[85] Some years ago, as is well known, on the 1st of October, 1877, the faculty of theology in the three state universities of Leyden, Utrecht, and Groningen, and in the Communal University of Amsterdam, was declared to be a lay faculty and was freed from all association and connection with the Church, and was required to give purely scientific and philosophic instruction on the history of religion, without practical discipline. (See M. Steyn Parvé, Organisation de l’instruction primaire, secondaire et supérieure dans le royaume des Pays-Bas, Leyden, 1878, and M. Maurice Vernes, Mélanges de critique religieuse, p. 305.)
The following is the programme of this faculty: 1. General theology; 2. History of doctrines concerning divinity; 3. History of religions in general; 4. History of the Israelite religion; 5. History of Christianity; 6. Literature of the Israelites, and the ancient Christians; 7. Old and New Testament exegesis; 8. History of the dogmas of the Christian church; 9. Philosophy of religion; 10. Ethics.
[86] As M. Vernes has remarked, the preparation for teaching the history of religions might well be the same as that for teaching philosophy, history, and letters. It should include the studies in the upper classes, of the philosophical section of the école normale, and a preparatory course in the divers other faculties: a real normal course. In this course the professor should point out the general principle of the history of religions and should confine himself to indicating them very summarily in the case of the religions of Greece and Rome, to which a general literary education will have given the pupil access; he should deal, without excessive attention to detail, with the other Indo-European religions (those of India, Persia, etc.), with the religions of Egypt, of Assyria, of Phœnicia, of Islam; and should spend his greatest efforts on the criticism of Judaism and the early stages of Christianity, on the history of the principal Christian dogmas and their development.
[87] Works in religious criticism would naturally find their place in the school and college libraries. They might be supplemented by a more or less extensive museum of religious curiosities, beginning with the fetiches of savage tribes and extending down to the present day.
To the mass of the French public the solid results already achieved by an independent criticism of the Bible constitute a terra incognita; they must be disseminated. M. Lenormant’s effort might serve as an example for other efforts of the same kind. In order to make it apparent at a glance how the Pentateuch has been formed, by the combination and fusion of the earlier sets of documents, M. Lenormant undertook to publish a translation from the Hebrew, in which he distinguishes the extracts from the respective sets of documents by different kinds of type. Thus one has before one the natural explanation of the way in which all the episodes in Genesis are presented in the two parallel versions, sometimes juxtaposed, sometimes mingled.
[88] “Memory is no doubt an affliction for the grown man much more than for the child, but it is also a consolation. Cultivation of one’s memories supplies powerful means of moral education for all ages, and for nations as well as for individuals. It was quite to be expected that we should find an ancestor worship in the early history of every people.” (Felix Henneguy, Critique philosophique, 8th year, vol. ii. p. 218.)
[89] Ibid.
[90] Among the greatest causes of difficulty with a child, let us note the following: the father is apt to be a free-thinker, the mother a Catholic. It hears every day at Church that those who do not practise their religious duties will go to hell: the child therefore reasons that if its father dies it will never see him again, unless it goes to hell with him, and then it will never see its mother again. A full and complete belief in annihilation would be less painful and less annoying than this belief in eternal damnation. Add that in this respect many Protestant clergymen, in especial in England and in the United States, are not less intolerant than Catholic priests.
[91] As a general rule, Darwin says, men go farther than women, whether the matter be one of profound meditation, of reason, or imagination, or simply of the use of the senses or even of the hands. According to certain statistical investigations it appears that the modern female brain has remained almost stationary, while the male brain has developed notably. The brain of a Parisian woman is no larger than that of a Chinese woman, and the Parisian woman labours under the additional disadvantage of possessing a larger foot.
Admitting these facts one may still refuse to infer from them the existence of a congenital incapacity, for the way in which women have always been treated by men and the education that they have received may well have left results which have become hereditary. The education of women has in all times been less strenuous than that of men; and their mind, perhaps naturally less scientific, has never been developed by direct contact with the external world. In the Orient and in Greece, among the nations from whom we derive our civilization, women (at least in families in easy circumstances) were always restricted to a subordinate rôle, confined to woman’s quarters, or withdrawn from all direct contact with the real world. Thence arose a sort of tradition of ignorance and intellectual abasement which has been handed down to us. There is nothing like the brain of a young girl reared at home for gathering to itself completely, and without loss, the whole residue of middle-class silliness, of naïve and self-satisfied prejudice, of strutting ignorance that does not see itself as others see it, of superstition transformed into a rule of conduct. But change the education and you will in a great measure change these results. Even according to Darwin’s own theory, education and heredity can in the long run undo anything that they have done. Even if there should remain a certain balance of intelligence in favor of the male, even if the female should prove to be in the end, as Darwin says, incapable of pushing invention as far in advance as man, it would not follow that her heart and intelligence should be filled with another order of ideas and sentiments than those which are beneficial to men. It is one thing to invent and to widen the domain of science, and another thing to assimilate the knowledge already acquired; it is one thing to widen the intellectual horizon, and another thing to adapt one’s eyes and heart to this more open habitat.