It must not be forgotten that this chapter is not of the general effect or the ordinary results of religion. It applies only to the excess when brought into public or business life. Do not let us have any mistake. Of the ordinary effect of religion in an ordinary person there is here no word at all. The general effect of religion on private natural life is quite another subject, a very different subject indeed. Therefore let us have no misunderstanding.
CHAPTER XVI.
STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS.
Has, then, a force, or a teaching that is capable of excess, no use?
If you look back at the histories of peoples, at the histories of their great wars, their movements, their enthusiasms, you will find that on one side or another, usually on both, religion has been invoked to their aid. For one side or for both the enthusiasm has been declared to be a religious enthusiasm, the war a religious war, the awakening of thought a religious awakening. The gods fought for the Greeks before Troy as the saints did for the Spaniards against the Huns, as the Boers expected the Almighty to fight in South Africa to-day. The intellectual revolt of the Teuton against the mental leading-strings of the Latins became a conflict of religion, as did the political conflict of the Puritans against the Stuart Kings. It has been religion always, if possible, that has been called on to lend strength and enthusiasm to the fighters to attempt forlorn hopes, to carry out far-reaching reforms, to dare everything for the end.
There is one great exception.
In the conflict that broke out in France at the end of the last century, that storm which swept before it the breakwaters of a world and changed mediæval Europe into that of to-day, religion was not the motive power. Those six hundred men of Marseilles "who knew how to die" were sustained by no religious belief. Those armies which affronted the world in arms had no celestial champions in their ranks. Those iconoclasts, who broke down the barriers that made the good things of the world a forbidden city to all but a caste, had no religious doctrine to work by.
Indeed, it may be said that it was quite the reverse, that the war of the Revolution was against religion; but I doubt if that is quite the truth. That the war was against the priests is in great measure true, but it was because of their support to the nobles, because of their connection with worldly abuses, because of their irreligion, that they were attacked. Religion, too, suffered, it is true, but only incidentally and for a time. And anyhow, you cannot get force out of a negation. But however this may be, the point as far as I am now concerned is not material; for all I want here to assert is that the enthusiasm which acted as a breath of life to the half-dead millions of France was not a religious enthusiasm. It never even assumed at any time a religious basis. It was not an enthusiasm of God, but of Humanity, and the war cry was "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." It was a revolt of the bond against the gaoler, of the spoiled against the ravishers; it was the assertion of the absolute equality and liberty of man.