"I demand nothing better as far as I am concerned; but I cannot refrain from asking, not without anxiety, whether Christian Rationalism is really a religion. What remains in the crucible after the operation just detailed? Is the residue really the essence of the positive dogmas, or is it but a caput mortuum? When Christianity is rendered translucent to man's mind, conformable to man's reason and man's moral appreciation of things, does it still possess any great virtue? Does it not very much resemble Deism, and is it not equally lean and sterile? Does not the potent influence of religious belief reside in its dogmatic formulas and marvelous legends just as much as in anything more essentially religious that it possesses? Is there not even somewhat of superstition in genuine piety, and is it possible for piety to dispense with that popular system of metaphysics, that attractive mythology, which men strive to eliminate from it? Do not the elements which you pretend to abstract from religion constitute the alloy, without which the precious metal becomes unsuitable for the rough usages of life? In short, when criticism shall have succeeded in overthrowing the supernatural as useless, and dogmas as irrational; when the religious sentiment on the one side, and a scrupulous reason on the other, shall have penetrated man's belief, assimilated and transformed it; when no other authority shall remain standing, save that of the personal conscience of each individual; when, in a word, man having torn every vail and penetrated every mystery, shall behold that God face to face to whom he aspires, will it not be discovered that that God is, after all, nothing else than man himself, the conscience and the reason of humanity personified? Will not religion, in the very attempt to become more religious, have ceased to exist?"
Such, according to the views of its most eminent representatives, are the potent influences and the final results of Rationalism. After having confusedly attributed to it all the progress of man's thought and of man's civilization, Mr. Lecky expresses the apprehension that he has lowered the nature of man, by depriving him (these are his very words) "of our noblest quality, of the divine spark, the principle in us of everything that is heroic," the complete and pure devotedness of Christian faith. M. Scherer asks himself sadly if in rejecting all dogma and all positive revelation, in obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing, and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, rational criticism does not inflict a deadly blow upon religion itself; and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the same perplexity, contents himself with saying, as resignedly, though more coldly, "The heart has its reasons, which the reason comprehends not."
Nothing is so affecting to me, but nothing, at the same time, throws such light upon the subject of my meditations as this involuntary, this invincible anxiety observable in men of lofty sentiments and profound convictions, when confronting the chasms in their system, and dealing with the incoherences of their own convictions. However profound, however different my own conviction may be, I have no desire to engage, either with them or against them, in any direct or prolonged controversy. I have been engaged all my life in frequent and ardent polemics. Those could not be well avoided by a man like myself, forced not merely to combat human opinions, but to grapple with human affairs; and called upon to resolve, upon the instant, practical and urgent questions. But while I voluntarily submitted to the necessity of precipitate and unforeseen struggles, experience has taught me their inconveniences and their perils. The combatants on each side are prone to make use of weapons of too offensive a nature; men involve themselves for party interests and party honor, and push their conclusions with obstinate pertinacity beyond the strictness of truth, sometimes even beyond their own intentions. I do not wish in the arena of philosophy to run the risk of striking upon any similar rock; but avoiding all personal polemics, all controversy of detail, I will express upon the essence of Rationalism, although only in a general manner, my sincere and intimate convictions.
There are in Rationalism two fundamental errors. First, it mutilates man while it studies him; it holds as of no account several of the constituent elements and essential facts of human nature, of which it ignores the meaning and the import. Secondly, Rationalism extends the pretensions of human science beyond its rights, and beyond its legitimate limits.
The instincts, the sentiments, of humanity are certainly not sufficient reasons for scientific conviction, nor conclusive proofs in support of any particular system whatever. The instinctive belief of the human race in one or more supernatural forces is no demonstration of the reality of the supernatural; and the aspirings of man's soul for a life beyond this terrestrial one does not rationally prove the soul's immortality. Error may occur in human instincts or sentiments just as much as in human ideas. But when these instincts and these sentiments are universal, permanent, indestructible, encountered in all ages and in all countries—when they resist and survive all attacks, all doubts of reason or science—they are, beyond all question, considerable facts, and facts which the human understanding cannot but recognize and respect. If these instincts and sentiments do not solve the problems which trouble man's understanding, at least they demand imperiously some solution; if they throw no light upon his road to science, they oblige him to see that that road has its mysteries. Rationalism mutilates humanity when it ignores such facts, regarding them as vain illusions because it cannot explain them; and when, after this mutilation, it assigns the entire empire to a single portion of the human nature, to a single faculty, called by it reason, as if reason constituted the entire man, Rationalism does in the intellectual world what it would be doing in the physical world did it deny the reality of night because it only sees the day clearly.
Rationalism is the more wrong in thus discarding facts which it does not explain, that in its proper domain similar facts occur, and that its science of reason arrives also finally at mysteries. I mentioned it before, as a truth acquired to philosophy, that there exist in the human mind certain universal and necessary principles, neither furnished to the mind by impressions derived from the external world, nor created by the mind itself; and that those principles are inherent in the nature of the mind, and come to it from another source than that of sensation, or any discovery of man's own thought. We have here a psychological fact which, after the profound studies of the spiritualistic school from the time of Plato down to M. Cousin, Rationalism is obliged to admit. To what does this fact tend, and what is its logical consequence? What but God, creation, revelation, and the relations of God with man? Will Rationalism give any better explanation of these divine laws of the human mind than it has given of the instincts and of the sentiments of the human heart? or will it ignore the one result as it has ignored the other?
But now to touch upon the radical and permanent error of Rationalism. It regards all things as accessible to the researches and to the methods of human science. When Spiritualism has recognized and proclaimed the essential and necessary facts which constitute the intellectual and moral being by it styled man, it halts abruptly; it hesitates also to recognize and proclaim the mysterious facts in that sanctuary the very door of which it has reached; it does not resign itself to adore what lies behind the vail; it is inconsequent and timid, although respectful and modest. Rationalism, on the contrary, is presumptuous and audacious; its ambition is to see clearly, to touch what is in the center of the sanctuary, as it sees and touches what is on its outside. Its pretension is that it may study and know, by its ordinary processes, as well the invisible world, its Sovereign and its laws, as the visible world in which man is now placed; and it wars upon Christianity because Christianity admits no such pretension. But Christianity here encounters another adversary, Positivism. Positivism arrests its progress, saying: "I do not know, nobody knows, if an invisible world be or be not a really existing thing. It is a mere loss of time to think of it, for nothing can be known about it with certainty. All religion, all metaphysics, are chimerical and vain sciences; there is no science but the science of the physical world, of its facts and of its laws!"