The moral unity of France was destroyed for ever by the Huguenots in the seventeenth century. Louis XIV sought in vain to restore it by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Revolution also tried to enforce moral unity by the unlimited practice of the “Sois mon frère ou je te tue.” It is in the name of this lost moral unity that the coalition in power now propose to crush out all educational and religious liberty. French Protestantism can hardly be said to exist any longer. In 1799, when their religious and civil liberties were restored, Rabaut de St. Etienne, then president of the Constituante, stated their number to be 2,000,000 in a population of 26,000,000. After a century of complete liberty and equality, the Agenda Protestant of Lyons states their number to be 650,000 in a population of 37,000,000. In the usual process of Protestant disintegration, the Huguenots, erstwhile so zealous for Calvinistic purity of doctrine, have evolved into the freethinking materialists, who form an important contingent in the anti-religious Masonic coalition I referred to some months ago.
The situation in France painfully recalls that of Constantinople some forty years before the fall of the Eastern Empire. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
A PAGAN RENAISSANCE
10th August, 1901.
IN a previous article I asserted that the revolutionary spirit so rampant to-day is a new version of that renaissance of Paganism in the fourteenth century which culminated in the Protestant revolt. I find the same view expressed in Goldwin Smith’s recently published work on the United Kingdom. In a chapter on the Renaissance he writes as follows: “Our generation may look upon this period with interest, since it is itself threatened with an interregnum between Christian morality and the morality of science.”
“Much learning maketh thee mad” might be said to our generation, that seems to be science mad and blissfully unconscious of the paradoxes of its programme. We are promised a scientific religion or a religion of science, meaning probably a religion worthy of men of science, unmindful of the fact that men of the highest attainments have been nurtured in the Church in every century, and that the supernatural must always be an indispensable element of religion.
Now Mr. Goldwin Smith raises our expectations to a future era in which “the morality of science” is to succeed to the hiatus or interregnum with which we are threatened to-day, as in the fifteenth century, when the Church was “drugged,” he says.
In his excellent work on Social Evolution, Kidd accentuates the fact that our Western civilization, the highest yet attained, has been wholly religious and not scientific; that in intellectual capacity and attainments we are, even now, far below the average Greek mind of centuries ago. This civilization of ours, marvellous in spite of all its shortcomings and blots, is founded on abnegation and self-sacrifice which are wholly irrational, scientifically speaking. It is indeed scientifically impossible for science to have any other morality than the law of brute force and the survival of the strongest, whether it be on the battlefield, the mart, or on ’change. The law of supply and demand is a corollary of this law.
Complacency for the weak and the lowly, that characterized Christianity from the beginning, and found expression in the legend of the Holy Grail, is all folly, the sublime folly of the Cross. The equality and brotherhood of man is also part of this “foolishness,” so repulsive to the cultured Greek mind. Nay, all our much-vaunted “free institutions” have grown out of this mustard seed, to which our Lord compared His kingdom on earth. “When the tree falls the shadow will depart,” as Tennyson wrote in another connexion. Nothing will be left to our poor science-ridden humanity but the cruel glare of human egoisms, passions, and ambitions.
In one of those sonorous paradoxes which his soul loved, J. J. Rousseau assures us that “all men are born free, and everywhere they are in chains.” That all men are born free is as false as that all men are born upright and virtuous. History and experience give the lie to both assertions. It is an incontrovertible fact that before Christ slavery was the normal status of the masses in every age and clime, and Lucanus only expressed an universally accepted axiom when he cynically declared that the human race only existed for a few: Humanum paucis vivit genus.