We are not of those who are led to you by this vile fear or by a still viler interest; we are not of those who see in you an armed force before which they must tremble, or an electoral majority before whom they must kneel. We will never come to solicit your votes, and we are bent upon serving you with absolute disinterestedness. Briefly, we are for you and will always be your friends and servants, but will never condescend to court you. Besides, the victory which we desire is not that which can be gained by force, consequently we do not count on force. We only wish to win your understandings with our faith, your hearts with our love.
We do not place the golden age in a past too superstitiously loved. Whatever affection I may feel in my heart for those dear middle ages, to which I have consecrated all my studies and all my life, I do not find them sufficiently Christian to be the only ideal. We know that those centuries, so differently judged, were the theatre of a gigantic struggle between paganism, more and more conquered, and the church, more and more victorious; and we draw a fundamental distinction between the chivalry that so heroically defended the truth and the feudality that did it such injury. We do not ignore the fact that paganism, in dying, left to the Christian ages, as a frightful legacy, the traditions of slavery, impurity, and violence; and we confess that Christianity could not in one day decapitate the hundred-headed hydra.
If we regard especially the workmen’s guilds or corporations, we will go so far as to own that their organization, so admirably Christian in some respects, nevertheless left too much room for certain abuses that we hate; and, as a decisive example, we assert that the material condition of the members was not then what a Christian heart would wish to-day. We have the religion, not the superstition, of the middle ages; of that epoch so unworthily calumniated we preserve all the elements truly Christian, and reject the others. We recognize in that rude and laborious age the dawn, the beautiful dawn, of Catholic civilization so scandalously interrupted by the Renaissance. In those centuries, so slighted and misunderstood, we salute above all the cycle of the saints.
We ardently love the sublime period when S. Benedict gave to a hundred thousand men and to twenty generations the order and signal to clear the minds and the fields, equally sterile; when S. Francis conversed with the birds of the air, reconciled all nature with humanity Christianized, and gave to his contemporaries the love of “our lady, poverty!” We love the period made joyful by the death of slavery under the font of the church; when all the institutions of the state and of the family were energetically Catholic; when royalty was represented by a S. Louis, love by a S. Elizabeth, science by a S. Thomas of Aquinas. But our soul has still stronger wings, and would fly still higher. We wish still more, we wish still better, and we will build up the future with two kinds of materials—with the past undoubtedly, but also with our desires, which are vast.
We are not of those who ingenuously think the world at present is organized as one would wish. Doubtless there are in the working-class of our time illegitimate desires, guilty jealousies, unrighteous thirsts; but we also know all that the world of laborers can offer to the eyes of God, of cruel sufferings, of noble sighs, and of honest tears. God preserve us from ever laughing at one of those griefs, even should they be merited! On the contrary, we hope that Christian society will one day come, through peace and prayer, the sacraments and love, to a better disposition, a more profound pacification, a happier distribution of riches, a wider-spread prosperity, and to something more resembling the reign of God. But, alas! we are convinced that the definitive repartition and equality will only be consummated in eternity. Those who do not believe in a future life will never see their desire of infinite justice satisfied—they condemn themselves to this punishment.
We do not despise the work of the hands; far from it, we seek to place the mechanic close to the artist. For centuries, there have been Pyrenees between art and industry; these Pyrenees we wish to remove, and we will succeed. In truth, the workman is an august being; and the title of his nobility will be easily found in the depths of faith and of theology. Listen: the eternal type, the adorable type, of the workman is the Heavenly Father, the Faber divinus, who, not content with making obedient matter spring from nothing, like a sublime goldsmith chiselled it into a splendid jewel. Beauty, Goodness, personal and living Truth—such, to the letter, was the first Workman. God joined, framed, hewed, cemented, carved the whole universe, the firmament, the stars. His gracious and magnificent hand, armed with an invisible chisel, is discovered in every part of the creation which has been wonderfully sculptured by this marvellous Workman. Workmen of every condition, here contemplate the work of your Model, of your Master, of your divine Patron. The sombre forests, the transparent foliage, the flowers whose wonders are only revealed by the microscope, the mountains, the ocean, the infinite depths—all, all were made by the great Workman.
Incomparable Artificer! he conceived the plan of all these beings in His eternal Word, and one day, to realize this design, he pronounced these words: “Be they!” and they were. But it was not enough to show himself the workman; God feared, if I may be allowed so to speak, that his calling might be despised; and he desired so truly to be a workman that of a God he made himself a carpenter as well as man. He chose a noble position, perfectly characteristic, and, with his divine hands, sawed, planed, polished, worked the wood that in the first hour of the world he had worked in the design of the creation. Workmen, my brethren, it is not a fable, it is not a symbol: Jesus, the Son of God, was the apprentice, the companion, the workman, the carpenter; and the venerable monuments of tradition show him to us making ploughs, perhaps crosses. What can I not say to you of the Holy Ghost, considered as the Workman of the spiritual world, which he had really cemented, hewed, and framed? What can I not explain of the beautiful realities of symbolism? With regret I leave this workshop of the church, and now content myself with the workshop of the creation, and with that of Nazareth.
But you question me more earnestly, and ask what I think of the contemporary workman. And I reply that, notwithstanding his faults and errors, I feel for him a great love, invincibly aroused by Christ. Yes; I close my eyes, I abstract myself. I forget so many ignoble flames, so much blood, the pure blood so sacrilegiously shed. I wish to separate my thoughts from so many ruins, so many scandals. I come to you, pagan workman, rebellious to God, and, in the midst of your rebellious and Satanic orgies, I approach you, who formerly were baptized, and place my hand upon your heart, that I may not despair. Your mind is darkened, your will misled; but there are yet some pulsations which allow me still to hope, and I willingly repeat the words of that great bishop who has devoted so much time to the social question: “The people love that which is beautiful, they understand what is great; know that they have high aspirations, and that they seek to rise.” And again: “The workman of our day has eliminated the generous ideas from the Gospel, and yet borrows from Christianity his noble and holy sentiments.”
Nothing is truer; if chemistry could analyze souls, what Christian elements would be found in those of workmen! I readily see in each the admirable material of one of those poor men so powerfully sketched by Victor Hugo. He speaks of a miserable fisherman on the sea-shore, who already has five children, perishing from hunger; when one day at market, he sees and adopts two orphans poorer than he, and thus he reasons: “We have five children, these will make seven; we will mingle them together, and they will climb at night on our knees. They will live, and will be brother and sister to the five others. When God sees that we must feed this little boy and this little girl with the others, he will make us catch more fish, that is all!” Workmen of Paris, read these lines; they are worth more than those of the Année terrible, and paint you exactly. You are capable of this sublime devotion, and I recall you to the true nobility of your nature.
You know now what we are not, and I think that we have never failed for an instant to be truly sincere. On the contrary, we have designedly multiplied all the difficulties with perfect frankness. It is scarcely necessary to add that we are not of those who disdain the social and labor questions, and who, while hiding themselves in the graceful domain of fancy, repeat with Alfred de Musset: