right; but never did they raise their banner to encourage revolt or attacks upon authority; they undertook the defence of liberty against tyranny, and never made appeals to insurrection against authority. Martyrdom, not murder; such is the sum of the history of Christianity from the day of its birth in the manger of Jesus, to the day when it mounted the throne of Constantine. The reason of this is, that from the time when Christianity was yet in its cradle, and even afterwards when it was struggling to conquer its liberty, liberty was not an exclusive idea for Christians either in their doctrines or their lives: they recognised, respected, and proclaimed with equal solicitude both principles upon which the moral order of the world reposes, authority and liberty. They never, in any respect, sacrificed the one to the other, nor humiliated the one in the presence of the other; masters and disciples, all referred power to its true source, and did homage to its right at the same time that they maintained their own right against power. When Jesus spoke, the people were astonished at his doctrine, "for he taught as one having authority, and not as the Scribes." [Footnote 44]
[Footnote 44: Matthew vii. 29.]
Jesus declared formally to his disciples his authority over them, and the mission which it imposed upon them: "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain." [Footnote 45]
[Footnote 45: John xv. 16.]