In 1816 and 1817 the evangelical reaction made rapid progress, and the body of Genevese pastors resolved to combat it by the voice of authority. They found, however, no better method of doing so than by insisting upon what, twelve years later, even M. Samuel Vincent did not scruple to recommend; they prescribed silence even whilst they proclaimed liberty. "Without"—these are their words—"giving any judgment upon the questions really involved, and without controlling in any respect the liberty of opinions," they imposed a solemn engagement both upon students demanding to be consecrated to the sacred ministry, and upon ministers candidates for pastoral functions in the Church of Geneva. It was conceived as follows: "As long as we reside and preach in the churches of the Canton of Geneva, we promise to abstain from establishing, either in entire discourses or in parts of discourses directed to this object, our opinion—first, of the manner in which the divine nature was incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ; secondly, of original sin; thirdly, of the mode in which grace operates, or grace is efficient; fourthly, of predestination. We promise also not to combat, in any public discourse, the opinion of any pastors or ministers touching these subjects." [Footnote 21]
[Footnote 21: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron de Goltz; p. 153.]
It is difficult to understand how men ever could have flattered themselves with the hope of re-establishing peace in the Church by the employment of so sorry an expedient. Liberty, that has rent asunder such heavy chains, does not permit itself to be confined by so flimsy a net. The immediate effect of the regulation of the Genevese pastors was an outburst of discontent. The more violent Methodists, MM. Malan and Bost at their head, proclaimed aloud their separation from the established Church; the more moderate, among others, MM. Gaussen and Merle d'Aubigné, persisted in remaining, by right of their ministry, in its bosom, holding themselves responsible representativesthereof the doctrines of the Reformation, which, in fact, they did continue to preach and to teach.The body of pastors at first used great forbearance toward them, and respected their liberty; and when the populace, irritated at the agitation caused in families by the Dissenters, and offended by the austerity of their precepts, made hostile demonstrations toward them, the Council of Geneva had the wisdom and fairness to use measures of repression; but, soon becoming weary of this painful duty, the Council formally forbade, without its express permission, any book of religious controversy to be printed at Geneva.The body of pastors soon pronounced as vehement a condemnation of the moderate Methodists as of the ultra Dissenters. The moderate Methodists then in their turn resorted to energetic measures in support of their cause: they founded an evangelical society and a school of theology; devoted the one to propagate the zeal and the other to teach the principles of the Christian reaction; and fifteen years after the commencement of the struggle, the chiefs of the party which had proclaimed that the free divergence of individual belief in the bosom of the Church was "the great fact of our epoch, and the great step that the Reformation had in our days to make"—these chiefs, being the body of pastors, the Consistory, and the Council of State at Geneva, suspended M. Gaussen from his functions of pastor in the parish of Satigny for having taken part in the organization of an independent form of worship, and of a school of independent theology; "a proceeding," they said, "incompatible with the peace of the Church, and to be regarded as an act of insubordination, tending to bring ecclesiastical authority into discredit." [Footnote 22]
[Footnote 22: Genève religieuse au XIX siècle: par le Baron de Goltz; pp. 379-384.]
Such religious ferment in the primitive home of the French Reformation, and at the very gates of France, could not fail to exercise a powerful influence upon the French Protestant Church.On quitting Geneva in 1817, Mr. Robert Haldane proceeded to Montauban, where he formed friendships with some of the Professors of the Faculty, and among others with M. Daniel Encontre. He published there also a work in French, which his friends hastened to circulate. It was styled "Emmanuel: vues Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ." In 1818, a society formed in England, named the "Continental Society," specially devoted itself to the purpose of seconding on the Continent the progress of this Christian reaction. An English dissenter, Mr. Mark Wilks, pastor of the American community formed at Paris, was the most efficient agent of the societies which had this object in view. "It might be said of Mr. Wilks," wrote lately the Pastor Juillerat, "that he might have governed an empire, his character was so energetic, his mind so active and enterprising. He brought me aid of every description: money was required, he had money; pamphlets and books were wanted, no one was better provided; no one understood better the details pertaining to the printing and publication of papers."Several Protestant journals and magazines, "La Voix de la Religion Chrétienne au XIX siècle," "Les Archives du Christianisme au XIX siècle," "Les Mélanges de Religion, de Morale, et de Critique Sacrée," "L'Evangeliste," "La Revue Protestante," "Le Semeur," etc., etc., were at this epoch successively founded and carried in different directions throughout the scattered Protestant Church, from its central organization, the fervor which had there been kindled. Genuine zeal for religion is not satisfied by action from a distance, or by action upon unknown persons, or by indirect means, as by books and by journals: it demands direct oral communication from man to man—the union of men's souls in common prayer. Certain young pastors who had at first shared in the evangelical movement at Geneva, MM. Neff, Pyt, Bost, Gonthier, scattered themselves over France, some assuming functions as local pastors, others as traveling missionaries, attracting to their proximity groups of zealous Protestants, animating the lukewarm, and erecting in every place where they made any stay little centers of Christianity, which radiated to the neighboring country around.Distinct associations, some officially recognized by the State, others having no public character, [Footnote 23] gave to the labors of isolated individuals the publicity, the unity, the permanence which they required; and a special organization (colportage biblique) which at its commencement numbered only seven, but a few years afterward had sixty agents, all of them, although obscure individuals, as zealous as their patrons were zealous, caused the Holy Scriptures and religious tracts to penetrate into parts of France hopelessly inaccessible to any other method of communication and of instruction.
[Footnote 23: La Société biblique, la Société pour l'encouragement de l'instruction primaire parmi les protestants, la Société évangélique de France, la Société des traités religieuse, la Société des missions protestantes, la Société centrale pour les intérêts protestants, la Société d'évangelisation, etc.]
To a movement so earnest and so general, although propagated by a small number of persons in the heart of a population itself forming but a small minority in the nation at large, obstacles would inevitably occur. They were encountered on all hands and of all kinds, religious and political—from the administration, from popular prejudices, from the distrust of the Government, from the hostility of the Roman Catholic clergy, from differences of opinion on theological points among Protestants themselves, from theamour propreof individuals, and the perplexed or timorous ideas of subalterns in authority. The activity of the Protestant societies created uneasiness in bishops and priests, who strove not merely to counteract their influence, but to interfere with their liberty of action. Mayors of towns, judges of the peace, sometimes too, magistrates and administrators of more elevated rank, lent their aid to these exceptionable proceedings. Hence arose suspicions, complaints, and struggles which retarded the new-born impulse of awakening Christianity.But the earnest perseverance of its patrons, the general wisdom of the supreme Government, and the authority, growing more and more each day, of the principles of justice and of liberty, gradually surmounted all these obstacles. It was the Restoration that recognized the chief Protestant societies and gave them the sanction of the law. Under the Government of 1830 they used their rights with more confidence and fewer hinderances. The equitable intentions of King Louis Philippe and of his counselors upon religious matters could not be doubtful, whatever their caution not to cause uneasiness or wound the susceptibilities of the Roman Catholics. The Protestants now believed it to be no longer necessary to look to foreign support. Formed at Paris in 1833, the Evangelical Society of France experienced a momentary impulse of national jealousy, the result of which was some coldness in its relations with the Continental Society of London; but as soon as the latter perceived that its direct interference was rather an embarrassment than a necessity to the Christian reaction in France, it withdrew its agency without withholding its sympathy, and handed over to the Evangelical Society of France all the "stations" and religious charities which had up to that time been founded by its exertions.
The awakening of Christianity among the Protestants of France had now produced such results that it mattered little who the patrons of the movement might be; it had assumed its true character, and was drawing its strength from the fountain of truth. In times of religious incredulity and of religious indifference, and even in the transitional times which immediately ensue, it is the error of many, and even of men who respect and support religion, to consider it in the light of a great political institution—a salutary system of moral police, however necessary to society, indebted for its merits and its prerogatives rather to its practical utility than to its intrinsic truth.Grave error, misconceiving both the nature and the origin of religion, and calculated to deprive it both of its empire and its dignity! Utility men hold as of great account, but it is only truth that commands unconditional surrender. Utility enjoins prudence and forbearance; truth alone inspires feelings of confidingness and devotion. A religion having no other guarantee for its influence and its endurance than its social utility would be very near its ruin. Men have need of, nay, they thirst for truth in their relations with God, even more than in their relations with one another; the spontaneous prayer, adoration, obedience, suppose faith. It was in the very name of the verity of the Christian religion, of that verity manifested in its history by the word and even by the presence of God, that the awakening of Christians was accomplished among us. The laborers in this great work felt the faith of Christianity, and they diffused it; had they spoken only of the social utility of Christianity, they would never have made the conquest of a single human soul.
At first sight one is tempted to attribute this success to energy of faith on the part of these laborers in the cause, to the active and devoted perseverance of their zeal. Again a mistake! Not that human merit was without its share in the results; but even where the faith was thus propagated, the share that that faith itself had in the result was infinitely greater, from its own proper and inherent virtue, than any share of men. Incredulity and indifferentism may diffuse themselves and pretend to dominate; they leave unsolved the problems that lie in the depth of man's soul: they do not rid him of his perplexities, of instinct or of reflection, as to the world's creation and man's creation, the origin of good and evil, providence and fate, human liberty and human responsibility, man's immortality and his future state.Instead of the denials and the doubts that had been thrown over these unescapable questions, those who applied themselves fully to rouse awakened Christianity, recalled the human soul to the memory of positive solutions of these questions; solutions in accordance with the traditions of their native land, in accordance with their habits as members of families, and in harmony with the recollections of early childhood; solutions often contested, never refuted; always recurring in the lapse of ages, and century after century! It was from the intrinsic and permanent value of the doctrines which they were preaching, and not from themselves, that the laborers in the work derived their force and their credit.
They had another principle of force as well; a force born and developed in the bosom of the Christian religion, and in that alone; they had the passionate desire to save human souls. Men are not, they never have been, struck as they ought to have been struck with the beauty of this passion, or with its novelty in the moral history of the world, or with the part that it has played among Christian nations.Before the era of Christianity, in times of Asiatic and European antiquity, pagans and philosophers busied themselves about the destiny of men after the close of their earthly life, and with curiosity, too, did they sound the obscurity; but the ardent solicitude for the eternal welfare of human souls, the never-wearying labor to prepare human souls for eternity—to set them even during this existence in intimate relations with God, and to prepare them to undergo God's judgments;—we have in all this a fact essentially Christian, one of the sublimest characteristics of Christianity, and one of the most striking marks of its divine origin. God constantly in relation with mankind and with every man, God present during the actual life of every man, and God the arbiter of his future destiny; the immortality of each human soul, and the connection between his actual life and his future destiny; the immense value of each human soul in the eyes of God, and the immense import to the soul of the future that awaits it: these are the convictions and the affirmations all implied in the one passion alluded to, the passion for the salvation of men's souls, which was the whole life of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which passed by his example and by his precepts into the life of his primitive disciples, and which, amid the diversities of age, people, manners, opinions, has remained the characteristic feature and the inspiring breath of the genius of Christianity; breath which animated the men who in our days labored, and with success, to revive Christian faith among the Protestants of France!Their zeal was employed in a very circumscribed sphere; beyond it their names were unknown, and unknown they have remained. What spectators, what readers, what public knew at that time, or know even at this moment, what manner of men they were or what their deeds—those men who called themselves Neff, Bost, Pyt, Gonthier, Audebez, Cook, Wilks, Haldane?But who, I would ask, in the time of Tacitus and of Pliny, knew what manner of men they were, and what the deeds of Peter, Paul, John, Matthew, Philip—the unknown disciples of the Master, unknown himself, who had overcome the world? Notoriety is not essential to influence; and in the sphere of the soul, as in the order of nature, fountains are not the less abundant because their springs are hidden in obscurity. The Christian missionaries of our time did not trouble themselves to lessen that obscurity. To literary celebrity they had no pretension, nor did they seek the triumph of any political idea, of any specific system of ecclesiastical organization, of any favorite plan in which their personal vanity was interested: the salvation of human souls was their only passion, and their only object. They looked upon themselves as humble servants commissioned to remind men of promises which they had forgotten—of promises of salvation by faith in Jesus. "The stir of the reaction," one of themselves has said, "bore impressed upon it the character of youth, or even of childhood.The humblest pastor on his circuit became a missionary; his transit was regarded almost like that of a meteor. On the instant an assembly was convoked, it numbered twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred, two hundred persons, collected to listen joyfully, as if it were a great novelty or miracle, to that Gospel which we know by heart;—alas! which we know by heart far more than we have it in the heart!" [Footnote 24]
[Footnote 24: Mémoires pouvant servir à l'histoire du réveil religieux des églises protestantes de la Suisse et de la France, par A. Bost, (1854,) t. 1, p. 240.]
Who could mistake, on hearing such sentiments and such language, the really Christian character of the reaction?
Never-ending weakness of man's nature, and inevitable imperfection of man's work, even when man is walking in the ways of God! In the midst of awakening Christianity, and of this fervent return to the faith of the Gospel, reappeared some of the ancient pretensions of theology, and among others the pretension to penetrate the decrees of God and to define the terms of man's salvation.
In February, 1818, the pious and orthodox "Doyen" of the Protestant Faculty of Montauban, M. Daniel Encontre, rendering an account of the work of Mr. Robert Haldane, (Emmanuel, ou vues Scripturaires sur Jésus-Christ,) which had just appeared, hastened, after having justly commended it, to add: "The concluding pages of the 'Emmanuel' express sentiments which Evangelical Christians are far from sharing. The author lays down the principle, that all men who do not believe in the perfect equality of theSonand of theFather, are enemies alike of bothFatherandSon; that they deny, and blaspheme against both, and cannot avoid eternal death. He regards the forbearance we show to them as infinitely criminal, and seems even inclined to condemn all who have not the courage to condemn them. As for me, I venture to believe that it is the duty of a Christian to work out his own salvation without allowing himself to pronounce upon the salvation of others.Judge not, that ye be not judged, says He whom we all acknowledge as our Master; and St. Paul adds, 'Who art thouthat condemnest another man's servant?' I seize this opportunity to declare to all men desirous to hear it, that I believe firmly in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that I adopt in every respect the Nicæan Creed. I dare to affirm besides, that these sentiments are actually those of all the members of our Faculty, as they have always been those of our Churches. It seems to me that persons who know not Jesus Christ as 'God above all things, blessed eternally,' are much to be pitied, and want the greatest of all consolations. This error appears the more dangerous, because it is generally followed by other errors; for the truths which are the objects of faith are so connected and riveted together, that it is impossible to discard one without shaking or overturning all the others.These truths form together a majestic edifice, to which all its parts are absolutely necessary, and which falls in ruins if a breach be made anywhere; and particularly, if the first stone removed be the keystone of the corner. But what would become of us all, if the erring, even when they err in good faith, had no hope of access to the throne of grace? Men who, as I do, feel how much they need God's mercy, and man's indulgence, feel little disposition to be severe toward others." [Footnote 25]
[Footnote 25: Archives du Christianisme aux XIX e siècle, t. 1, pp. 63-66.]
In holding this language, M. Encontre was not merely performing, on his own account, an act of humility and of Christian charity; he was touching upon one of the supreme questions which, in our days, are occasioning a crisis in Christendom; and he was indicating its true and its sole solution. Like all passions, (the best are not exempt,) the passion for the salvation of man's soul is full of enthusiasm and fall of blindness; it believes too readily in the possibility of attaining the object; it is too unscrupulous and undiscriminating in the means.Hence sprung religious tyranny and theological intolerance: the powerful thought they could compel the human soul to work out its own salvation; the learned believed they could define the conditions of that salvation. Mistakes, both of them, profoundly antichristian! Just as no power of man has the right to strip any single soul, created by God free and responsible, of its liberty of conscience; so, equally, no science of man can define the laws and the facts that shall regulate the future state of the soul. Liberty is, on this earth, the principle of the moral life of man; man's state beyond this earth is a question between him and his Maker, and to be determined by the use which man may have here made of his liberty. To respect God's gift of liberty to man, and the mystery of God's decrees respecting man's salvation, is in reality the law of Christians; and it is only on this double condition that there really is either any awakening or any progress of Christians.
Nothing does more honor to the memory of M. Daniel Encontre than to have been one of the first to understand and to fulfill this double duty. Firmly attached to those fundamental articles of belief which are Christianity itself, he was strange to every narrowness or exaggeration of doctrine, to every presumptuousness of opinion, and to every theological intolerance; his piety was comprehensive, without there being any vagueness in his faith; his Christianity was that of a Liberal; nor did his attainments as a mathematician indispose him to remain a Christian.
Scarcely was M. Encontre dead, when two new men, both, like him, eminent as pastors and professors—M. Alexandre Vinet and M. Adolphe Monod—appeared on the religious arena, and gave more éclat to the Christian reaction by using similar means, and by impelling the Protestant Church of France in the same direction.
Although he was born and continually lived and wrote in Switzerland, M. Alexandre Vinet was of French extraction; he belongs to France as much as to Switzerland, for he knew, and understood, and loved France as much as he did Switzerland. He served, too, the cause of religious liberty, and the Christian reaction, in France not less than in Switzerland. A delicate child, son of a poor and an austere school-master, who destined him to the obscure life of a village clergyman, he manifested from the commencement of his laborious career an ardent taste for literature and for study, which promised him a rich reward in the intellectual enjoyment of the chef-d'oeuvres of ancient and modern literature. He was found upon one occasion in his little chamber in a fit of enthusiasm and affected to tears by a perusal of the "Cid." At the age of twenty he became Professor of French Literature at Bâle; and there he devoted himself to the service of every candidate upon the Rhine or upon the Swiss Alps who required to be taught to comprehend and admire the great writers of France of whatever age, and in whatever department of literature.Philosophers and orators, prose-writers and poets, Christians or Freethinkers, Catholics or Protestants, Conservatives or Reformers, Classicists or Romanticists—all the men who have constituted the intellectual and literary glory of France, obtained in this fervent Methodist of the Valdenses an admirer as warm as he was intelligent and impartial. The prevailing characteristic of M. Vinet's literary essays and criticisms is their geniality; and wherever he encounters any spark or trace of the true or the beautiful, under whatever banner they appear, and however they may be mingled with opinions otherwise shocking to his feelings, he is at once attracted and moved, and he admires and praises with enthusiasm. His was a mind of comprehensive sympathies, open to every impression, keen to appreciate, always ready to enjoy everything that deserved to give pleasure, even although it might be only momentarily and in passing.
This passionate admirer of the beautiful, this critic, so liberal-minded and so impartial, was a sound and uncompromising moralist, as well as a pious and firm Christian. The predominant idea of all his literary judgments is moral; and this determines the tone of his criticism, and the impression which it leaves behind it, without ever rendering it either harsh, or illiberal, or narrow-minded. In the sphere of positive belief, without importing into controversies between believer and believer any microscopic criticism of detail, M. Vinet has never, upon the divine origin and the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, had the least hesitation, never made the smallest concession; he grapples directly with the most specious and the most popular objections of his adversaries, and combats them with a conviction the expression of which becomes more and more eloquent the clearer and the more complete its manifestation. "To attempt to distinguish morality from dogma," he says, "is to attempt to distinguish a river from its source.The Christian dogma is at its outset a morality, although a Christian one. Just as God, in the creed of Christianity, reveals himself under a form that nature did not announce, Christian morality, in its turn, invests itself with a character that nature would never have impressed upon it. Man finding his own inability to make himself a religion, God came to aid him in his weakness. It is now rather more than eighteen centuries since, in an obscure corner of the world, there appeared a man. I do not say that a long series of prophets had announced the coming of that man; that a long series of miracles had marked with the seal of God the nation where he was to be born, and even the prophecy which foretold him; that, in a word, an imposing mass of evidence surrounds and authenticates him. I say merely that that man preached a religion. That religion is not natural religion; the dogmas of the existence of God and of the soul's immortality are everywhere taken for granted in his discourses—never taught, never proved.Neither are the ideas which he teaches deduced logically from the primitive axioms of reason; that which he teaches, that which forms the substance of his doctrine, embraces subjects which confound the reason, and to which the reason has neither way nor access; he preaches a God on earth, a God man, a God poor, a God crucified; he preaches wrath involving the innocent, mercy exempting the guilty from all condemnation, God the victim of man, and man forming one person with God; he preaches a new birth, without which man can never be saved; he preaches the sovereignty of God's grace, and the plenitude of the liberty of man. I do not in any way qualify his teaching; I give them to you as they are, and without disguise; I seek not to justify them. You may, if you please, feel surprise, you may take offense; scruple not to do so. But when you have to your heart's content wondered at their strangeness, I on my side will propose to you another subject for your wonder.These strange dogmas conquered the world. In their very infancy they invaded learned Athens, rich Corinth, haughty Rome. They gathered together 'Confessors' from workshops, from prisons, from schools, from the courts of justice, and from thrones. Conquerors of civilization, they triumphed over barbarism; they made to pass under the same yoke the degraded Roman, the savage Sicambrian. The forms of society have changed; society has been dissolved and moulded afresh. They alone have endured in their integrity. No other doctrine, whether of philosophy or of religion, lasted: each had its time; each time its idea; and, as a celebrated writer has said, the religious sentiment, abandoned to itself, chose for itself moulds in accordance with the time, which it broke when the time was no longer there. But the dogma of the Cross persisted in recurring.Had it only taken possession of a certain class of persons it would have been much, it would perhaps have been even inexplicable; but you find followers of the Cross in the camp and in civil life, among the rich and among the poor, among the bold and among the timid, among the learned and among the ignorant. This dogma is good for all, everywhere, always; it never grows old. The religion of the Cross appears nowhere in arrear of civilization; on the contrary, far as civilization may progress, it ever finds Christianity in advance. Suppose not that a complaisant Christianity will ever cancel any article or expunge any idea to accommodate itself to the age: no, it derives its strength from its inflexibility, and needs not make any surrender to be in harmony with what is beautiful, legitimate, true; for it is in itself the type of them all. Still it is not a religion which flatters man; and the worldly, by keeping aloof, show plainly enough that Christianity is a strange doctrine. Those who dare not reject it strive to render it palatable. They strip it of what offends them—of its myths, as they are pleased to style them; they almost make out of Christ's doctrine arationalism.But, singular to say, once a rationalism it has no longer any force; in this respect resembling one of the most marvelous creatures in the animate world, to which it is death to lose its sting. Thestrangedogmas disappear, but with them all zeal, fervor, sanctity, charity, disappear also; the salt of the earth has lost its savor, and we know not by what means to restore it. But, on the other hand, do you learn that somewhere or other there is an awakening of Christians, that Christianity is resuscitating, that faith shows signs of life, that zeal abounds? Ask not in what soil these precious plants are springing; you may pronounce yourself: it is in the rude and rugged soil of orthodoxy, in the shade of the mysteries which confound human reason, and of which human reason would like so much to get rid, … Some passages in the fair work of M. Saint-Marc Girardin upon dramatic literature might, at least I fear so, lead to the conclusion that Christianity is, in its essence, only the result of a natural progress of man's mind, a gradual development of ancient wisdom.Such, for instance, is the passage where the author tells us that the Greeks were advancing step by step toward Christian spiritualism. We regret that M. Saint-Marc Girardin did not say in what sense he understood this, and within what limits. We hope that he will not see in us the champion of a captious orthodoxy, if we say that nothing so much weakens the authority of Christianity, that nothing prejudices in men's minds its cause more, than to treat it as a link in the chain, which chain in reality it severed. That events, that is, Providence, did aforehand hollow a bed in the regions of the west for this divine river, what believer, however rigid, would ever entertain any scruple in admitting? But still it is essential that we should not misapprehend the source whence that river welled forth.No natural development of events, either among the Jews or among the Greeks, can account for the existence of Christianity. Whatever the progress made by the ancients, there never was a time when there existed not an infinity between their ideas, and the ideas of Christianity; and infinity alone can fill up the gulf between. There is an end of Christianity if men agree in thinking the contrary—if they succeed in causing the Supernatural to assume a place in one of the compartments of the Philosophy of History. As far as we are concerned, we would prefer for the Christian religion the most outrageous denial, to an admiration circumscribed within such limits. Christ's faith is nothing if not, like Melchisedek without earthly parent here below, and without genealogy." [Footnote 26]
[Footnote 26: Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, p. 85. Premiers discours, pp. 14, 50, 53. Littérature Française, vol. iii, p. 623.]
Whoever indicated with greater distinctness the keystone in the edifice of Christianity, or ever clung to it more closely? M. Vinet occupied himself in turn with freedom of conscience and of man's thought, with the faith of Christ, and with the literature of France. These three subjects became the passions of his life, stirring his soul, though at unequal depths. But of these three only one, the passion for literature, was a source to him of tranquil and unmitigated enjoyment. In his advocacy of man's liberty and of Christianity, M. Vinet had to pass not only through the ordeal of intellectual labors and combats, but through the solicitudes and sorrows of life. The defender of the liberty of forms of worship, crowned as such by the "Societé Français de la Morale Chrétienne," lived to see this liberty attacked in his native Switzerland, at once by popular fury and by civil authority. The fervent promoter of the Christian reaction, beheld one hundred and sixty evangelical pastors of the Canton of the Vaud, his companions in this pious work, forced to quit their "Chairs" in order to preserve their faith.And it was in sickness, and at the approach of death, that M. Vinet had to undergo all this. Neither his faith nor the tranquillity of his soul was disturbed. He continued, to his last hour, to be the active champion of liberty, the faithful servant of Christ, the eloquent admirer and commentator upon French literature, which he followed in all its phases, whether calm or stormy, whether pure or defiled. "After all," so he wrote in 1845, "I am not one of those who despair; God, without any violence to our freedom of action, rather by that freedom itself, conducts us to the unknown shores. The ports at which we land do not all of them afford secure mooring; we know something of that even in this little country. Our progress will be slow, and amid storms; but the circle of universal truth will be completed, and man's sense of moral right and wrong will be improved, at the same time that man's science will be enriched.I should feel horror if I thought thatSome Oneis not at the center of all this movement, holding all its elements in his hand;Some Oneto whom, whether they know him or do not know him, the aspirations of all creatures ascend in their sorrow, and whom they instinctively salute with the sweet reassuring name of 'Father.'" [Footnote 27]
[Footnote 27: Notice sur M. Alexandra Vinet, par M. E. Souvestre, published in the Magazin Pittoresque de 1848, p. 81.The principal works of M. Alexandre Vinet are:1. Traité et Polémique sur la liberté des cultes. 1826, 1852.2. Discours sur quelques sujets religieux. 1831, 1853.3. Essais de philosophic et de morale religieuse. 1837.4. Essai sur la manifestation des convictions religieuses, et sur la séparation de l'Église et de État. 1842, 1858.5. Études et méditations évangéliques. 1847, 1849, 1851.6. Études sur Pascal. 1848, 1856.q 7. Chrestomathie Française, Histoire de la littérature Française au XVIII siècle, et Études sur la littérature Française au XIX siècle. 1829, 1849, 1853, etc.He wrote, besides, numerous short pieces, and articles in reviews and journals, suggested by topics of the day.]
Upon a single point, the relations of Church and State, his usual comprehensiveness of view and independence of thought appeared to abandon M. Vinet.Justly struck and afflicted by his own experience of the inconveniences of a strict bond between Church and State, disgusted at the servility and falsity which frequently are, sometimes on the part of the State, sometimes on the part of the Church, its results, he concluded that in all cases all alliance between the two conditions of society is radically vicious; and he declared their entire separation a general and absolute principle, the sole reasonable and just system, the sole efficacious guarantee of truth and of liberty in spirituals or temporals. He thus ignored, it appears to me, the natural causes which produce, and the human motives which sanction, a certain alliance between societies civil and ecclesiastical; he ignored also the inestimable advantages which, at certain times and in certain circumstances, each may derive, and has actually derived, from that alliance. In the United States of America, the entire separation of the State and of the different Churches was necessary and salutary, for it was the spontaneous consequence of the condition of men's minds, and of the position of society.In England, in spite of the acts of injustice, and the ills engendered by the intimate union of the state with a Church legally constituted and having exclusive privileges, the coexistence of the Church of England with the freedom, more and more every day complete and recognized, of the Churches of the Dissenters, was for the Christian religion a potent principle of life, of force, and of durability.
And if we go back to the ancient history of Europe, who can doubt that at the fall of the Roman Empire, if the State and the Church had not, although distinct institutions, been allied, the development of Christianity would have been far less energetic, and its conquest of its barbarous conquerors far more problematical? This is, I repeat, a question not of principle, but of time, of place, of circumstance, and of condition of society. A complete separation of Church and State may be good and practicable; it is neither the only good system, nor is it always a practicable system.
An alliance of the two upon certain fixed terms has its inconveniences and its perils, but its effects may be also very salutary; it may be essential, and does not of necessity exclude religious sincerity or religious liberty. M. Vinet, in discussing the subject, lost sight of the general history of human societies, and attached too much importance to the specious and transient facts which he had before his eyes.
If M. Vinet were now living, he might in his own country behold two fair examples of the good results of the mixed systems which he so absolutely condemned. In the Cantons of the Vaud and of Geneva, after the violent and painful contests to which I have above referred, a dissenting Independent Church was established by the side of a Church recognized and supported by the State. In neither canton was this establishment a temporary expedient, the fruit of a momentary ardor; the Independent Church has consolidated and developed itself; it endures and prospers. Like the Establishment, it has its pastors, its churches, its solemnities, its schools for general and for superior instruction.I have before me facts and figures which prove its vitality and its progress. And not only did the Established Church finally acquiesce in the peaceable existence of the independent Church, it also profited by it, and its salutary influence has been frankly acknowledged by its worthiest pastors. In Switzerland, as in England, Scotland, and Holland, and in our days more easily and more promptly than in ancient times, the existence on the one side of a national Church recognized by the State, has given to the different forms of Christian belief a stability and a dignity which have secured its permanent effects upon succeeding generations; the existence, on the other side, of independent Churches, and the religious emulation between the two establishments, have turned in both to the profit of faith and of piety.
M. Adolphe Monod seemed, even more than M. Vinet, to promise by natural bent of his character, and by the incidents of his life, to become the champion of an entire separation of Church and State. At the very commencement of his career, he suffered from a Government based upon their connection. Pastor at Lyons, in 1831, of the established Protestant Church, he was dismissed from these functions by the Consistory of that city, as too exacting in his orthodoxy, and as troubling by his exigencies the peace of his Church. He then became the founder and pastor of a small dissenting and independent Church at Lyons. The energy with which he expressed his convictions, and the excellence of his preaching, rapidly spread, and increased his renown for piety. Numerous Protestants manifested the desire to see him once more within the pale of the national Church. He made no objection; a Chair becoming vacant in the Faculty of Montauban, M. Adolphe Monod was nominated, and from 1836 to 1847 he both lectured and preached at Montauban with a commanding ability that made itself felt, not only among the majority of the students, but propagated its influences to a distance among the principal centers of French Protestantism.In 1847 he was summoned to Paris as the suffragan of another pastor, M. Juillerat. Nor did he scruple to accept this secondary and precarious situation. He had full confidence in the divine vocation, and was firmly resolved to proceed to any place where the faith of Christ might demand his services. He had, in the evangelical chair, even more success at Paris than at Lyons and Montauban. When, after the Revolution of 1848, a general assembly of the Reformed Churches of France assembled for the purposes of considering their institutions and discussing points of common interest, a grave question was raised, and became the subject of warm and lengthened debate: Should French Protestants proclaim their ancient Confession of Faith, that of Rochelle, or should they proclaim a confession of new articles; or lastly, should they remain passive and do nothing? some, and particularly their pastor, M. Frederic Monod, elder brother of M. Adolphe Monod, announced their determination to retire from the assembly and from the established Church, unless they adopted a Confession of Faith in accordance with the traditional principles of the Reformation.The inertness of the hesitating and timid assembly was equivalent to a refusal, and they did in effect retire. To the great surprise and great regret of his adversaries, M. Adolphe Monod, although favorable to the principles of the Confession of Faith, did not follow the example by retiring; he even succeeded his brother as titular pastor in the Church of Paris, and published to the world the motives of his conduct. [Footnote 28]
[Footnote 28: In his work entitled, Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie.]
His motives were good, such as a man of elevated character and energetic purpose might conceive and might avow. In spite of their importance, the questions which concern the organization of the Church and its eternal relations were, in the eyes of M. Adolphe Monod, only secondary considerations, subject in a certain measure to time and to circumstance. For him the question of faith was supreme; and he occupied himself infinitely more with the spiritual state of souls than with ecclesiastical government. To the serious thinker the Christian faith is quite different from any conception or conviction of the understanding; it is a general condition of the whole man; it is the very life of the soul; not merely its actual life, but the source and the guarantee of its future life. The faith in Christ Jesus, the Redeemer, the Saviour, makes the life of a Christian; and the life of a Christian is a preparation for an eternal salvation. With this faith penetrating to his very marrow, and with the intimate persuasion of its consequences, the duty of giving a voice to that faith, and of diffusing it, was the dominant idea, the permanent passion, of M. Adolphe Monod.He had not himself been always firmly settled in his religious convictions; he had been a prey to great moral perplexities, and to attacks of profound melancholy. When he had escaped from these—or rather, to use his own words, "when God had become really the master of his heart"—he had no other thought but that of bringing other souls to the same state, and of rousing them to a faith in Christ, with a view to their eternal salvation. The position which he regarded as of all the most appropriate for himself, was one in which he could most profitably forward this work. When in 1848 the question was thus put to him, and when he had been convinced both by his past observation of the Protestant Church of France during the last twenty years, and by his own experience of it, that the established Church offered to him in his Christian purpose the vastest field of exertion, and the best chance of success, he did not hesitate to remain in it. "I find in the situation," he said, "grave disorders, of which it is my duty to seek unceasingly the reform; but that situation has also its hopeful side.A long development of my ideas would be superfluous; let us confine ourselves to some striking facts. Try and reckon how many orthodox pastors our Church possessed when the reaction began in 1819, and then make a similar calculation for 1849. I do not mean to fix the precise numbers; but is it too much to say, that in the course of a single generation the number of orthodox pastors is ten, fifteen, twenty times perhaps as great? This applies to the clergy, of whom everywhere the immense influence is felt. Among their congregations it is less easy to follows things; but the attentive observer does not fail to mark similar indications. Behold our religious societies: are not the most popular among them those which hoisted most manfully the colors of orthodoxy? And if some are in a languishing condition, is it not because they offered in this respect fewest guarantees? Evidently the first condition of existence for our religious institutions of charity is sound doctrine.My readers, permit me to question you still more closely. Throw your eyes upon the eight or ten families best known to you, beginning with your own, and compare what they are now with what they were in 1819; contrast their occupations, tastes, sacrifices, and intercourse, the modes of education, the books read, friendships formed, and so on; and then declare, thankless ones, if God has allowed you to be without encouragement." [Footnote 29]
[Footnote 29: Pourquoi je demeure dans l'Église établie, par M. Adolphe Monod, pp. 25-32. Paris, 1849.]
M. Adolphe Monod had good reason to draw attention to this general progress of Christianity; but there was another progress also deserving notice, that which he had himself made, and which he was making more and more every day, in the attainment of the true and distinguishing character of a Christian.