Fifteen years have passed, and it subsists. The State, the Church, private institutions founded by laymen or by ecclesiastics, have competed actively during all that period. Religious congregations, Lazarists, Dominicans, Oratorians, Jesuits, have in this struggle displayed all the enthusiasm of faith, all the ardor of reciprocal rivalry. The Jesuits, since the year 1850, have opened twenty colleges for secondary instruction, and have founded at Paris, for courses of study preparatory to the special schools, an establishment whose successes have attracted the attention of the government and of the public; for it sends every year to the Military Schools, the Polytechnic, Naval, or Central, an extraordinary number of successful candidates, who have passed with honor, although the competition has been extensive and the examinations are severe. A great school, founded by the Archbishop of Paris for the higher branches of ecclesiastical study in the ancient house of the Carmelites, has formed priests who, in the public examinations and theses, have proved themselves capable of taking rank by the side of the best pupils of the lay establishment of the "École Normale Supérieure." Everywhere the University has encountered numerous and ardent rivals; and it has been at the same time in its own interior a prey to painful trials. Under the pretext of an interest for studies of a scientific and practical nature, classical and philosophical studies have been displaced and depreciated. At the very moment that the University was losing its privileges beyond, it saw its principles and its organization shaken inside its walls.
Faithful to her convictions and traditions, even while accepting the experiments and the struggles that were forced upon her, the University has surmounted perils from within and rivalries from without; on the one side, little by little, it has returned to its system of a large and solid teaching of the classics; on the other, the level of the studies in its principal establishments has been raised, and the number of its pupils has been ever on the increase. The Lycées counted (in 1850) 19,300; they have now (1865) more than 30,000 pupils. The State has thrown open the career of instruction to the Church, and has at the same time redoubled its own solicitude and success. Liberty of instruction has calmed both the anxieties of the religious party that made them demand it, and those anxieties of the laity which that liberty had inspired. It has given peace to the State and to the Church, at the same time that it has excited their emulation and stimulated their progress.
An incident which made some noise at the time has, under the new regime, shown the force of the Liberal spirit, and proved that, when needed, it would have unforeseen defenders. Under the influence of a blind zeal, a pious ecclesiastic, the Abbé Graume, demanded by what right the literature of pagan antiquity occupied the place it did in public teaching; denounced it as "the devouring canker of modern societies;" and insisted that the Christian classics should replace in our schools the Greek and Latin classics. What was this but to reject one of the great cradles of modern civilization; to condemn the renaissance of literature in the fifteenth century, as well as the religious reform in the sixteenth century; and to close to the minds of rising generations of Christians the general history of the world! This attack upon the system of public instruction which had been in vigor during the last four centuries in all the States of Christendom, met from a part of the Romanists with a sympathetic reception: bishops, eminent for learning, thanked its author; M. Veuillot constituted himself his champion. But in the Catholic Church itself, as well as in the University, the fire of the defense silenced that of the attack; ecclesiastics, as eminent by their piety as by their science, the Bishop of Orleans at their head, proclaimed aloud their sympathy for the comprehensive scheme and the liberal studies which embrace all the fair works of man's intelligence. The Jesuits on this occasion set an example of broad views and common sense; they introduced no modification into the programmes of their colleges; the Pères Cahoux and Daniel demonstrated their propriety, nay, their necessity; and the literature of the Greeks and of the Romans has preserved in the education of Christians the place which it gained in their history by the right of genius and by the splendor of its productions.
Scarcely had this controversy on a literary and moral subject been settled, when questions of far more gravity were raised, and more profoundly agitated Christian society. Christians found themselves attacked simultaneously upon scientific and upon political grounds. Men denied to the Christian Faith its reasonableness and its vital sources—to the Church of Rome its traditional and historical régime, and the temporal power of its chief.
Two things strike me in this double attack—on the one hand its timidity, yet gravity; on the other, the powerful resistance which it encounters. Nothing is less novel than a denial of the supernatural character of Christianity, and of its primitive facts, of its miracles, of the divinity of its founder. The eighteenth century carried on this war in a far more violent, rude, and iniquitous spirit than the nineteenth century has done. M. Renan, in the attempt to dethrone Jesus, has at least treated him with admiration and respect; not from calculation, I feel assured, but from the natural tone of his mind. In our time, men have instincts and tastes, at once inconsequent and prudent; at the very time when they engage in a deadly struggle they affect to carry thither the cool impartiality of spectators; they flatter themselves that they unite the acumen of the critic to the feeling of the poet. The skeptic shows no disinclination to play the mystic; and the erudite man strives to cover with the vail of fancy the ruin that he makes. Hume was a more stubborn skeptic, and Voltaire an enemy more daring. If I pass from philosophy to politics, and from books to events, I observe the war undergoing a similar transformation. What a contrast between the attacks of the Directory and the Emperor Napoleon the First upon the Papacy, and the circumspect and hesitating treatment of which, in spite of the blows that it receives, the Papacy is in these days the object? Are we to conclude that the general course of events has changed, and that the flood, which for a century whirled Europe along, is arrested and subsiding? Certainly not: there are abundant facts to prove the contrary. Whether regarded as a religious or a political question, whether considered as affecting opinions or interests, the contest between authority and liberty, between faith and incredulity, is carried on more earnestly and more systematically now than ever: principles on each side are pushed to their extreme consequences, and contrasted in a manner never before the case. But experience imposes a restraint upon men even where it does not change them. In the years of internal order which the Empire insured, and in the years of liberty to which the constitutional Monarchy gave the sanction of its laws, the different parties learned to appreciate the obstacles with which they had to contend, and to measure their own strength and that of their opponents: they now know that everything is not possible to them; and necessity has inculcated a certain amount of equity and good sense. The experience of the past, as well as that of each day, convinces them of their inability to insure a complete success to their systems and their designs. Its adversaries thought Christianity expiring; but they soon saw that it was still full of life: while they express their surprise and persevere in their warfare, they admit its practical influence, render homage to its moral value, and strive, although they contest its rights, to appropriate to themselves the inheritance of its blessings. The wind has often blown from the right quarter for Catholic Absolutists during this century; they have enjoyed the favor of more than one master, and more than once they have requited him by devoted services. More than once, also, they have obtained from the supreme head of their Church official declarations, which have been used by them against the Catholic Liberals. The Absolutists, nevertheless, have not succeeded in changing the tendency of Christian societies; they have arrested the course neither of ideas nor events; their defeats have cost them dearer than their victories were worth; and in spite of the obstinate infatuation of parties, I doubt whether they themselves believe in the progress of their cause. And how often has the Papacy itself in our days been insulted and despoiled? Has it not even been vanquished and expelled? Still, in spite of what it has suffered, sometimes from revolutions, sometimes from arbitrary power, it has outlived not only the triumphs of its enemies, but its own impolitic measures: and at this day, assailed by freethinkers in spirituals, by ambitious neighbors in temporals, menaced with abandonment even by its protectors, it is more energetically defended and efficaciously supported than it ever was at the commencement of this century in its reverses. Pius VII. never received such pecuniary contributions as have been forwarded to Pius IX. in his necessities; and if the French bishops were now summoned to a council, their conduct would, beyond doubt, be more dignified and more influential than was that of their predecessors in 1811.
Why such changes in a situation itself in effect unchanged? Whence these hesitating measures, this embarrassed attitude of the adversaries of the Christian faith and of the Christian Church? What cause at the same time gives such boldness and even success to their defenders?
Each age has its own peculiar and characteristic mission, and one from which it cannot escape; every human being has his share in it, whether he knows it or not. As a consequence of the truths and the errors, of the good and evil, of the triumphs and reverses of the preceding centuries, the nineteenth century has before it a special task, which will employ all its energies, and which will also, I hope, constitute its glory. It has both in the State and in the Church found the two supreme forces that preside over man's life, and over that of society, Authority and Liberty, in violent conflict, in turn intoxicated with victory, or vanquished, ruined. It is the mission of the nineteenth century to make them live together, and live in peace; or at least in an antagonism entailing upon neither any mortal danger. The recognition of, and respect for, authority; the acceptance and guarantee of freedom; these are the imperative necessities which our age is called upon to feel and to satisfy, both in State and Church. Nor does this imply, as is often pretended, any inconsistency or any compromise of principle or any policy of expedients; it is not by inconsistency that great questions are settled, it is not by expedients that we content the cravings of men's souls, or calm the anxieties of human society; for mankind yields genuine submission and feels real confidence only where it believes in the existence of truth and justice. The recognition, veneration, and guarantee of the different rights which co-exist naturally and necessarily in human societies—of the rights, both of individuals and of the State—of the rights of religious society and of civil society—of the rights of little local societies as well as of the grand general society—of the rights of conscience as well as of tradition—of the rights of the future as well as of those of the past—these are the dominant principles of which the nineteenth century has to insure the triumph. Triumphs assured, if Liberals and Christians are both of them determined to accomplish it! Notwithstanding all the violent emotions of party, and of all our differences on intellectual and social subjects, the consciousness of this situation is ever before our minds; and whether we admit it or not, the alliance of the liberal movement with the movement of awakened Christianity, is the grand measure and the grand hope of the day.
A Catholic priest, now a bishop, inquiring the origin of the actual disputes of religion, and their probable issue, expresses himself as follows:—"Free institutions, freedom of conscience, political liberty, civil liberty, individual liberty, liberty of families, of education, and of opinions, equality before the laws, the equal division of imposts and of public charges, these are all points upon which we make no difficulty; we accept them frankly; we appeal to them on solemn occasions of public discussion; we accept, we invoke the principles and the liberties proclaimed in 1789; even those who combat those principles and those liberties admit that liberty of religion and free education have become acknowledged, self-evident truths (des verités de bon sens)." [Footnote 13]