The French Protestants form a little world apart, which (except, perhaps, in the most Protestant districts, and they are of small extent) appears to be outside the current of the national life. Just as, in England, you may live in the upper classes for a lifetime without having once been inside a dissenter’s house, or seen a dissenter eat, so in France aristocratic people go from the cradle to the grave without having seen the inside of an “evangelical” home. I am not speaking of real religious bigotry, of that evil-spirited intolerance which hates the Protestant as a schismatic, and would revive the old horrible penalties against him if it could; I am speaking only of the mild modern objection to people who are under the ban of a social prejudice.
Disadvantage of belonging to the Inferior Sects.
Dissenters in England.
Protestants in France.
Dissenters in Former Times.
A ban of this kind falls with very different effect on different persons. It scarcely troubles elderly people in comfortable circumstances, who are content with a retired life, but it weighs heavily on the young. A Protestant girl in a French country town may have admirable virtues and a good education, but the simple fact that she belongs to an inferior religious community restricts her chances of marriage. In both England and France a young man may suffer both in that and in other ways from his connection with an unfashionable sect. A young Englishman may come to turning-points in his career where an Anglican will be preferred to a dissenter, even although no question of religious belief may avowedly be involved. A valuable office may be given to merit when the qualities of a dissenter would not be taken into consideration. I am thinking of a real instance when a man of great merit received a private appointment which would certainly not have been offered to a nonconformist, yet the work to be done had no connection with theology. In France I know several successful men who, if they had been Protestants, would have been left out in the cold. If this may still be the case in an age that has made such very real advances in justice, what was it two or three generations since? Then the dissenter was literally an outlaw;[37] to-day he is so only in a social and metaphorical sense. A Frenchman once said to me, “Un Français qui n’est pas Catholique est hors la loi,” but the law of good society was understood, not the law of the land.
Only a Nominal Orthodoxy required.
Facilities of Modern Catholicism.
Liberty of French Catholics.
In both countries alike, it is but fair to admit that a merely nominal orthodoxy is accepted, and that a man is not required to believe anything in his own intellect and conscience, if he will only conform to certain outward ceremonies. In France the Church has become so accommodating that it is not now any harder to be a Catholic than a fashionable Anglican. The Church requires hardly anything that can be unpleasant to the upper classes (the fasts are only a variety of good eating), and conformity now consists in little else than attendance at a weekly mass. In some respects French orthodoxy is more compatible with freedom than its English counterpart. After mass, and an early low mass is sufficient, a French gentleman is free to amuse himself on Sunday as he pleases. There is, indeed, a rather stern French puritanism which objects to theatres on Sunday, but it objects to them equally on all other days of the week.