The apostasy of the Protestants went to a fearful extent. For example, at the very time of the infamous worship of the Goddess of Reason, a pastor and his elders carried their communion plate and the baptismal vessels to the mayor, to have them melted down for the nation. Improvement began about 1820. There were but three Protestant chapels in Paris, and the services were dull and unattractive. To the late Frederic Monod belongs the imperishable honor of commencing the renovation by means of his little Sunday school. "Never will the traces of his labors be effaced," says M. de Pressensé, "for he it is to whom we owe the first furrows in the vast field which now we rejoice to see white unto the harvest." A domestic evangelical spirit, embracing the most distant provinces, began to be apparent in the ministrations of the clergy and in the popular attendance at the services.
A foreign agency also contributed to the awakening. In 1785 a Wesleyan mission was commenced in the Norman isle of Guernsey, and in the following year Adam Clarke was sent to Jersey. It was designed to make the Channel Islands the beginning of French missions. Wesley predicted that they would be outposts for evangelizing efforts all over the Continent. In a short time Jean de Quetteville and John Angel went over into Normandy, and preached the gospel in many villages. Dr. Coke, the superintendent of the Methodist missions, went with the former preacher to Paris, where they organized a short-lived mission. But the labors of Mahy, who had been ordained by Coke, were very successful. Large numbers came to his ministry, and many were converted through his instrumentality. When peace was declared after the battle of Waterloo, three men, Toase, Robarts, and Frankland, sailed for Normandy. In 1817 Charles Cook joined them. He went from town to town, stirring up the sluggish conscience of French Protestantism. He terminated his arduous toils in 1858, leaving behind him a French branch of the Methodist church, which embraces one hundred and fifty-two houses of worship, one hundred ministers, lay and clerical, and fifteen hundred members. Merle d'Aubigné has said of Dr. Cook that "the work which John Wesley did in Great Britain Charles Cook has done, though on a smaller scale, on the Continent." His death was lamented by all the leaders of French Protestantism. Professor G. De Félice, of Montauban, has affirmed that, of the instruments of the French awakening, "Dr. Charles Cook was not the least influential."[99]
The new religious interest arising from the native and imported influences was so fatal to the prevalent skepticism that Voltaire and his school have now but few adherents. Skeptics of France consider that type effete, and unworthy of their support. "The present disciples of Voltaire," says Pastor Fisch, "are compelled to deny his language if they would remain true to the spirit of their master. For, to deride Jesus Christ would manifest an inexcusable want of respectability."
But infidelity has only changed its position. Des Cartes, the apostle of Rationalism in France, had taught that God was only a God-Idea, or human thought continuing itself in divine thought and in infinity. He would make no greater admission than that God had put the world in motion. The principles of Des Cartes, clustering around this opinion, have never lost their hold upon the French mind, and are now influencing it to a remarkable degree.
Cartesianism gained new power by the agency of the Eclectic School, whose champions were Royer-Collard, Maine de Biran, Cousin, and Jouffroy. Their great achievement was the unification of the philosophical systems of Germany and Scotland. But the Eclectics are now in a state of dissolution.
Positivism, as a subordinate system, is the work of Comte alone. This, too, is every year losing its hold upon the land of its birth. Its fundamental principle is, that in virtue of an inner law of development of the mind, the whole human race will gradually emancipate itself from all religion and metaphysics, and substitute for the worship of God that of love of humanity, or a mundane religion. The law of development consists in the psychological experience that all the ideas and cognitions of the human mind have necessarily to pass through the three stages of theology, metaphysics, and positivism. It is only when it arrives at the stand-point of absolutely positive, or mathematically exact knowledge, that human thought attains its goal of perfection. The religion of mankind is divided into three stages; fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism. Its representatives are Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity. Catholicism is better suited than any other form of religion to the perfect development of human society. The Christian world is now in the transitory stage of metaphysics, which, by and by, will lead to the golden age of Positivism. This is the absolute religion, or the worship of humanity, which needs no God or revelation.
While Comte has so deeply impressed the thinking circles of France that his opinions are still perceptible in the doctrines of the Liberal Party, another great agent has been operating upon the young, uneducated, and laboring classes. We refer to the light French novel, or feuilleton literature. Such writers as Sue, George Sand, and Dumas, father and son, have published many volumes which were issued in cheap style, and afterward scattered profusely over the land. These works have been extensively read, not only in France, but in all parts of the Continent, Great Britain, and the United States. A recent traveler has averred that he found many persons perusing them in the reading-rooms of Athens. But the public mind sometimes needs a path by which it can effect a transition from a skeptical to an evangelical condition. May it not be that, as far as France is concerned, the minds of the masses have, by this agency, been deflected to such an extent from the infidelity of Encyclopædism that popular evangelical literature will now find a readier entrance than it could otherwise have effected? If a taste for reading be once created, it may be won, under judicious management and by the aid of God's Spirit, to a purer cause than that which first excited it. The tendency of the works in question is indisputably pernicious, but, if we may think they will serve as a medium of passage for the French masses to the reading and adoption of the great truths of the Gospel, let us not be too slow to accept the consolation.
Such are some of the agencies which have been operating upon the French mind. It now becomes necessary to take a survey of the present theological movements, and to show in what relations the Rationalistic and evangelical thinkers stand to each other.