The free-thinker, it is true, labours under a great disadvantage in the work of conversion: a believer may always decline to reason; whenever an intellectual duel seems to him to be disadvantageous he may decline to fight; a high degree of indulgent tenacity and of prudence is necessary in a discussion with anyone who is thus ready to take refuge in flight at the slightest alarm. What can one do against a gentle and obstinate determination to say nothing, to intrench one’s self in ignorance, to allow argument to shatter itself against an outer wall. “It seemed to me,” a Russian novelist cries, “as if all my words bounded off her like peas shot at a marble statue.” One of Shakspere’s heroines proposes to essay matrimony as an exercise of patience. If patience is, in the management of the household, the great virtue of the wife, the man’s virtue should be perseverance and active obstinacy in an effort to fashion and create her to his desire and ideal. I once questioned a woman who had married a free-thinker with a secret intention of converting him. The upshot of the matter was the precise opposite, and I quote below her own account, as she gave it to me, of the successive phases of this moral crisis. It is of course only an isolated example, but it may serve to illustrate the character of women, and the more or less great facility with which they may be made to accept scientific or philosophic ideas.
Wife’s effort to convert her husband.
“The double aim of every Christian woman is to save souls, in general, and to save her own in particular. To aid Christ, by bringing back into the fold the sheep who have strayed away, is her great dream, and to preserve her own purity is her constant preoccupation. When the moment came for me to try my powers, a lively solicitude took possession of me: should I really succeed in winning over the man to whom I was to unite my life, or would he succeed in winning me over? Great is the power of evil, and whoever exposes himself to temptation will perish, but if evil is powerful, God, I assured myself, is still more powerful, and God never abandons those who confide in him, and I confided in God. To convince the incredulous who had systematized their incredulity into a reasoned whole was no slight task, and I did not hope to accomplish it in four and twenty hours. My plan was this: to be faithful in the midst of the unfaithful, immutable and confident in my religion which was the religion of the humble, the simple, and the ignorant; to do the utmost good possible, according to the first of Christ’s commandments; to practise my religion in silence but openly; to domesticate it in my household; to inaugurate a secret, slow, incessant combat which should last, if necessary, till the end of my life. And then to rely upon the infinite mercy of God.
“With this disposition of mind I had no difficulty in standing mute whenever my husband attacked my beliefs. My first object was to prove the uselessness of all discussion, the firmness of my faith. I knew perfectly well that I really was unable to reply, that he knew so much and I so little. But if I had only been a doctor of theology I would have accepted the challenge, I would have heaped up proof on proof! With the truth and God for me, how could I have been vanquished? But I was not in the least like a doctor of theology, and the result was that, fortified in my ignorance, I listened placidly to all his arguments, and the livelier, the more cogent they were, the more profoundly I was convinced of the truth of my religion, which stood erect under so much battering and triumphed in its immunity.
“I was inexpugnable, and the siege might have lasted long if my husband had not recognized the strength of my position and changed his tactics. His object was to force me to discuss, to follow his objections, to understand them in spite of myself, to turn them over in my own mind. He told me that it would be a help to him in his work if I should epitomize sometimes in writing, sometimes viva voce, a certain number of works on religion. He put into my hands M. Renan’s ‘Vie de Jésus,’ M. Reville’s wise and conscientious little book on ‘L’Histoire du dogme de la divinité de Jésus Christ,’ often full of abstract inquiries in which the sincerity of the author was evident and contagious, even when the reader was looking for sophisms.[95] I could not refuse to read the books without abandoning my most cherished ambition, which was to aid my husband in his work. My conscience was involved, and I could not consult my confessor because we were then abroad; moreover my faith, although profound, had always been, or pretended to be, generous and enlightened. If I was ever to hand my religion on I must not be intolerant; and I read! M. Renan did not especially scandalize me, he was a follower of Jesus, writing of Jesus; his book, which has charmed many women as much as a romance, saddened me without repelling me. I was obliged to make a written abstract of the entire book and had to put myself into the author’s place, to see things with his eyes, to think his thoughts; and, in spite of myself, I sometimes saw in my own heart, side by side with the impeccable and perfect Christ God, the figure of the imperfect, suffering, worn man, out of patience and cursing. The other books, which were much more abstract, called for a much greater effort on my part, but the very effort that I put forth constrained me more completely to assimilate their contents. Every day I lost ground, and my once passive faith became slowly transformed into an anxious desire to know, into a hope that a more complete knowledge would re-establish my broken defences.
“One day, my husband said to me abruptly: ‘You will not refuse to read the Bible, which is the source of your religion, from one end to the other?’ I acceded with pleasure, I did not wait for permission—I was beyond that; it seemed to me that to read the Bible must be the beginning of that profound knowledge which I envied my ideal doctor of theology. It was with trembling fingers that I opened the black-bound book, with its closely printed pages dictated by God Himself, alive still with the divine Word! I held in my hands the truth, the justification of human life, the keys of the future; it seemed to me that the tablets of Sinai had been committed to me as to the prostrate multitude of the Hebrews at the foot of the mountain, and I also would have kneeled humbly to receive it. But, as I made my way through the book, the immorality of certain pages seemed to me so evident that my whole heart rose in revolt against them. I had not been hardened from my childhood, as Protestant girls are, to all these tales. The Catholic education, which does what it can to keep the Sacred Books out of sight, seems to me in this respect, and only in this respect, much superior to the Protestant religion. In any event, it prepares one who reads the Bible for the first time in mature years to feel much more acutely the profound immorality of sacred history. Catholicism often perverts the intelligence; Protestantism might naturally go the length of perverting the heart. Unbelievers have often made the moral monstrosities in the Bible a subject of raillery; I felt nothing but indignation when I came across them, and I closed with disgust the book which I had so long regarded with respect.
“What should I think of it; what should I believe? The words of infinite love and charity which the New Testament contains came back to me. If God was anywhere He must be there, and once more I opened the sacred book—the book which has so often tempted humanity. After all, it was Christ that I had adored rather than the Lord of Hosts. My acquaintance had been almost wholly limited to the Gospel of St. John, which I had learned was of disputable authenticity. I read the Gospels from end to end. Even in St. John I could not find the model man above reproach, the incarnate God, the divine Word; in the very midst of the beauties and sublimities of the text, I myself began to perceive innumerable contradictions, naïvetés, superstitions, and moral failings. My beliefs no longer existed, I had been betrayed by my God, my whole previous intellectual life looked to me more and more like a dream. This dream had its beautiful aspects; even to-day I sometimes regret the consolation that it once afforded me and can never afford me again. Nevertheless, in all sincerity, if I had the chance to sleep once more the intellectual sleep of my girlhood, to forget all that I have learned, to return to my errors—I would not for the world consent to take it, I would not take a step backward. The memory of the illusions that I have lost has never disturbed the line of reasoning by means of which I lost them. When once I had come face to face with the reality, it maintained itself from that moment on, sometimes painfully, but steadily in my imagination. The last thing that a human being can willingly consent to is to be deceived.”
CHAPTER VII.
THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE.
I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism between numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers for the maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity of giving the advantage of numbers to the superior races—Problem of population in France—Its relation to the religious problem—Are the reasons for the restriction of the number of births physiological, moral, or economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.