Eighth Meditation.
Impiety, Recklessness, And Perplexity.
The different systems, of each of which I have endeavored to show the essential and characteristic vice, do not remain confined to learned regions, or to the classes to which, from profession or from taste, man and the world are a special object of study. The breath of science penetrates to a distance, and pervades, unseen itself, places even where ignorance reigns. How often in remote cities and even rural districts, among a population alien to every kind of study, have I met with and discovered the traces of Rationalism, of Positivism, of Pantheism, Materialism, Skepticism; and yet these had been imported, imperceptibly and in manner that the sense could not detect, like a noxious miasma, into places where their very names were unknown; and yet they bore everywhere their natural fruits! There is a contagion in the intellectual as well as in the moral order; and the facility, the rapidity, the universality of communication, which contribute so much to the force and the grandeur of modern civilization, are as much at the disposal of evil as of good, of error as of truth.
The effects of this intellectual contagion vary with the social regions into which it penetrates, and the dispositions that it there encounters. When the systems of philosophy present themselves confusedly to minds in which ambitious and passionate feelings are fermenting, and these feelings are capable of being aided by those systems, their action is prompt and forcible. At epochs and among classes where pride and ambition of intellect reign without bounds, Rationalism and Pantheism are received with favor. In those, on the other hand, conspicuous for the almost exclusive study of the material world, or for the ardor with which men thirst after physical enjoyments, Positivism and Materialism seem very readily to prevail. After long perturbations of society, and in the midst of the disappointments and the jaded feelings that they leave behind them, many minds fall involuntarily into skepticism, or make it even their refuge. These different social facts, and the influence which they give to the different systems of philosophy, manifest themselves in our days in the state of men's minds, and they do so whether men be learned or unlearned, demonstrative or taciturn.
Three dispositions of the mind are very observable and very general—impiety, recklessness as to religion, and religious perplexity.
I feel no difficulty in thus ranging side by side things which are coexisting, and developing themselves simultaneously although contrary in their nature. There are epochs when a great current rises and hurries society toward a single object and by a single way. Others there are where different currents cross and combat one another, and impel society at the same moment toward different objects. The spirit of authority and of faith was very predominant in the seventeenth century; the spirit of independence and of innovation in the eighteenth. The nineteenth century is sweeping on its way under the empire of tendencies various but simultaneous in their power and their activity; the different principles and elements of our society, good or the reverse, confront one another, awaiting the moment when they may again be harmonized. I retraced the awakening of Christianity and its progress; I seek in no respect to qualify any remark that I have made, either as to that important movement or as to the confidence with which it inspires me; but I, at the same time, believe also in the forcible influence of the antichristian demonstrations which are taking the form of impiety or of recklessness; nor can I disregard the force of that religious perplexity into which this great struggle throws so many men of feeble purpose, and even some men of eminent powers of mind.
In our days impiety is spreading, and assuming serious development, more especially among the operative classes, and in that young generation that issues from the middle classes, and is destined to follow the liberal professions. Not that the infection is universal even there; on the contrary, those classes show also the most different tendencies; among them, too, the progress of the Christian awakening has made itself felt, and religious belief is treated with more respect. There, however, it is that the evil of impiety has its focus and its center of expansion. Sometimes it manifests itself under gross and cynical forms, sometimes with a pretension to thought and learning; now by the brutal licentiousness of its behavior, now by the arrogant yet embarrassed expression of its opinions. Last year I received an invitation to attend the great congress of students assembled at Liège; an invitation which, although I expressed for the purpose of this assemblage a real and a sincere interest, I declined. When I learned what the ideas were that had been there loudly expressed—when I read that the question had there been put as one between God and man, and that the idolatry of man had been proclaimed in the place of the adoration of God,—I experienced two sentiments the most contradictory, a lively satisfaction that I had held myself aloof from such a scene, and a profound regret, at the same time, that I had not been present to protest against such an invasion of Pantheism and of Atheism into young souls, upon whom my thoughts only rest with sentiments of affectionate hopefulness. I have grown old, I have had to undergo painful disappointments, but in spite of all, my first impulse has ever been to believe in the prompt efficacy of truth when it knocks unhesitatingly at the door of the mind; nor is it without reluctance that I bring myself to wait for time and experience to unvail what is error. Of the two kinds of impiety which I have just alluded to, the impiety which is gross and cynical, which springs from immorality and which produces immorality, is undoubtedly the more fatal to the human soul, to its dignity and its future lot; but systematic impiety—impiety that establishes itself into doctrine—is the more dangerous for human societies; for, enamored of itself, it takes its pride in self-glorification and self-propagation. The ambitious ones of impiety obtain more credit than those, the chief characteristic of whose impiety is licentiousness. Recklessness in religion is in our days a more widely spread evil than impiety. I do not here speak of that indifferentism with respect to religious subjects that the Abbé de la Mennais so eloquently attacked; that sentiment may be profound, and it may be frivolous; it may spring from Materialism, from Skepticism, from a thoughtful impiety, as well as from a gross forgetfulness of the paramount questions which exercise the human mind. The recklessness now so common gives no thought at all to these subjects, does not picture to itself that there is any ground for so doing; where this tendency prevails, man's thought confines itself to its terrestrial, its actual life; the business and the interests of this life alone occupy him, alone content him; there is, as it were, a sleep of all those instincts and requirements of the human soul which go beyond this low region, and if not a complete abdication, at least a sluggish torpor of the heavenly part of our nature.
Let not the friends of a religious life and of the Christian faith deceive themselves; it is here that they have the greatest obstacles to encounter, the deadest weight to lift and to remove. Aggression provokes resistance; a struggle leads to the marshaling of the different hostile forces; nor does the learning of the believer dread to enter the arena with the learning of the incredulous. But recklessness in religion is like a vast Dead Sea in which no being lives, an immense barren desert in which no vegetation pushes. It is, if not the most revolting, at least the most formidable evil of the day. It is against this evil that Christians are bound, more especially, to direct their energies, for there are a world and an entire population here to be conquered.
Nor will points d'appui or means of action fail them in this great work. For if religious recklessness is in our days deplorably common, neither is perplexity as to religious matters a stranger among us. It springs from sentiments and out of interests very different in their natures, sometimes merely on the surface, sometimes in the depths of the soul. There is a kind of perplexity founded upon the dictates of common sense, and entitled to every respect, but to which I do not accord, nevertheless, the epithet of religious; this perplexity is generated by the instinct or the experience of the utility of religion for the maintenance of order in society, not merely in the great public society, but also in the smaller domestic societies, that is, in the state as well as in families. A man of distinguished mental capacity and of an honorable character, "elève" of the "Ecole politechnique," and "ingénieur en chef" in one of our great departments, was one day speaking to me with sorrow of the attacks leveled at Christianity. "It is not," he said, "on my own account that I regret these attacks; you know I am a 'Voltairean;' but I ask for regularity and peace in my own household; I felicitate myself that my wife is a Christian, and I mean my daughters to be brought up like Christian women. These demolishers know not what they are doing; it is not merely upon our Churches, it is upon our houses, our homes and their inmates, that their blows are telling!"