After

in our own time; this had not yet appeared on the scene. this fashion, indeed, the Neoplatonists had dealt with the more embarrassing myths of Olympus; but the method, though fitfully and insecurely essayed by the scholars of the Renaissance, was foreign to the positive temper of the Voltairian period, and recommended itself to neither the advocates nor the opponents of the Church. Again, whatever his estimate of their opinions, there is no instance of his having reviled or ridiculed good men. He admired the English Quakers; nor, vehement as they were, were his animosities personal. When the Jesuits were suppressed he took a member of the Order into his household; his quarrel was with a system, not with men. And that the system which he assailed, the living working system of official Catholicism as it existed in France under Louis XV., deserved the epithet infamous cannot seriously be denied.

6

The change of the religion taught by Christ into ecclesiastical Christianity is perhaps the most momentous event in history. The Catholic sees in it a developement, the Protestant a corruption; to the historian it presents itself in another light, as the result of causes whose operation was as inevitable as it was unperceived. Auf den Enthusiasmus lässt sich kein Gemein'wesen aufbauen,' says a living theologian. Here is the process in a nutshell. Christianity could have retained its ideal character only by the sacrifice of its world-mission. The choice was unconscious, as such choices are for the most part; but it had to choose between the two. Only one choice, it may appear, was open; yet, had those who were called upon to make it realised what it involved they might have hesitated. For the price asked was prohibitive; and it has been, and is being, paid to the last farthing. The Church overcame the world with the world's weapons; with greater force, greater cunning, greater unscrupulousness. The preacher points with pride to the leavening of the world by religion; he overlooks the reverse side of the picture, the leavening of religion by the world. It was as if the Tempter had approached the Church with the offer made to and rejected by her Founder, the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them for one act of homage; and with the acceptance the poison had entered into her soul. Age by age it penetrated deeper; she became one with the actual order of things, sharing its weaknesses, compromised by its shortcomings, succeeding to its mixed inheritance. Manifold as were the causes and results of the Reformation, it was first and foremost a protest against this secularisation of the religious idea. To secularise, experience showed, was to degrade it and to incapacitate it for its function; with all the side issues of the movement the essential

question was, Was religion to keep pace with or to fall behind the mind and conscience of the time? Roughly speaking the Reformed nations chose the first, the unreformed the second alternative; and the subsequent history of each group has been decided by the choice made. Religiously each lost something that could ill be spared; Protestantism the masses, for whom it was too abstract; Catholicism the educated, with whom it fell more and more out of touch. But politically the former had the advantage. The Protestant nations have advanced towards a higher civilisation with orderly if measured steps, and as communities; the Catholic have broken up into factions; oscillated between the extremes of rival fanaticisms, developed at the expense of unity under the stimulus of civil and religious strife.

In Voltaire's time the relations between religion and official Catholicism had reached breaking point: for generations the two had been diverging further and further in temper, methods, and aim. There were good men, needless to say, in the French Church; but the Church had ceased to be, in any active sense, a force that made for righteousness. It had become a department of state; the most powerful of the corporations that barred the way to reform in every direction, and the most odious, because it made use of religion as a pretext for wrongdoing. Its effeteness must not blind us to its ferocity. It was the golden age of the French salon: never had society been more manysided, more untrammelled, more intelligent. But this was only one side of the life of the period: it was an age of contrasts; the extremes of scepticism and superstition, of humanitarianism and medieval savagery stood side by side. Hence the vehemence of the philosophical attack: there could be neither truce nor quarter; men were fighting for their lives:

'Here Calas broken on the wheel, there Sirven condemned to be hanged, further off a gag thrust into the mouth of a lieutenantgeneral, a fortnight after that five youths condemned to the flames for extravagances that deserved nothing worse than St. Lazare. Is this the country of philosophy and pleasure? It is the country rather of the St. Bartholomew massacre: Why, the Inquisition would not have ventured to do what these Jansenist judges have done. . . . Ah, my friend, is it a time for laughing? Did men laugh when they saw Phalaris's bull being made red hot??

Thus, sick with horror and shame, wrote Voltaire to D'Alembert. Which were the enemies of religion, of Christianity, those who denounced or those who perpetrated these crimes? It was no time to discriminate or draw nice distinctions. If good men shelter under the same roof with bad when it falls both are

involved in a common destruction; those who associate falsehood with truth have themselves to blame if, when the falsehood is detected, truth shares in its discredit. We may regret it, but certain antecedents are followed by certain consequents; things are what they are. Recrimination will not help us. The criticism of the eighteenth century was external, hard, superficial; so was the system which it criticised; it was blind to the higher side of Catholicism; so was the Catholicism with which it had to deal. Do not let us take names for things. To oppose a clergy or a Church is not necessarily to oppose religion; impiety and wrong become not less but more detestable when they shelter themselves under the Christian name. 'It was just 'because the cruelty, persecution, and darkness in the last ten years of the reign of Louis XV. were things possible that the onslaught upon Catholicism was justifiable and praiseworthy.' * The overthrow of the Infamous was the first condition of religious revival and reform.

Piety is seldom found on the side of reformers. The devout in Israel, we may be sure, regarded the denunciation of the high places by the prophets of the eighth century B.C. much as those of a later generation regarded the crusade against the Infamous waged by Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. Nor were they without what casuists call a 'probable' opinion in their favour. In each movement many a time-honoured shrine was shattered, many a poetic legend and gracious symbol disappeared. But piety, though a virtue, is not the only virtue; nor is it to be purchased at the price of the qualities by which men and nations live. There is probably no great movement in history, if we except those directly religious in character-and these are attended by other and graver dangers-which has not acted unfavourably on piety: the more energy expended in one channel the less remains available for others, the total being represented by a fixed sum. This loss, however, is made up by gain in other directions, while the type of piety injured is one whose extinction has become, in any case, a matter of time. The conditions which brought it into existence are changing, and with their disappearance it disappears. A hardier variety will replace it; even now the young shoots are bursting through the kindly earth. And that this new growth has become possible is due to the apparently destructive work of plough and harrow, to the breaking up of the exhausted surface soil. Where would Europe have stood to-day had the last word rested with the Churches, had the Pope, or the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury,

*Voltaire, p. 238.

or the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland had their way? Nay, what would have been the fate of the Churches themselves? It is thanks to heretics that orthodoxy has been kept from putrefaction: the Acta Sanctorum' should include the achievements of men like Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire. They supplied Catholicism with the ideas which saved it from becoming a curse to civilisation.

'It was no Christian prelate but Diderot who burst the bonds of a paralysing dogma by the magnificent cry," Détruisez ces enceintes qui rétrécissent vos idées! Elargissez Dieu!" We see the same phenomenon in our own day. The Christian Churches are assimilating, as rapidly as their formule will permit, the new light and the more generous moral ideas and the higher spirituality of teachers who have abandoned all Churches, and who are systematically denounced as enemies of the souls of men. Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes!" These transformations of religion by leavening elements contributed by a foreign doctrine are the most interesting process in the history of truth.'*

More than one order of ideas presents itself to us in the reconstructed Catholicism of the nineteenth century. Life had been breathed into the dry bones, and with life appeared the play of conflicting forces. The survivors of the past generation retained the traditional Gallican standpoint-a national Church, supporting and supported by the historic monarchy, and constituting an essential part of the fabric of society. The newer school, of which De Maistre and Lamennais, far apart as they stood in many respects, were representative, saw-as the English Tractarians and the Fathers of the Scottish Disruption saw-that religion, the Church, must be something more than this. A universal idea could accommodate itself to no local or temporary setting; the earthly Jerusalem, like the heavenly, was free. More than any one man De Maistre has left his mark upon Catholicism. The idealisation of the Papacy, its identification with Christianity, the definite establishment of its claim to supremacy and infallibility, are his work. His political instinct, his sense of the concrete, his acuteness in detecting the weak points in his opponents' position, recommended him to no less important a thinker than Comte and to no less eminent a statesman than Guizot. The career of each of these distinguished persons may remind us that a temper too exclusively practical is apt to overreach itself. The elaborate constructions of De Maistre were as remote from reality as those of the speculators whom he was never weary of denounc

* Diderot, i. 130.

ing; he argued to what, he thought, must be, not to what was. The category of the relative had no existence for him; there was no haze on his mental or moral horizon; he was one of those who never think, they always know. His object was practical -to reconstruct European society. The Papacy, the international centre of Christendom, was an instrument ready to his hand. It must be equipped with the necessary attributes; certain prerogatives-prescription, supremacy, infallibilitymust be possessed by it, if it was to serve its purpose. Therefore, he argued, it possessed them: what should be was the key to what is. On this foundation of presumed necessity the fabric of modern Ultramontanism was built. It was Jacobinism applied to theology. The Gallicans, the Girondins of the piece, were suppressed by methods as unscrupulous as those of the Committee of Public Safety. 'La tradizione son' io,' said Pius IX. : Rome was the Church and the Church was Rome.

The character of the movement is unmistakable: a political motive-the epithet is used in no invidious sense-rather than a religious was at work. Le plus catholique des esprits, le moins chrétien des cœurs' is Sainte-Beuve's judgement on De Maistre.

'He speaks of Christianity (says Mr. Morley) as a statesman or publicist would speak of it; not theologically, nor spiritually, but politically and socially. The question with which he concerns himself is the utilisation of Christianity as a force to shape and organise a system of civilised societies, a study of the conditions under which this utilisation had taken place in the earlier centuries of the era, and a deduction from them of the conditions under which we might ensure a repetition of the process in changed modern circumstances.' *

This political conception of the Church is peculiarly Latin; and the circumstances of the time were such as to give it special force. The Church presented herself to Europe as the Saviour of Society, much as Louis Napoleon did to France in 1851; and Europe, exhausted by the expenditure of blood and treasure that the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had entailed, was ready, provisionally at least, to accept the claim. In neither case did the result justify the experiment; the house was built upon the sand. Societies, like individuals, must work out their own salvation; they cannot, passively, be saved. The Second Empire did but postpone the evil day, which came in 1870 with double destruction: Ultramontanism has brought about a state of things in the Latin Churches resembling in many respects

* Miscellanies, ii. 314.