But to leave England and Mr. Lecky, and to return once more to France. I turn to the pages of a rationalistic philosopher more profound, and more profoundly troubled, too, in his sentiments than Mr. Lecky. I find there, in an essay of M. Edmond Scherer, entitled "The Crisis of Protestantism," [Footnote 43] the following passage:
[Footnote 43: Mélanges d'histoire religieuse. Pp. 250-254. 1864.]
"That which is really imperiled is not so much Protestantism; it is Christianity, it is very religion. As for natural religion, that exists only in books. Religions which have vital force and influence are positive religions; that is, religions which have a Church, and particular rites, and dogmas. What are these dogmas? Taken in their intimate meaning, they are the solutions of the great problems which have ever disquieted the mind of man—the origin of the world, and of evil; the expiation; the future of humanity. The doctrines of religion are a sort of revealed metaphysics.
"Considered in its form, dogma is the supernatural—not merely because religions were born at an epoch when the imagination was greedy of miracles, and when the imagination, in her näiveté, associated herself with everything; but also because, as may be readily understood, it is impossible for a positive religion to have any other origin than a revelation; it is necessarily a history of the intervention of God in the destinies of man, the account of acts by which God created and saved the world—it is that or it is nothing. We see then at once that in religion everything is not religious. There is in every religion a multitude of elements, historical, physical, and metaphysical, as to which its dogmas may come into conflict with science. Nevertheless, it is not of this antagonism that I would here speak. The religious sentiment has also its critical action; it also may enter into a struggle with religion.
"As long as the authority of the priest or of the book preserves its prestige, the believer receives his religion ready made for him, without himself making distinctions; but as soon as that authority is shaken, a man, if he do not entirely reject his first belief, will at least no longer accept it without reservations. He only retains so much of it as enlightens or touches him, so much as commends itself to his understanding or to his heart; so much, in a word, as gives a satisfaction to his religious requirements.
"Thus it is that religious sentiment becomes the measure of religious truth. It receives all in religion that addresses itself to the soul, all that nourishes and fortifies the soul, all that raises the soul to the infinite and the ideal, all that unites the soul to God. Religious sentiment appropriates it all, but it appropriates nothing more. Let but a thing become indifferent, and it feels it as an importunity, and looks upon it in the light of an element strange, useless, arbitrary. It rejects, for this reason, doctrines purely speculative as well as facts purely marvelous. Man requires his religion to be entirely religious; that is to say, to be in all respects in direct relation with piety, and, so to speak, to be vertical to his conscience. The more his faith purifies itself, the more a man eliminates from his religion dogmas which, having no root either in the divine nature or man's nature, appear on that very account to have no ground to exist at all.
"At first sight this gradual emancipation of faith and this corresponding progress of religion in the ways of Spiritualism, seem a natural process by means of which religious opinion and the human mind contrive to maintain themselves in a state of constant equilibrium. We imagine all difficulties removed, and fancy that we catch a glimpse of the religious future of humanity in a sort of Christian Rationalism, a rational Christianity not excluding fervor of devotion, but leaving all its liberty to man's thought.