And it is necessary to remark that this need of movement thus begun, did not end with the conquest; but, obeying perfectly the law of inertia, according to which a movement being started it continues indefinitely if friction does not occur to arrest it, it was continued by the crusades, by the Norman invasion of Sicily, and by the epidemics of pilgrimage that may be regarded as the continuation of the movement towards the South, begun three centuries before Christ, and become a habit when even the necessity was no longer so great as at other times, and when it was even no longer urgent.
Here is still another cause of philoneism; the successive movements which grow out of those first started.
As the historians very well observe, Mahomet was a continuation of the Judaic Christian revolutionary initiative. "Mahomet was a Nazarene, a Judæo-Christian. Semitic monotheism regained its rights through him, and avenged itself for the mythological and polytheistic complications that Greek genius had introduced into the theology of the first disciples of Jesus." (Renan.) There is more of this in revolutions and still more in rebellions; progress, philoneism, following the law of accelerated movement and of the same law of inertia, once begun, blindly precipitates itself to opposite excesses, the very thing that causes its ruin. Thus Cromwell in a country almost feudal and ultra-monarchical reached, or rather was driven by his party, to regicide, and to the foundation of a democratic republic in which the peers were consigned to oblivion and his partisans (of the Barebones parliament) went so far as to wish to do away with lawyers and universities, to forbid dances, theatrical representations, and even Christmas festivities, to mutilate statues on behalf of decency, and to burn sacred pictures. (Macaulay.) This led to a reaction which under Charles II. reached absolute power by consent of parliament. In Christianity castration, and even the abolition of property was reached. We know the excesses of '89.
Passion explains many of these facts, which proceed even to insanity. St. Paul, from an enemy became an apostle of Christ. Clarendon after abandoning himself to despair at seeing his son go over from the service of James to that of William, became a rebel at the end of fifteen days. The parliament of James, ultra-monarchical as it was, rebelled. The conventional Baudot said: "There are men who have fever for twenty-four hours. I have had it for ten years." "In the days of terrible crises," wrote Valbert, "the law of cause and effect seems suspended, the work is accomplished in an hour. To ask revolution to be wise, is to ask the tempest to break nothing."[76]
[76] Valbert. Le centennaire de 1789. Paris, 1889.
"In every revolution," writes Renan, "the authors of it are absorbed and suppressed by those who succeed them. The first century of the Hegira saw the extermination of the relations and friends of Mahomet by those who pretended to confiscate for their own profit the revolution he had created. In the Franciscan movement the true friends of Saint François d'Assisi, were, after a generation, regarded as heretics and as dangerous men, and were led to the stake by hundreds."
An idea in the first days of creative activity proceeds with giant steps, and we can say, the movement once begun continues by virtue of the law of inertia always to increase; its originator falls behind, and becomes an obstacle to his own idea which persists in moving forward in spite of him. The Ebionites who gave to Christianity its first start became after a century a scandal to the church; their doctrine a blasphemy.[77]
[77] Renan. L'Eglise chrétienne.
It is this very tendency, caused by the arousing of passion, that makes all revolutions abortive, that causes them through their own excesses to be the authors of their own destruction, and which neutralises or much decreases the progress made by revolutions.
The gravest objection against misoneism constitutes, accordingly, the strongest proof of it. Like the plant, the animal, and the stone, man remains motionless, unless a disturbance of his state occurs through other forces, and through the law of inertia itself, which after having at first rendered him immovable afterwards drives him to opposite excess, but to replunge him anew into immobility.