I see there manifold associations, enterprises supposing a long duration of existence, unremitting efforts for the moral development of men; for the bodily solace of their earthly condition; for the propagation and the defense of freedom of opinion in religious matters; for the support and diffusion of the faith itself: all these objects, at once so various and so analogous, are being laboriously worked out both by the independent Protestant Churches, and by the Protestant Church established from the State. M. Edmond de Pressensé and M. Eugène Bersier devote their talents and their zeal to the same forms of Christian belief as were advocated by M. Alexandre Vinet and M. Adolphe Monod. In spite of the free divergence of sentiment and the diversity of ecclesiastical government in French Protestantism, we may observe in its bosom a progress of Christian Faith, a progress in works of Christian Charity, a progress in Christian Science, and a progress in Christian Influence. I use the same terms employed by me in speaking of the contemporary Catholic Church of Rome, because I find before me similar facts. These facts do not announce the reconciliation of the two Churches—profound differences of opinion continue to separate them; but these facts are, in both Churches, signs of the Awakening of Christianity.
III. Awakening Of Christianity In France.
But the world has not changed since God at its creation delivered it up to the disputes of mankind; nor have the diversity and conflict of ideas and of passions ever ceased to be the condition of humanity. By the side of the movement of Christianity to which I refer, a movement in the contrary direction is manifesting itself, and is pursuing its course. Christianity at its Awakening is challenged to ruder combats. Philosophy refuses to its fundamental dogmas the marks and the rights of rational truth. An erudite criticism contests its historical evidence. The natural sciences proclaim that they do not require its aid to account for man and for the world. It is affirmed as a principle, and maintained in learned societies, that morality is entirely independent of religion. Man in his aspirations for liberty, that generous passion of the age, retains a profound resentment for the chains and the sufferings which, under pretext of Christianity, human conscience and human thought have so long been made to endure. The influence of these bitter reminiscences is manifesting itself in the different Christian Churches under various forms, and with different effects. Many liberals so dread the prospect of the Church of Rome obtaining power over civil society that they hardly accord to this Church the rights of common liberty; or, if they do so at all, they do it reluctantly and little by little.
Among the Protestants, some push the pretensions of liberty so far as to insist that in religious society a community of faith should count for nothing; that a man should be entitled to remain a member of a Church, and even to remain its minister, although he profess respecting the essential facts and dogmas of the Church the most contradictory opinions, and opinions the strangest to its traditions and its texts. With respect to Roman Catholics, the dominant question is that of liberty. Are the liberties of civil society to be accorded to the Church? Are those of the Church to be allowed to remain intact in the bosom of the State? In Protestantism, on the other hand, the complete liberty of religion in the midst of civil society, the right of every individual to avow his belief, and to solemnize his own forms of worship—these are all privileges already acquired, and contested as little by any orthodox believer as by any freethinker. The questions really here agitated are questions of faith and of discipline. Are a common faith and a uniform internal discipline essential to the Church? Here is the debate. But above all these special questions and these different situations of the various Christian Churches rise, for Romanist and Protestant alike, the general question and the common situation; it is Christianity itself which is engaged in the contest, and its awakening spirit confronts the antichristian movement.
Let us not delude ourselves as to the character, the force, or the danger of this antichristian movement. It is not merely a feverish excitability in men's minds, a simple revolutionary crisis in the religious order. No; we have here earnest convictions at work, and the prospect of a long war. Impatience of an ancient yoke, a spirit of reaction, a love of innovation, frivolous instincts not a few, as well as evil impulses, may claim a share—and a large share—in the attacks of which Christianity is in these days the object; but what gives to these attacks their most formidable character is a sentiment far more serious, one that has made heroes and martyrs, the love of truth at all risk and in despite of consequence, for the sake of truth and for its sake alone. The feeling that makes man thirst for truth is an honor to human nature. If he fancies that he has found that truth, man abandons himself with transport to the satisfaction of his cravings, and does not scruple to drink even to intoxication at this pure source. But here he is incurring a great danger: man is not merely an intelligence whose vocation during his brief transit through this world confines him only to study and science: he is an active, responsible being; a being engaged in a life full of labors, with a future life before him full of mystery; a laborer in a career having a particular interest for himself, and yet forming part of a general scheme, of the design of which he has but imperfect glimpses. Very incomplete and very imperfect is that man's state of intellectual action, who restricts himself to that which appears to him to be scientific truth, who does not, at the same time, submit his thought to all the tests to which he is himself subject, and who does not examine whether that thought be in harmony with the laws of his nature—whether it respect or transgress the limits imposed upon his means of knowledge. The danger of falling into error becomes greater in proportion as this incomplete and imperfect state of his mind is in itself a noble state, a state that satisfies noble impulses, and procures noble means of enjoyment. The most eminent among the actual adversaries of Christianity believe themselves the interpreters and the defenders of truth; some of philosophical truth; others of historical truth, others again of the truth of the facts and laws of the physical world. They are all proud of belonging to the department of pure science, and of making of scientific truth the sole object, the sole rule of their labors; but they are also all forgetful of some conditions—nay, the most indispensable ones—to which science is bound to conform; some tests—and the most legitimate ones—to which science is obliged to submit.
They claim, too, the honor of bearing the banner of a grand and noble cause, the cause of Liberty. That Christianity alone restored to man, as man, and for no other reason, his rights to liberty, is a fact that the comparative histories of the world, whether Christian or Pagan, place beyond all doubt; for confront these two histories, and name the nations among whom the idea of the dignity of man's liberty became a general idea, powerful in influence and fruitful in consequence! Another fact equally historic and certain is, that Christianity knew how to adapt itself, and did readily adapt itself, to the different states of society, and the different forms of government; that it set itself up and maintained its rank in republics as well as monarchies, under constitutional regimes as well as in despotisms, in the midst of democratical as well as aristocratical institutions; and, beyond doubt, it was not in free states that it displayed least vigor, or met with the smallest success. These two great facts are nowadays lost sight of. Christianity is accused of being hostile to Liberty and incompatible with the spirit of modern societies; and this is, indeed, the chief charge laid to its score. True it is, that the charge is not without deriving countenance from the history of Europe in modern times; worldly interests, selfish passions, events complex and obscure, in which moral order and social order have been compromised, have as it were suspended in certain countries the liberal action of Christianity, and enlisted momentarily the cause of Liberty under a banner not Christian. The error is profound, but transient; the traditional influences of ages will resume their empire, the grand events their course; Christ's religion and man's liberty will once more remember that each stands in need of the other, and that their alliance in the bosom of order is their natural and necessary condition. That they do misunderstand each other occasions the most serious crisis at this moment in modern society.