What, again, avails it to allege the good faith, the involuntary ignorance, of Protestants in resisting the Council of Trent? That good faith, if real, may excuse them in the eyes of God, who reads the heart; it opens not the doors of the visible Church, which can admit to her external communion only those who make an explicit profession of her doctrine. Where, in fact, should we be, what chimera would be the authority of the [{445}] Church, and in what smoke would vanish the obedience of the faithful, if every man could at pleasure retrench this or that article from the Credo, under the pretext that he could not in his conscience recognize in it the marks of divine revelation? Certainly it is obstinacy in error that makes the heretic, for a just God can punish only the adhesion of the will to error. So in that terrible and solemn day which will rend the veil which covers the inmost human conscience, not only of those in separated Christian communions, but even those in the darkness of paganism and idolatry, many souls may be discovered who for their constant fidelity to the feeble gleams of light vouchsafed them, will have deserved to have applied to them the merits of the sacrifice of the Son of God. More than one Queen of Saba will come up from the desert to accuse the children of Abraham of a want of faith, and in that supreme moment the Church will recognize more than one
"Enfant qu'en sol sein elle n'a point porté."
(Child which she has not brought forth.)
But it is given to no one to anticipate that hour of mystery and revelation, and so long as here below, and knowing one another only by words and external acts, it is, by our beliefs that we must, at least externally, as to the body, if not to the soul, separate ourselves. Sole certain guide to salvation, sole confidant of the mysteries of grace, the Church damns not in advance all those whom she excludes, any more than she saves all those whom she admits; but she can relinquish to nobody a single one of the articles of faith, nor knowingly allow a single farthing to be subtracted from the deposit confided to her keeping.
Against these two fixed points, imperturbably sustained by the hand of Bossuet, the inexhaustible dialectics of Leibnitz, always repulsed, ever returning anew to the charge, beats and breaks, without relaxation, precisely as the waves of the ocean against the rock. The contrast between the flexibility of one of the adversaries and the immobility of the other is about all the interest that, in the midst of continual repetitions, is offered by this interminable debate. We subjoin, however, to conclude our analysis, the recital of two inventions of doubtful loyalty imagined by Leibnitz to give the change to his adversary, and which out of respect for the memory of so great a man we will call not artifices, but with M. Foucher de Careil simply expedients.
The first consisted in passing over the head of Bossuet, in order to crush him with the heavy hand of his sovereign, Louis XIV.
Europe knew, or at least believed that it knew, both Bossuet and Louis XIV. It knew that the one suffered from temperament, and the other from principle, hardly any limit to the royal authority. The susceptibility of the monarch and the conscience of the subject being of one accord, Leibnitz thought that by disquieting the monarch he could easily bring the subject to reason. So in a note, ably and skilfully drawn up, addressed to the Duke of Brunswick, who was to send it to the French king, he represented that the work of peace at the point reached was arrested by an obstacle in reality more political than religious; that the Council of Trent, which was the real stumbling-block, interested Rome in her struggle with the temporal powers far more than in her controversies with heresy. Hence an intervention of the royal authority to remove that obstacle, so far from being an invasion of the domain of faith, would be only a very proper act defensive of the legitimate attributes of the temporal authority, only a continuation and a consequence of the struggle against ultramontane pretensions instituted and sustained by all the parliaments of France, and for the clergy something like a supplementary article to the declaration of 1682. Let the king make felt in this languishing [{446}] negotiation that hand which nothing in Europe can resist. Let him pronounce one of those sovereign words which have so often fetched an echo even in the sanctuary, or let him simply join to the theologians and bishops, too submissive by their quality to the spiritual authority, an ordinary representative of the regalian rights—a lawyer, a statesman, or a magistrate, and all will speedily return to order, and march rapidly toward a solution. Numerous adulations of the wisdom of the king, and even of his theological knowledge, followed by honeyed insinuations against the Bishop of Meaux, terminate this singular appeal to the secular arm, the discovery of which will hardly count among the titles to glory of philosophy, and which, moreover, was no more successful than estimable.
The king, old, weary of those religious discussions which were the plague of his reign, and even to his last days the chastisement of his intolerable despotism, communicated the note to Bossuet without comment, perhaps even without having paid it the least attention. Bossuet, strong in the solidity of his arguments, declared himself perfectly willing to receive such lay associate as should be chosen, and Leibnitz, having no reason after that to desire what Bossuet so little dreaded, the proposition fell through, and left no trace.
The other snare was not less adroit, but more innocent. In his attachment to his favorite plan, Leibnitz could not persuade himself that it could possibly be resisted by any reasons drawn from conscience alone. The party taken, the point of honor, scholastic obstinacy, were, it seemed to him, the principal reasons for rejecting his plan. It was with Catholics a matter of vanity not to yield to demands made by Protestants. But what they refused from the hand of a stranger, they would, perhaps, accept more willingly from the hand of a friend, a member of their own communion. A pious fraud would relieve the plan of all suspicion of heresy. A consultation, for example, of a supposed Catholic doctor, who should show himself favorable to it, would, perhaps, be all that was required to disarm prejudice, and the flag would pass the merchandise. The great philosopher, therefore, set himself at work. Assuming the paternal tone and authoritative air of a Catholic priest, taking care that no expression smacking of heresy should escape his lips, playing a part, so to say, with all the gravity in the world, and, without a single smile, produced in eight or ten pages that little document which he entitled Judicium Doctoris Catholici, and which, proceeding from principles in appearance the most Catholic, and advancing in ways the most orthodox, arrived at the foot of the Council of Trent itself, to mine in silence its very foundation. If M. de Careil had not this time conscientiously printed the entire text of this discovery, we should find it very hard to believe that a mind so great could descend to such a puerile game, and of which we seek in vain the fruit he evidently hoped. With whom, then, did Leibnitz imagine he had to do? Do people disguise their ideas, as they counterfeit their voices? Is the Church a citadel so poorly guarded that one can enter it by stratagem, by simply turning his cockade or dissembling his uniform? Took he Bossuet for an imbecile sentinel who could be imposed upon by passports so evidently forged?
For the honor of Leibnitz and of philosophy we would pass over in silence this crotchet of misplaced gaiety, if M. de Careil did not force us to pause on it for a moment longer before including, by attaching to it an undue importance, by pretending to see in it the solution of a literary problem, which we formerly made a subject of some observations. A few words will dispose of this incident, which beside is not wholly foreign to the principal object of our present reflections.