M. Adolphe Monod seemed, even more than M. Vinet, to promise by natural bent of his character, and by the incidents of his life, to become the champion of an entire separation of Church and State. At the very commencement of his career, he suffered from a Government based upon their connection. Pastor at Lyons, in 1831, of the established Protestant Church, he was dismissed from these functions by the Consistory of that city, as too exacting in his orthodoxy, and as troubling by his exigencies the peace of his Church. He then became the founder and pastor of a small dissenting and independent Church at Lyons. The energy with which he expressed his convictions, and the excellence of his preaching, rapidly spread, and increased his renown for piety. Numerous Protestants manifested the desire to see him once more within the pale of the national Church. He made no objection; a Chair becoming vacant in the Faculty of Montauban, M. Adolphe Monod was nominated, and from 1836 to 1847 he both lectured and preached at Montauban with a commanding ability that made itself felt, not only among the majority of the students, but propagated its influences to a distance among the principal centers of French Protestantism. In 1847 he was summoned to Paris as the suffragan of another pastor, M. Juillerat. Nor did he scruple to accept this secondary and precarious situation. He had full confidence in the divine vocation, and was firmly resolved to proceed to any place where the faith of Christ might demand his services. He had, in the evangelical chair, even more success at Paris than at Lyons and Montauban. When, after the Revolution of 1848, a general assembly of the Reformed Churches of France assembled for the purposes of considering their institutions and discussing points of common interest, a grave question was raised, and became the subject of warm and lengthened debate: Should French Protestants proclaim their ancient Confession of Faith, that of Rochelle, or should they proclaim a confession of new articles; or lastly, should they remain passive and do nothing? some, and particularly their pastor, M. Frederic Monod, elder brother of M. Adolphe Monod, announced their determination to retire from the assembly and from the established Church, unless they adopted a Confession of Faith in accordance with the traditional principles of the Reformation. The inertness of the hesitating and timid assembly was equivalent to a refusal, and they did in effect retire. To the great surprise and great regret of his adversaries, M. Adolphe Monod, although favorable to the principles of the Confession of Faith, did not follow the example by retiring; he even succeeded his brother as titular pastor in the Church of Paris, and published to the world the motives of his conduct. [Footnote 28]
[Footnote 28: In his work entitled, Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie.]
His motives were good, such as a man of elevated character and energetic purpose might conceive and might avow. In spite of their importance, the questions which concern the organization of the Church and its eternal relations were, in the eyes of M. Adolphe Monod, only secondary considerations, subject in a certain measure to time and to circumstance. For him the question of faith was supreme; and he occupied himself infinitely more with the spiritual state of souls than with ecclesiastical government. To the serious thinker the Christian faith is quite different from any conception or conviction of the understanding; it is a general condition of the whole man; it is the very life of the soul; not merely its actual life, but the source and the guarantee of its future life. The faith in Christ Jesus, the Redeemer, the Saviour, makes the life of a Christian; and the life of a Christian is a preparation for an eternal salvation. With this faith penetrating to his very marrow, and with the intimate persuasion of its consequences, the duty of giving a voice to that faith, and of diffusing it, was the dominant idea, the permanent passion, of M. Adolphe Monod. He had not himself been always firmly settled in his religious convictions; he had been a prey to great moral perplexities, and to attacks of profound melancholy. When he had escaped from these—or rather, to use his own words, "when God had become really the master of his heart"—he had no other thought but that of bringing other souls to the same state, and of rousing them to a faith in Christ, with a view to their eternal salvation. The position which he regarded as of all the most appropriate for himself, was one in which he could most profitably forward this work. When in 1848 the question was thus put to him, and when he had been convinced both by his past observation of the Protestant Church of France during the last twenty years, and by his own experience of it, that the established Church offered to him in his Christian purpose the vastest field of exertion, and the best chance of success, he did not hesitate to remain in it. "I find in the situation," he said, "grave disorders, of which it is my duty to seek unceasingly the reform; but that situation has also its hopeful side. A long development of my ideas would be superfluous; let us confine ourselves to some striking facts. Try and reckon how many orthodox pastors our Church possessed when the reaction began in 1819, and then make a similar calculation for 1849. I do not mean to fix the precise numbers; but is it too much to say, that in the course of a single generation the number of orthodox pastors is ten, fifteen, twenty times perhaps as great? This applies to the clergy, of whom everywhere the immense influence is felt. Among their congregations it is less easy to follows things; but the attentive observer does not fail to mark similar indications. Behold our religious societies: are not the most popular among them those which hoisted most manfully the colors of orthodoxy? And if some are in a languishing condition, is it not because they offered in this respect fewest guarantees? Evidently the first condition of existence for our religious institutions of charity is sound doctrine. My readers, permit me to question you still more closely. Throw your eyes upon the eight or ten families best known to you, beginning with your own, and compare what they are now with what they were in 1819; contrast their occupations, tastes, sacrifices, and intercourse, the modes of education, the books read, friendships formed, and so on; and then declare, thankless ones, if God has allowed you to be without encouragement." [Footnote 29]
[Footnote 29: Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie, par M. Adolphe Monod, pp. 25-32. Paris, 1849.]
M. Adolphe Monod had good reason to draw attention to this general progress of Christianity; but there was another progress also deserving notice, that which he had himself made, and which he was making more and more every day, in the attainment of the true and distinguishing character of a Christian.
At the commencement of his career as a minister of the Gospel, in his different controversies, and especially in his controversy with the Consistory of Lyons, he had shown rudeness, impatience, and want of foresight; he had been too precipitate in enforcing his faith by arguments, and too much disposed to undervalue the obstacles in its way. Thanks to his genuine sincerity and the natural elevation of his character, time, experience, and success had given at once breadth and suppleness to his thought. Faith had generated modesty, and hope patience. Contrary to the ordinary bias of men, his liberalism had increased in the same measure as his strength. As an act of duty he made in 1848 an avowal of the state of his mind in this respect. "The age," he said, "reproaches us with 'exclusisme,' (exclusiveness,) a new word expressly invented to denote its favorite charge; for false ideas the age has only the resource of a barbarous phraseology. This 'exclusisme' is the sole thing which the age cannot tolerate in matters of doctrine: it is prepared, it says to itself, to take everything within its pale except the 'exclusives.' Thus they demand from us only one change in the profession of our faith; they call upon us to substitute for our usual prefatory formula, 'This is the truth,' the words, 'This is my opinion.' And if they, in claiming such qualification of language, limited their demand to things which, in spite of any relative importance, do not constitute the substance of the faith and of the life of a Christian, we should do what they require; perhaps I should rather say, we do it already, as brother should do to brother, and in the interest of truth itself. It is one of the distinctive features of the awakening of Christians in our epoch, that charitably sparing in the absolute dogmatism of which the sixteenth century was prodigal, they make dogmas of only a small number of fundamental doctrines. And even of these they strive to contract the circle, until having reached the vital forces, the very heart, so to say, of truth, they sum it up in one single name, Jesus Christ, and in one single word, grace. Whoever is of that faith, whatever name he bears elsewhere, and whatever place he occupies in the Universal Church—Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Moravian, Baptist, nay, Roman Catholic, or Greek Catholic, we receive that man as a brother in Christ Jesus; and not we only, but the whole contemporary Evangelical Church, with certain exceptions becoming every day rarer, and arising from a narrow or sectarian pietism. Hence the 'Evangelical Alliance,' formed in our own time of more than twenty Protestant denominations, the prelude only to another evangelical alliance which will exclude none who rely upon the sole merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour and Lord of all.
"Our 'exclusisme,' besides, has not for its objects individuals but doctrines. Absolute affirmation is legitimate when the object is to define the faith, which is the promise of salvation, for God has clearly revealed it in his word; but when the object is to mark the individuals who possess that saving faith, similar affirmation could not be used without temerity; for God has nowhere revealed to us either the internal state of any man, or the final lot reserved for him. We exclude no man, we judge no man, alive or dead; the judgment of the quick and of the dead belongs to God alone. Doubtless we estimate, according to our ability, the spiritual condition of a man by his works, as we do a tree by its fruits; Jesus himself invites us to do so. Doubtless, when we see a man living and dying in the works of the faith, we hope for him, and our hope may grow even to a firm assurance; and when, on the contrary, we see a man living and dying in the works of incredulity, we have a feeling of anxiety for him—a feeling as painful as it is mysterious. But, after all, neither in the first case nor in the second, and still less in the second than the first, are we authorized to pronounce any personal judgment; and but for the paradoxical turn of the expression, I would willingly adopt the language of the devout Bunyan: Three things would astonish me in heaven; first, not to see there certain persons whom I expect to see there; secondly, to see there those I do not expect to see there; and thirdly, which would surprise me most, to see myself there.'" [Footnote 30]
[Footnote 30: Sermon sur l'Exclusisme, ou l'unité de la foi, in the Recueil des Sermons de M. Adolphe Monod. 3me série, t. ii, pp. 386-390. Paris, 1860. The sermons of M. Adolphe Monod have been collected and published in four vols. 8vo. Paris, 1856-1860. He also wrote several small works, among others:
1. Lucile, ou la lecture de la Bible. 1841.
2. La Destitution d'Adolphe Monod, récit inédit, rédigé par luimême. 1864.
3. Récit des conférences qui ont eu lieu en 1834, entre quelques Catholiques Remains et M. Adolphe Monod. Paris, 1860.
4. Les adieux d'Adolphe Monod à ses amis et à l'église. Paris, 1856.]