To a movement so earnest and so general, although propagated by a small number of persons in the heart of a population itself forming but a small minority in the nation at large, obstacles would inevitably occur. They were encountered on all hands and of all kinds, religious and political—from the administration, from popular prejudices, from the distrust of the Government, from the hostility of the Roman Catholic clergy, from differences of opinion on theological points among Protestants themselves, from the amour propre of individuals, and the perplexed or timorous ideas of subalterns in authority. The activity of the Protestant societies created uneasiness in bishops and priests, who strove not merely to counteract their influence, but to interfere with their liberty of action. Mayors of towns, judges of the peace, sometimes too, magistrates and administrators of more elevated rank, lent their aid to these exceptionable proceedings. Hence arose suspicions, complaints, and struggles which retarded the new-born impulse of awakening Christianity. But the earnest perseverance of its patrons, the general wisdom of the supreme Government, and the authority, growing more and more each day, of the principles of justice and of liberty, gradually surmounted all these obstacles. It was the Restoration that recognized the chief Protestant societies and gave them the sanction of the law. Under the Government of 1830 they used their rights with more confidence and fewer hinderances. The equitable intentions of King Louis Philippe and of his counselors upon religious matters could not be doubtful, whatever their caution not to cause uneasiness or wound the susceptibilities of the Roman Catholics. The Protestants now believed it to be no longer necessary to look to foreign support. Formed at Paris in 1833, the Evangelical Society of France experienced a momentary impulse of national jealousy, the result of which was some coldness in its relations with the Continental Society of London; but as soon as the latter perceived that its direct interference was rather an embarrassment than a necessity to the Christian reaction in France, it withdrew its agency without withholding its sympathy, and handed over to the Evangelical Society of France all the "stations" and religious charities which had up to that time been founded by its exertions.
The awakening of Christianity among the Protestants of France had now produced such results that it mattered little who the patrons of the movement might be; it had assumed its true character, and was drawing its strength from the fountain of truth. In times of religious incredulity and of religious indifference, and even in the transitional times which immediately ensue, it is the error of many, and even of men who respect and support religion, to consider it in the light of a great political institution—a salutary system of moral police, however necessary to society, indebted for its merits and its prerogatives rather to its practical utility than to its intrinsic truth. Grave error, misconceiving both the nature and the origin of religion, and calculated to deprive it both of its empire and its dignity! Utility men hold as of great account, but it is only truth that commands unconditional surrender. Utility enjoins prudence and forbearance; truth alone inspires feelings of confidingness and devotion. A religion having no other guarantee for its influence and its endurance than its social utility would be very near its ruin. Men have need of, nay, they thirst for truth in their relations with God, even more than in their relations with one another; the spontaneous prayer, adoration, obedience, suppose faith. It was in the very name of the verity of the Christian religion, of that verity manifested in its history by the word and even by the presence of God, that the awakening of Christians was accomplished among us. The laborers in this great work felt the faith of Christianity, and they diffused it; had they spoken only of the social utility of Christianity, they would never have made the conquest of a single human soul.
At first sight one is tempted to attribute this success to energy of faith on the part of these laborers in the cause, to the active and devoted perseverance of their zeal. Again a mistake! Not that human merit was without its share in the results; but even where the faith was thus propagated, the share that that faith itself had in the result was infinitely greater, from its own proper and inherent virtue, than any share of men. Incredulity and indifferentism may diffuse themselves and pretend to dominate; they leave unsolved the problems that lie in the depth of man's soul: they do not rid him of his perplexities, of instinct or of reflection, as to the world's creation and man's creation, the origin of good and evil, providence and fate, human liberty and human responsibility, man's immortality and his future state. Instead of the denials and the doubts that had been thrown over these unescapable questions, those who applied themselves fully to rouse awakened Christianity, recalled the human soul to the memory of positive solutions of these questions; solutions in accordance with the traditions of their native land, in accordance with their habits as members of families, and in harmony with the recollections of early childhood; solutions often contested, never refuted; always recurring in the lapse of ages, and century after century! It was from the intrinsic and permanent value of the doctrines which they were preaching, and not from themselves, that the laborers in the work derived their force and their credit.
They had another principle of force as well; a force born and developed in the bosom of the Christian religion, and in that alone; they had the passionate desire to save human souls. Men are not, they never have been, struck as they ought to have been struck with the beauty of this passion, or with its novelty in the moral history of the world, or with the part that it has played among Christian nations. Before the era of Christianity, in times of Asiatic and European antiquity, pagans and philosophers busied themselves about the destiny of men after the close of their earthly life, and with curiosity, too, did they sound the obscurity; but the ardent solicitude for the eternal welfare of human souls, the never-wearying labor to prepare human souls for eternity—to set them even during this existence in intimate relations with God, and to prepare them to undergo God's judgments;—we have in all this a fact essentially Christian, one of the sublimest characteristics of Christianity, and one of the most striking marks of its divine origin. God constantly in relation with mankind and with every man, God present during the actual life of every man, and God the arbiter of his future destiny; the immortality of each human soul, and the connection between his actual life and his future destiny; the immense value of each human soul in the eyes of God, and the immense import to the soul of the future that awaits it: these are the convictions and the affirmations all implied in the one passion alluded to, the passion for the salvation of men's souls, which was the whole life of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which passed by his example and by his precepts into the life of his primitive disciples, and which, amid the diversities of age, people, manners, opinions, has remained the characteristic feature and the inspiring breath of the genius of Christianity; breath which animated the men who in our days labored, and with success, to revive Christian faith among the Protestants of France! Their zeal was employed in a very circumscribed sphere; beyond it their names were unknown, and unknown they have remained. What spectators, what readers, what public knew at that time, or know even at this moment, what manner of men they were or what their deeds—those men who called themselves Neff, Bost, Pyt, Gonthier, Audebez, Cook, Wilks, Haldane? But who, I would ask, in the time of Tacitus and of Pliny, knew what manner of men they were, and what the deeds of Peter, Paul, John, Matthew, Philip—the unknown disciples of the Master, unknown himself, who had overcome the world? Notoriety is not essential to influence; and in the sphere of the soul, as in the order of nature, fountains are not the less abundant because their springs are hidden in obscurity. The Christian missionaries of our time did not trouble themselves to lessen that obscurity. To literary celebrity they had no pretension, nor did they seek the triumph of any political idea, of any specific system of ecclesiastical organization, of any favorite plan in which their personal vanity was interested: the salvation of human souls was their only passion, and their only object. They looked upon themselves as humble servants commissioned to remind men of promises which they had forgotten—of promises of salvation by faith in Jesus. "The stir of the reaction," one of themselves has said, "bore impressed upon it the character of youth, or even of childhood. The humblest pastor on his circuit became a missionary; his transit was regarded almost like that of a meteor. On the instant an assembly was convoked, it numbered twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred persons, collected to listen joyfully, as if it were a great novelty or miracle, to that Gospel which we know by heart;—alas! which we know by heart far more than we have it in the heart!" [Footnote 24]
[Footnote 24: Mémoires pouvant servir à l'histoire du réveil religieux des églises protestantes de la Suisse et de la France, par A. Bost, (1854,) t. 1, p. 240.]
Who could mistake, on hearing such sentiments and such language, the really Christian character of the reaction?
Never-ending weakness of man's nature, and inevitable imperfection of man's work, even when man is walking in the ways of God! In the midst of awakening Christianity, and of this fervent return to the faith of the Gospel, reappeared some of the ancient pretensions of theology, and among others the pretension to penetrate the decrees of God and to define the terms of man's salvation.