Meditations and Moral Sketches

by François Guizot

I feel a profound respect for the Catholic Church. She has been during centuries the Christian Church of all Europe. She is the great Christian Church of France. I look upon her dignity, her liberty, her moral authority, as essential to the fate of entire Christianity; and did I believe that the Catholic church could not, without self-abjuration, accept in the State the principle of religious liberty, I should be silent; for above all things I detest hypocrisy and subtlety. But it is not so.

Let the Catholic Church maintain fully her fundamental principles, her permanent inspiration, her doctrinal infallibility, her unity. Let her by her laws and internal discipline interdict to her faithful followers all that may tend to the injury of these; it is her right as well as her faith. But let her at the same time fully admit, not of the separation of the Church and State, that clumsy expedient which lowers and weakens both under the pretext of freeing both, but of the separation of spiritual and temporal order, of the civil and religious state, and acknowledge the illegality of all forcible interference in spiritual order, albeit in the cause of truth. Let her thus accept religious liberty as a law, not of religious society, but of policy, as a right not of the Christian, but of the citizen. At once will the pretended incompatibility between modern society and the Catholic Church disappear. The problem of peace between civil and religious society will be solved.

The Catholic Church can pursue this course; for all that religiously constitutes it, all her spiritual order thus remains intact and independent: and if she so pursues it; if, while she firmly upholds her principles and rights as a religious society, she accepts loyally the principles of our political order and the religious liberty which forms a part of it; not only will she lay the foundation of peace between herself and civil society, but she will assure to herself great strength and a great future. Christianity has many conquests to make and to repeat. For the re-establishment of social order and the moral welfare of the soul, she must regain much ground. Nor is it known how rapidly obstacles and resistance would disappear before her, if the dread of her old intolerance were dispelled, and respect for religious liberty on the part of the Catholic Church herself considered as assured.

I would go still further, and submit to Christians another consideration.

There is amongst Christians of whatever church a common faith. They believe in a divine revelation contained in the gospels, and in Jesus Christ who came upon earth to save the world.

For Christians of whatever church there is now a common cause. They have to maintain Christian faith and law against impiety and anarchy.

This faith and this necessity, common to all Christians, are of infinitely greater moment than all the differences which separate them.

Do I say that they ought at all hazards to set aside those differences, and in the name of their common faith and common danger undergo fusion,—to use an expression of the day,—and form hereafter but one and the same church?