In these utterances we have at one and the same time the delight in consistency which is to be observed in the earliest nineteenth-century devotees of the principle of authority, the delight in a disconcerting idea which is one of De Maistre's own chief mental characteristics, and the delight in describing suffering which he has in common with Görres and so many of the other champions of the gloomy doctrine of the necessary subjection of humanity to kings and priests.
De Maistre resents hearing men so often talk as if crime went unpunished. What do they mean by this? "For whom are the gallows, the knout, the wheel, and the stake and fagot provided? Surely for the criminal." Justice may sometimes miscarry, but such exceptions do not alter the rule. It is folly to believe in all the judicial murders one hears talked about. Take the frequently quoted case of Calas. Nothing is more doubtful than his innocence.
The very fact that Voltaire defended him speaks against it.
But given the worst—that an innocent man is deprived of his life—why, it is simply a misfortune like any other. When a guilty man escapes we have another exception and misfortune of the same kind. The events which lead to the discovery of a crime are, however, often so unexpected and improbable that we cannot but believe that human justice is supported by higher aid. And all the time that we are foolishly blaming human justice for having punished an innocent man, nothing is more probable than that he really is guilty, though of some other, unknown crime. Many such cases are on record, the truth coming to light through the confession of the criminals. De Maistre, we observe, understands how to extricate himself from a difficulty.
Something of the same nature holds good in the matter of sickness. Its injustice, too, is only apparent. If every kind of intemperance could be prevented, most, nay, in reality all diseases would be done away with. This inference may be arrived at by arguing as follows: If there were no moral evil in the world there would be no physical evil, and since an infinite number of diseases are direct consequences of certain offences, it is permissible to generalise and say that this holds good of them all.
Everything, then, is ordered upon moral principles. It is undeniable that life is a terrible thing, but this does not prove that God is unjust; he is offended, he is insulted, and to appease his anger blood is required. Man early comprehended his own fall, early understood that it is the innocent who must and alone can, by the transference of merit, atone for the sins of the guilty, that there is no salvation without the shedding of sacrificial blood.
Hence the idea of sacrifice is one of perpetual and keen interest to De Maistre. Sacrifice is ideal slaughter, slaughter the one and only aim of which is the accomplishment of what is right and meet. From the earliest ages men have offered both animal and human sacrifices; and in Christianity the practice is sanctified and acquires a deeper meaning. Here it is not any chance and possibly guilty individual who is the victim, but a being who is elected to die because of his innocence. This, therefore, is ideal sacrifice.
All this is undoubtedly an offence to reason. But contrariety to reason is the sign and seal of truth. The theory which is the most obviously reasonable is the theory which never stands the test of practice. Nothing could be more obviously reasonable than the whole philosophy of the eighteenth century, with its faith in man and its liberalism. But its very reasonableness bespeaks its superficiality. It satisfies reason; but experience opens men's eyes to its futility. Nothing seems more self-evident than that man is born free. Yet when Rousseau writes: "Man is born free, nevertheless he is everywhere in fetters," he does not notice that he is not only writing nonsense, but distinctly affirming that he is doing so. It would be quite as sensible to say; Sheep are born carnivorous, nevertheless they everywhere live on vegetable food. In the same way, nothing is theoretically more unreasonable than hereditary monarchy. If, without any previous experience, men were called on to choose a government, that man would be thought mad who hesitated to give an elective monarchy the preference over a hereditary one. And yet we know from experience that the latter is the best, the former the worst form of government. In other words, the world, far from being a reasonable world, is full of things that are profoundly at variance with reason.
Christianity, the Christian conception of life, is therefore no new, hitherto unknown conception. It is connected by many links with the whole succession of heathen religions, and is prepared for by them. All the truths of Christianity are foreshadowed in the creeds of heathendom. In heathen sacrificial practices, for instance, we already have the essential idea of sacrifice. And De Maistre waxes wroth over Voltaire's violent, irreligious tirades against the sacrificial festivals of the old pagans. He is yet more exasperated when, at the end of a description of a sacrifice of both adults and children, he comes upon the words; "However, the sacrifices of the Inquisition, of which we have so often spoken, are a hundred times more execrable."
It is apropos of this utterance that (in his essay Éclaircissement sur les sacrifices) De Maistre first takes up the cudgels for the Inquisition, to the defence of which institution he was ere long to devote a special work. He writes: "The passage relating to the Inquisition appears to have been written during an attack of delirium. What! The lawful execution of a small number of human beings, condemned to death by a fully qualified court of justice according to the strict letter of a penal law which had previously been solemnly proclaimed, and which each one of the victims was perfectly free to avoid transgressing—to call such an execution a hundred times more abominable than the horrible act of the parents who cast their children into the flaming arms of Moloch! What wild insanity! What forgetfulness of all reason, all justice, all shame!" De Maistre storms thus because he is here attacking the man who was his opposite, and who fought, like himself, with the weapons of wit and paradox, but wielded them with far greater power.