Public worship is no more an arbitrary institution than society and government, language and arts. All these things have their roots in human nature. Adoration abandoned to itself, would easily degenerate into dreams and ecstasy, or would be dissipated in the rush of affairs and the necessities of every day. The more energetic it is, the more it tends to express itself outwardly in acts that realize it, to take a sensible, precise, and regular form, which, by a proper reaction on the sentiment that produced it, awakens it when it slumbers, sustains it when it languishes, and also protects it against extravagances of every kind to which it might give birth in so many feeble or unbridled imaginations. Philosophy, then, lays the natural foundation of public worship in the internal worship of adoration. Having arrived at that point, it stops, equally careful not to betray its rights and not to go beyond them, to run over, in its whole extent and to its farthest limit, the domain of natural reason, as well as not to usurp a foreign domain.
But philosophy does not think of trespassing on the ground of theology; it wishes to remain faithful to itself, and also to follow its true mission, which is to love and favor every thing that tends to elevate man, since it heartily applauds the awakening of religious and Christian sentiment in all noble souls, after the ravages that have been made on every hand, for more than a century, by a false and sad philosophy. What, in fact, would not have been the joy of a Socrates and a Plato if they had found the human race in the arms of Christianity! How happy would Plato—who was so evidently embarrassed between his beautiful doctrines and the religion of his times, who managed so carefully with that religion even when he avoided it, who was forced to take from it the best possible part, in order to aid a favorable interpretation of his doctrine—have been, if he had had to do with a religion which presents to man, as at once its author and its model, the sublime and mild Crucified, of whom he had an extraordinary presentiment, whom he almost described in the person of a just man dying on the cross;[258] a religion which came to announce, or at least to consecrate and expand the idea of the unity of God and that of the unity of the human race; which proclaims the equality of all souls before the divine law, which thereby has prepared and maintains civil equality; which prescribes charity still more than justice, which teaches man that he does not live by bread alone, that he is not wholly contained in his senses and his body, that he has a soul, a free soul, whose value is infinite, above the value of all worlds, that life is a trial, that its true object is not pleasure, fortune, rank, none of those things that do not pertain to our real destiny, and are often more dangerous than useful, but is that alone which is always in our power, in all situations and all conditions, from end to end of the earth, to wit, the improvement of the soul by itself, in the holy hope of becoming from day to day less unworthy of the regard of the Father of men, of the examples given by him, and of his promises. If the greatest moralist that ever lived could have seen these admirable teachings, which in germ were already at the foundation of his spirit, of which more than one trait can be found in his works, if he had seen them consecrated, maintained, continually recalled to the heart and imagination of man by sublime and touching institutions, what would have been his tender and grateful sympathy for such a religion! If he had come in our own times, in that age given up to revolutions, in which the best souls were early infected by the breath of skepticism, in default of the faith of an Augustine, of an Anselm, of a Thomas, of a Bossuet, he would have had, we doubt not, the sentiments at least of a Montesquieu,[259] of a Turgot,[260] of a Franklin,[261] and very far from putting the Christian religion and a good philosophy at war with each other, he would have been forced to unite them, to elucidate and fortify them by each other. That great mind and that great heart, which dictated to him the Phedon, the Gorgias, the Republic, would also have taught him that such books are made for a few sages, that there is needed for the human race a philosophy at once similar and different, that this philosophy is a religion, and that this desirable and necessary religion is the Gospel. We do not hesitate to say that, without religion, philosophy, reduced to what it can laboriously draw from perfected natural reason, addresses itself to a very small number, and runs the risk of remaining without much influence on manners and life; and that, without philosophy, the purest religion is no security against many superstitions, which little by little bring all the rest, and for that reason it may see the best minds escaping its influence, as was the case in the eighteenth century. The alliance between true religion and true philosophy is, then, at once natural and necessary; natural by the common basis of the truths which they acknowledge; necessary for the better service of humanity. Philosophy and religion differ only in the forms that distinguish, without separating them. Another auditory, other forms, and another language. When St. Augustine speaks to all the faithful in the church of Hippone, do not seek in him the subtile and profound metaphysician who combated the Academicians with their own arms, who supports himself on the Platonic theory of ideas, in order to explain the creation. Bossuet, in the treatise De la Connaissance de Dieu et Soi-même, is no longer, and at the same time he is always, the author of the Sermons, of the Elévations, and the incomparable Catéchisme de Meaux. To separate religion and philosophy has always been, on one side or the other, the pretension of small, exclusive, and fanatical minds; the duty, more imperative now than ever, of whomsoever has for either a serious and enlightened love, is to bring together and unite, instead of dividing and wasting the powers of the mind and the soul, in the interest of the common cause and the great object which the Christian religion and philosophy pursue, each in its own way,—I mean the moral grandeur of humanity.[262]
LECTURE XVII.
RÉSUMÉ OF DOCTRINE.
Review of the doctrine contained in these lectures, and the three orders of facts on which this doctrine rests, with the relation of each one of them to the modern school that has recognized and developed it, but almost always exaggerated it.—Experience and empiricism.—Reason and idealism.—Sentiment and mysticism.—Theodicea. Defects of different known systems.—The process that conducts to true theodicea, and the character of certainty and reality that this process gives to it.
Having arrived at the limit of this course, we have a final task to perform,—it is necessary to recall its general spirit and most important results.
From the first lecture, I have signalized to you the spirit that should animate this instruction,—a spirit of free inquiry, recognizing with joy the truth wherever found, profiting by all the systems that the eighteenth century has bequeathed to our times, but confining itself to none of them.
The eighteenth century has left to us as an inheritance three great schools which still endure—the English and French school, whose chief is Locke, among whose most accredited representatives are Condillac, Helvetius, and Saint-Lambert; the Scotch school, with so many celebrated names, Hutcheson, Smith, Reid, Beattie, Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart;[263] the German school, or rather school of Kant, for, of all the philosophers beyond the Rhine, the philosopher of Kœnigsberg is almost the only one who belongs to history. Kant died at the beginning of the nineteenth century;[264] the ashes of his most illustrious disciple, Fichte,[265] are scarcely cold. The other renowned philosophers of Germany still live,[266] and escape our valuation.
But this is only an ethnographical enumeration of the schools of the eighteenth century. It is above all necessary to consider them in their characters, analogous or opposite. The Anglo-French school particularly represents empiricism and sensualism, that is to say, an almost exclusive importance attributed in all parts of human knowledge to experience in general, and especially to sensible experience. The Scotch school and the German school represent a more or less developed spiritualism. Finally, there are philosophers, for example, Hutcheson, Smith, and others, who, mistrusting the senses and reason, give the supremacy to sentiment.