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MEDITATIQ^B*

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY,

THE RELIGIOUS QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.

By M. GUIZOT.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH, UNDER THE SUPERINTENDENCE
OF THE AUTHOR.

geto fork:
CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.,
124 GRAND-STREET.
1865,

P B E F A C B.

DuniNa the last nineteen centuries -Christian
ity has been often assailed, and has successfully
resisted every attack. Of these attacks some
have been more violent, but none more serious
than that of which it is, in these days, the
object. For eighteen hundred years Christians were
in turn persecutors and persecuted ; Christians
persecuted as Christians, Christians persecutors
of every one who was not Christian — Christians
mutually persecuting each other. This persecu
tion varied, it is true, in degree of cruelty with
the age and the country, as it also did in the
degree of inflexibility evinced and success at
tained in the prosecution of its object; but
whatever the diversity of State, Church, or pun-

PREFACE.

ishment, whatever the degree of severity or
laxity in the application of the principle, this
principle was ever the same. After having had
to endure proscription and martyrdom under
the imperial government of Paganism, the
Christian religion lived, in its turn, under the
guard of the civil law, defended by the arms of
secular power.
In these days it exists in the very presence
of liberty. It has to deal with free thought,
with free discussion. It is called upon to de
fend, to guard itself, to prove incessantly and
against every comer its moral and historical
veracity, to vindicate its claims upon man's
intelligence and man's soul. Roman Catholics,
Protestants or Jews, Christians or philosophers,
all, at least in our country, are sheltered from
every persecution ; for no one without incurring
the risk of ridicule could characterize as perse
cution the sacrifices or the inconveniences to
which the expression of his opinion may occa
sionally subject him. To every man such

PREFACE.

expression of opinion is permitted, and can
never lead to the forfeiture, on the part of any
single individual, of any of his political rights
or privileges. Religious liberty, that is to say,
the liberty of believing — of believing differently
or of disbelieving — may be but imperfectly
accepted and guaranteed as a principle in cer
tain states; but it still is evident that it is"
becoming so every day more and more, and
that it will eventually become the common law
of the civilized world.
One of the circumstances that render this
fact pregnant with importance is, that it does
not stand isolated, but holds its place in the
great intellectual and social revolution, which,
after the fermentation and the preparation of
centuries, has broken out and is in course of
accomplishment in our own days. The scien
tific spirit, the preponderance of the democratic
principle, and that of political liberty, are the
essential characteristics and invincible tenden
cies of^this revolution. These new forces may

"6 i . PREFACE.
fall into enormous errors, and commit enormous
¦faults, the penalty for which they will ever
dearly pay ; still they are definitively installed
in modern society ; the sciences will continue to
develop themselves in its bosom in the full
independence of their methods and of their
results; the democracy will establish itself in
the positions which it has conquered, and on
the ground which has been opened to it; polit
ical liberty in the midst of its storms and its
disappointments will still, sooner or later, cause
itself to be accepted as the necessary guarantee
for all the acquisitions and all the progress
possible in society. These are the grand pre
dominant facts to which all public institutions
will now have to adapt themselves, and with
which all authority, whose action is upon the
mind, requires to live at peace.
Christianity also must submit to the same
tests and trials. As it has surmounted all
others, so also will it surmount this ; its essence
and origin would not be divine did they not

PREFACE. f l^

... ' . *"ji !* > >
permit it to adapt itself to &8F|he -different
forms of human institutions, to serWthjeni flgwi^
as a guide, now as a support in their vicissitudes
whether of adversity or prosperity. It is, how
ever, of the most serious importance for Chris
tians not to deceive themselves, either as to the
nature of the struggle which they will have to
sustain, or as to its perils and the legitimate
arms which they may use to combat them. The
attack directed against the Christian religion is
one hotly carried on, now with a brutal fanat
icism, now with a dextrous learning;1 at one
time with the appeal to sincere convictions, and
at another invoking the worst passions ; some
contest Christianity as false, others reject it as
too exacting and imposing too much restraint ;
the greater part apprehend it as tyranny. In
justice and suffering are not so soon forgotten ;
nor does one readily recover from the effect of
terror. The memory of religious persecutions
still lives, and this it is that maintains, in mul
titudes, whose opinions vacillate, aversion, prej-

8 PREFACE.
udice, and a lively sentiment of alarm. Chris
tians on their side are loth to recognize and
accommodate themselves to the new order of
society ; every moment they are shocked, irri
tated, terrified by the ideas and language to
which that society gives utterance. Men do
not so readily pass from a state of privilege to
one of community of rights — from a state of do
minion to one of liberty ; they do not resign
themselves without a struggle to the audacious
obstinacy of contradiction, to the daily neces
sity of resisting and conquering. Government
according to principles of liberty is still more
influenced by passion, and entails a necessity of
still more exertion in the sphere of religion
than of civil politics : believers find it still more
difficult to support incredulity than govern
ments to bear with oppositions; and, neverthe
less, these themselves are forced to do so, and
can only find in free discussion and in the full
exercise of their peculiar liberties the force
which they require to rise above their perilous

PREFACE. 9
condition, and reduce — not to silence, for that
is . impossible, but to an idle warfare — their
inveterate enemies.
To leave that civil society, in which the dif
ferent sects of religion are nowadays compelled
to live in peace and side by side, and to enter
religious society itself, the Christian Church
of our days: what is its actual position with
respect to these grand questions which it has to
discuss with the spirit of human liberty and
audacity ? Does it comprehend properly, does
it suitably carry on the warfare in which
it is engaged ? Does it tend in its proceed
ings to a re-establishment of a real peace, and
active harmonious relations between itself and
that general society in the midst of which
it is living %
I say Christum Church. It is, in effect, the
whole Church of Christ, and not such or such a
Church that is in these days attacked, and vital
ly attacked. When men deny the supernatural
world, the inspiration of the Scriptures, and

10 PREFACE.
the divinity of Jesus Christ, they really assail
the whole body of Christians — Romanists, Prot
estants, or Greeks : they are virtually destroy
ing the foundations of faith in all the belief of
Christians, whatever their particular difference
of religious opinion or forms of ecclesiastical
government. It is by faith that all Christian
Churches live ; there is no form of government,
monarchical or republican, concentrated or dif
fused, that suffices to maintain a Chu-rch ; there
is no authority so strong, no liberty so broad,
as to be able in a religious society to dispense
with the necessity of faith. For what is it that
unites in a Church if it is not faith ? Faith is
the bond of souls. When, then, the founda
tions of their common faith are attacked, the
differences existing between Christian Churches
upon special questions, or the diversities of
their organization or government, become sec
ondary interests ; it is from a common peril
that they have to defend themselves; or they
must reconcile themselves to see dried up the

PREFACE. 11
common source from which they all derive
sustenance and life.
I fear that the sentiment of this common
peril is not, in all the Christian Churches, as
clear and well-defined, as deep and predomi
nant, as their common safety requires. In pres
ence of similar questions everywhere varied, of
identical attacks everywhere directed against
the vital facts and dogmas of Christianity, I
dread Christians of the different communions
not concentrating all their forces upon the
mighty struggles in which they are, all, to
engage. My dread, however, is unattended by
astonishment. Although the danger is the
same for all, the traditional opinions and habits,
and consequently the actual dispositions, are
very different. Many Romanists feel the per
suasion' that faith would be saved were they
only delivered from liberty of thought. Many
Protestarits believe that they are but employ
ing their right of free examination, and do not
lose their title to be regarded as Christians,

1 2 PREFACE.
when they are in effect abandoning the founda
tions and withdrawing from the source of faith.
Roman Catholicism has not sufficient reliance
on its roots, and respects too much its branches ;
no tree exists that does not need culture and
clearing in accordance with climate and season,
if it is expected to continue to bear always good
fruit; but the roots should be especially de
fended from every attack. Protestantism is too
forgetful that it also has roots from which it
canaot be separated without perishing, and that
religion is not what an annual is in vegetation :
a plant that men cultivate and renew at their
pleasure. While the Romanists dread freedom
of thought too much, the Protestants on their
side have too great a fear of authority. ' Some
believe that inasmuch as religious faith has firm
and fixed points, movement and progress are
incompatible with religious society ; others
affirm that a religious society can never have
fixed points, and that religion consists in relig
ious sentiment and individual belief. What

PREFACE. 13
would have become of Christianity, had it from
its birth been condemned to the immobility
which the former recommend ; and what would
become of it at' the present day, were it surren
dered, as the latter would have it, to the caprice
bf every mind, and the wind bf every day.
Happily, God permits not that, at this Crisis,
the true principles and the true interests of the
Christian religion should remain without suffi
cient defenders. Romanists there are, who un
derstand their age and the new constitution of
society, who accept frankly its liberty, religious
and politic : it is precisely they who have most
boldly testified their attachment to the faith of
Rome, who have claimed with most ardor the
essential liberties of their Church, and defended
with most energy the rights of its chief. Nor
are Protestants wanting who have used with the
most untiring zeal all the liberty acquired in
our days by Protestantism ; they have founded
all those associations and originated all those
undertakings which have manifested the vital

;'-'i4 ' PREFACE.
¦ energy and extended the action of the Protest
ant Church; they have demanded and they
' continue to demand, for this Church, the re-
.iestablishment of its synods, that is to say, its
religious autonomy. Among these Protestants,
where men have appeared who have not found
in the Protestant Church as by law established
the entire satisfaction of their convictions, they
have felt no hesitation to separate from it and
to found, with their own means alone, independ
ent Churches. It may be affirmed also of the
Protestants that they have most largely put in
practice all the rights and all the liberties of
Protestantism, in the internal ordeal through
which Christianity is at present passing; it
is precisely they who assert most loudly the
dogmas of the Christian faith, and maintain
most inflexibly the authoritative rights estab
lished by law in the laosom of their Church.
The Liberal Romanists ''of the present day are
the most zealous defenders of the fundamental
traditions and institutions of Catholicism. The

PREFACE.
Protestants who have been the most active
during the last' half century in the ¦, exercise of
the liberties of Protestantism are thei. firmest
maintainers of its doctrines and of its vital
rules. Humanly speaking, it is upon the influence
exercised and to be exercised in their respect
ive Churches and on the public, by these two
classes of Christians, that depends the peaceable
issue of the crisis through which Christianity is
in these days passing. Qur society is, doubt
less far from meriting the title of a Christian
one; still it cannot be characterized as anti-
christian; considered as one vast whole, it has
no hostile or general prejudice against the
Christian religion: it maintains the habits, the
instincts, I would willingly add the longings, of
Christians; it is conscious that Christian faith
and ordinance serve powerfully its interests
with respect to order and' peace ; the fanatical
opponents of Christianity exercise upon it far
more disquieting than seductive influences, for

16 PREFACE.
it has already had experience of their empire ;
and where society appears to offer a silent
acquiescence, or even to pride itself upon them,
still at bottom it dreads their progress.
Such being the state of the case, and such
the constitution of society, how are we to draw
men away from their apathy and their igno
rance in matters of religion \ How lead them
back to Christianity? They alone can accom
plish this object who in their defense and
propagation of the religion of Jesus shall not
wound society itself in the ideas, sentimAts,
rights, and interests which have at present
rooted themselves in its very life and energies.
Like religion, modern society has also its fixed
points and its invincible tendencies: it can
never be set on terms of harmony with the
former unless by the concurring action of men
who have with each of them a genuine and
deep sentiment of sympathy. Since the Chris
tian religion lives in these times confronting
civil liberty, those alone can be efficient cham-

PREFACE. 17
pions of religion who at the same time profess
fully the Christian faith and accept with sin
cerity the tests of liberty.
But in pursuing their pious and salutary
enterprise, let not these liberal Christians flat
ter themselves with the probability of any
prompt or complete success. Maintain and
propagate the Christian faith they may, but
they will never be able in the bosom of society
to get rid either of incredulity or doubt ; even
while combating them they must learn to
endure their presence; in institutions of free
dom there is essentially an intermixture of
good and evil, of truth and error; contrary
ideas and dispositions produce and develop
themselves in it simultaneously. "Think not
that I am come to send peace on earth : I came
not," said Jesus to his apostles, " to send peace,
but a sword." Matt, x, 34. The sword of
Jesus Christ, that is, Christianity at war with
human error and shortcomings; a victory,
still a victory ever incomplete in an inces-
2

18 PREFACE.
sant struggle — that is the condition to which
those must submit with resignation who, in
the bosom of liberty, defend the truth of
Christianity. Were these valiant and intelligent cham
pions of the faith of Jesus not adopted and
accredited as such in the Churches to which
they belong ; did the Church of Rome furnish
ground for thinking her essentially hostile to
the fundamental principles and rights of mod
ern society, and that she only tolerates them
as Moses tolerated divorce among the Jews,
" because of the hardness of their heart ;" and,
on the other hand, did the rejecters of the
supernatural, of the inspiration of the Scrip
tures, and of the divinity of Jesus Christ, pre
dominate in the bosom of Protestantism; and
finally, did the latter then become naught but
a hesitating system of philosophy ; if all these
deplorable things were to be realized, I am far
from thinking that, owing to such faults, such
disasters, the religion of Christ, would vanish

PREFACE. 19
from the world and definitively withdraw from
men its lights and its support. The destinies of
religion are far above human errors ; but still,
beyond all doubt, for mankind to be turned
back from them, and for the light to return to
their soul and harmony to modern society, there
would have again to burst out in the human
soul and in society one of those immense
troubles, one of those revolutionary whirlwinds,
whos« evils man is compelled actually to un
dergo before he can derive benefit from its
lessons. On the point of addressing myself to ques
tions more profound and of a less transitory
nature, I content myself with having merely
indicated what I think of the crisis that agitates
Christendom at the present day, as also of its
main cause, its perils, and the chances, good or
bad, that it holds out for the future. In the
work of which the first part is now before the
public, I omit all the circumstantial facts and
details, as well as the discussions that grow out

'20' PREFACE.
of them, and it is only with the Christian relig
ion as it is_in._itself, with its fundamental belief
and its reasonableness, that I occupy myself; it
has been my purpose to illustrate the truth of
Christianity by contrasting it with the systems
and the doubts that men set in array against it.
It is my intention to avoid all direct and per
sonal polemics ; express reference to individuals
embarrasses and envenoms all questions in con
troversy, and gives rise to ill-judged defe»ence
or unjust invective, two descriptions of falsity
for which alike I feel no sympathy. Let me
have then for adversaries ideas alone ; and what
ever these may be, I admit beforehand the
possibility of sincerity on the part of those that
prefer them. Without this admission all seri
ous discussion is out of the question; and nei
ther the intellectual enormity of the error, nor
its awful practical consequences, positively pre
cludes sincerity on the part of him that promul
gates it. The mind of man is still more easily
led astray than his heart, and is still more

PREFACE. '21
egotistical ; after having once conceived and
expressed an idea, it attaches itseiLfaftit as to its
own offspring, takes a pride in imprisoning
itself in it, as if it were so taking possession of
the pure and entire truth.
These Meditations will be divided into four
series. In the *8.rst, which forms this volume, I
explain and establish what constitutes, in my
opinion, the essence of the Christian religion;
that is to say, what those natural problems are
that correspond with the fundamental dogmas
that offer their solution, the supernatural facts
ii|>on which* these same dogmas repose: Crea
tion, Revelation, the Inspiration of the Scrip
tures, God according to the biblical account,
and Jesus according to the Gospel narrative.
Next to the essence of the Christian religion
comes its history ; and this will be the subject
of a second series of Meditations^ in which I
shall examine the authenticity of the Scriptures,
the primary causes of the foundation of Chris
tianity, Christian Faith, as it has always existed

22 PREFACE.
throughout its different ages, and in spite of all
its vicissitudes ; the great religious crisis in the
sixteenth century which divided the Church
and Europe between Roman Catholicism and
Protestantism; finally, those different anti-
christian crises, which at different epochs and
in different countries have set 4n question and
imperiled Christianity itself, but which dangers
it has ever surmounted. The third Meditation
will be consecrated to the study of the actual
state of the Christian religion, its internal and
external condition. I shall retrace the regen
eration of Christianity which occurred amdig
us at the commencement of the nineteenth cen
tury, both in the Church of Rome and in the
Protestant Churches; the impulse imparted to
it at the same epoch by the Spiritualistic Phi
losophy that then began again to flourish, and
the movement in the contrary direction which
showed itself very remarkably soon afterward
in the resurrection of Materialism, of Pantheism,
of Skepticism, and in works of historical erit-

PREFACE. 23
icism. I shall attempt to determine the idea,
and consequently, in my opinion, the funda
mental error of these different systems, the
avowed and active enemies of Christianity.
Finally, in the fourth series of these Meditations
I shall endeavor to discriminate and to char
acterize the • future destiny of the Christian
religion, and to indicate by what course it is
called upon to conquer completely and to sway
morally this little corner of the universe termed
by us our earth, in which unfold themselves
the designs and power of God, just as, doubt
less, they do in an infinity of worlds unknown
to us.
I have passed thirty-five years of my life in
struggling, on a bustling arena, for the estab
lishment of political liberty and the main
tenance of order as established by law. I have
learned, in the labors and trials of this strug
gle, the real worth of Christian faith and of
Christian liberty. God permits me, in the re
pose of my retreat, to consecrate to their

24 PREFACE.
cause what remains to me of life and of
strength. It is the most salutary favor and
the greatest honor that I can receive from his
goodness. GUIZOT.
Val-Richbe, June, 1864.

CONTENTS.

PAQB

I. Natural Problems  27
II. Christian Dogmas  37
IIL The Supernatural  112
IV. The Limits op Science  138
V. Revelation  163
VI. The Inspiration of the Scriptures  172
VII. God according to the Bible  189
VIII. Jesus Christ according to the Gospel  268
NOTE  .-.  341

MEDITATIONS

ON THE ESSENCE OF

THE CHRISTIAN BELIGIOff.

FIRST MEDITATION.

NATURAL PROBLEMS.
From the very origin of the human race,
wherever man has existed, or' still exists, certain
questions have peculiarly and irresistibly fixed
his attention, and they continue to do so at the
present hour. This arises not alone from a
feeling of natural curiosity, or the ardent thirst
for knowledge, but from a deeper and more pow
erful motive. The destiny of man is intimate
ly involved in these questions ; they contain the

28 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
secret not only of all that he sees around him,
but of his own being ; and when he aspires to
solve them, it is not merely because he desires
to understand the spectacle of which he is a
beholder, but because he feels, and is conscious
of being himself an actor in the great drama of
existence, and because he seeks to ascertain his
own part there, and comprehend his own destiny.
His present conduct and his future lot are as
much at issue as the satisfaction of his thought.
These great problems are, for man, not questions
of science, but questions of life : in considering
them he feels himself compelled to say with
Hamlet, "To be or not to be, that, is the
question." Whence does the world proceed, and whence
does man appear in the midst of it ? What is
the origin of each, and whither does each tend ?
What are their beginning and their end ? Laws
there are which govern them : is there a legis
lator? Under the empire of these laws, man
feels and calls himself free : is he so in reality ?

FIRST MEDITATION. 29
How is his liberty compatible with the laws
which govern him and the world? Is he a
passive instrument of fate, or a responsible
agent ? What are the ties and relations which
connect him with the Legislator of the world ?
The world and man himself present a strange
and painful spectacle. Good and evil, both
moral and physical, order and disorder, joy and
sorrow, are here intimately blended and yet in
continual antagonism. Whence come this com
mingling and this strife? Is good or is evil
the condition and the law of man and of the
world ? If good, how then has evil found ad
mission ? Wherefore suffering and death ? Why
this moral disorder ? the calamities which so
frequently befall the good, and the prosperity,
so abhorrent to our feelings, which attends the
wicked ? Is this the normal and definitive state
of man and of the world ?
Man is conscious that he is at the same time
great and little, strong and feeble, powerful and
impotent. He finds in himself matter for admi-

30 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ration and for love, and yet he suffices not to
himself in any respect ; he seeks an aid, a sup
port,, beyond and above himself: he asks, he
invokes, he prays. What mean these inward
disquietudes, these alternate impulses of pride
and weakness ? Have they, or not, a meaning
and an object ? Why prayer ?
Such are the natural problems, now dimly
felt, now clearly defined, which in all ages and
among all nations, in every form and in every
degree of civilization, by instinct or by reflection,
have arisen, and still arise, in the human mind.
I indicate only the greatest, the most apparent :
I might recall many others which are connected
with them.
Not only are those problems natural to man ;
they appertain to him alone ; they are his pecul
iar privilege. Man alone, among all creatures
known to us, perceives and states them, and feels
himself imperiously called upon to solve them.
I borrow the following admirable observations
from M. de Chateaubriand : " Why does not the

FIRST MEDITATION. 31
ox as I do ? It can lie down upon the grass,
raise its head toward heaven, and in its lowings
call upon that unknown Being who fills .this
immensity of space. But no : content with the
turf on which it tramples, it interrogates not
those suns in the firmament above, which are the
grand evidence of the existence of God. Ani
mals are not troubled with those hopes which
fill the heart of man ; the spot on which they
tread yields them all the happiness of which
they are susceptible ; a little grass satisfies the
sheep ; a little blood gluts the tiger. The only
creature that looks beyond himself, and is not*
all in all to himself, is man."*
From these problems, natural and peculiar to
man, all religions have sprung. The object of
them all is to satisfy man's thirst for their solu
tion. As these problems are the source of relig
ion, the solutions they receive are its substance
and foundation. There prevails in our days a very j
general tendency to regard religion as consisting '
* Genie dn Christianisme, vol. i, p. 208, edit, of 1831.

32 THE CHRI8TIAN RELIGION.
essentially— I might say wholly— in religious
sentiment, in those lofty and vague aspirations
which are termed the poetry of the soul, beyond
and above the realities of life. Through the
religious sentiment, the soul enters into relation
with the divine order of things ; and this rela
tion, of a wholly personal and intimate charac
ter, independent of all positive dogma, of any
organized Church, is deemed to be all-sufficient
for man, the true and needful religion.
Unquestionably the religious sentiment, the
intimate and personal relation of the soul with
the divine order, is essential and necessary to
religion ; but religion is more than this — much
more. The human soul is not to be divided
and restricted to certain faculties selected and
exalted, while the rest are condemned to slum
ber. Man is not a mere sensitive and poetic
being, aspiring to rise above the present and
material world by love and imagination : he
not only feels, but he thinks; he requires to
know and believe as well as love; it is not

FIRST MEDITATION. 33
enough that his soul should be capable of emo- \
tion and aspiration ; he requires that it should
be fixed, and rest upon convictions in harmony
with his emotions. This it is that man seeks
in religion ; he requires something more than a
pure and noble rapture ; he requires enlighten
ment, as well as sympathy. But if the moral
problems that beset his thought are not solved,
what he experiences may be poetry — it is not
religion. I cannot contemplate unmoved the troubles
of men of lofty minds, seeking in the religious
sentiment alone a refuge against doubt and
impiety. It is well to preserve, in the ship
wreck of faith and the chaos of thought, the
great instincts of our nature, and not to lose
sight of the sublime requirements which remain
unsatisfied. I know not to what extent men of
eminent minds may thus compensate, by their
sincerity and fervor of sentiment, for the void
in their belief; but let them not deceive them
selves; barren aspirations and specious doubts

34 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
satisfy a man as little as to his future spiritual
interests as with respect to his condition in the
present life ; the natural problems to which I
have alluded will ever be the great weight
pressing upon the soul, and religious sentiment
will never alone suffice to be the religion of
mankind. Besides this apotheosis of religious sentiment,
some at the present day have essayed a differ
ent, a more serious and more daring theory.
Far from sounding the natural problems to
which religions correspond, schools of philoso
phy, occupying a prominent intellectual posi
tion — the Pantheistic School, and the so-called
Positive School — suppress and deny them alto
gether. In their view the world has existed,
of itself, from all eternity, as have the laws also
by which it is sustained and developed. In
their elementary principles, and taken alto
gether, all things have ever been what they
now are, and what they will ever continue to
be. There is no mystery in this universe;

FIRST MEDITATION. 35
there exist only facts and laws, naturally and
necessarily linked together; and these furnish
the field for human science, which, although
incomplete, is yet indefinitely progressive in its
power as well as in its operations.
According to these views Divine Providence
and human liberty, the origin of evil, the com
mingling and the strife of good and evil in the
world, and in man, the imperfection of the
present order of things, and the destiny of
man, the prospect of the re-establishment of
order in the future ; these are all mere dreams,
freaks of man's thought : no such questions
indeed exist, inasmuch as the world is eternal,
it is in its actual state complete, normal, and
definitive, though at the same time progressive.
The remedy for the moral and physical evils
which afflict mankind must then be sought, not
in any power superior to the world, but simply j
in the progress of the sciences and the advance J
of human enlightenment.
I shall not here discuss this system ; I do not

36 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
even qualify it by its true name ; I merely re
capitulate its tenets. But at the first and sim
ple aspect what contempt does it manifest of
the spontaneous and universal instincts of man !
What heedlessness of the facts which fill and
never cease to characterize the universal history
of the human race !
Nevertheless to this we are come: not a
solution, but the negation of the natural prob
lems, which irresistibly occupy the human soul,
is presented to man for his full satisfaction and
repose. Let him follow the mathematical or
physical sciences; let him be a mechanician,
chemist, critic, novelist, or poet; but let him
not enter upon what is termed the sphere of
religious and theological inquiry: here are no
real questions to solve, naught to investigate,
nothing to do, nothing to expect — absolutely
nothing.

SECOND MEDITATION.

CHRISTIAN DOGMAS.
The Christian religion knows man better and
treats man better: it has other answers to his
questions ; and it is between the absolute nega
tion of the problems of religion and the Chris
tian solution of these problems that the discus
sion lies at the present day.
Some words there are which we now regard
with distrust and alarm : we suspect their
masking illegitimate pretensions and tyranny.
Such, in our days, has been the lot of the word
dogma. To many this word imparts an im
perious necessity to believe, at once offending
and disquieting. Singular contrast! On all
sides we seek for principles, and we take alarm
at dogmas.

38 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
This sentiment, however absurd in itself, is in
no way strange. Christian dogmas have served
as motive and pretext for so much iniquity, so
many acts of oppression and cruelty, that their
very name has become tainted and suspected.
The word bears the penalty of the reminis
cences which it awakens, and justly. All
attacks upon the liberty of conscience, all em
ployment of force to extirpate or to impose
religious belief is, and ever has been, an iniqui-
tous and tyrannical act. All powers, all par
ties, all Churches have held such acts to be not
only permissible, but enjoined by the Divine
law. All have deemed it not merely their right,
but their duty to prevent and to punish by law
and human force error in matters of religion.
They may all allege, in excuse, the sincerity of
their belief in the legitimacy of this usurpation.
The usurpation is not the less enormous and
fatal, and perhaps indeed it is, of all human
usurpations, the one which has inflicted on men
the most odious torments and the grossest errors.

SECOND MEDITATION. 39
It will constitute the glory of our time to have
discarded this pretension ; nevertheless it yet
exists, with persistency, in certain states, in cer
tain laws, in certain recesses of the human soul
and of Christian society ; and there is, and ever
will be, need to watch and to combat it, to
render its banishment unconditional and with
out appeal. Subdued, however, it is: civil
freedom in matters of faith and religious life
has become a fundamental principle of civiliza
tion and of law. These questions, affecting the
relations of man to God, are no longer dis
cussed or adjusted in the arena and by a re
course to the hand of political and executive
power ; but they are transported to the sphere
of the intellect, and left to the uncontrolled
working of the mind itself.
But again, in this sphere of the intellect,
these questions still start up and call loudly
for their peculiar solution, that is, for the fun
damental facts and ideas, the principles in effect
which their nature requires. The Christian

40 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. .
religion has its own principles, which constitute
the rational basis of the faith it inculcates and
the life which it enjoins. These are termed its
dogmas. The Christian dogmas are the princi
ples of the Christian religion, and the Christian
solutions of the problems of natural religion.
Let men of a serious mind, who have not
entirely rejected the Christian religion, and
who still admire it, while denying its funda
mental dogmas, beware of this: the flowers
whose perfume captivates them will quickly
fade, the fruits they delight in will soon cease
to grow when the ax shall have been applied
to the roots of the tree that bears them.
For myself, arrived at the term of a long
life, one of labor, of reflection, and of trials — of
trials in thought as well as in action — I am"
convinced that the Christian dogmas are the
legimate and satisfactory solutions of those
religious problems which, as I .have said, nature
suggests and man carries in his own breast,
and from which he cannot escape.

SECOND MEDITATION. 41
I beg, at the outset, theologians, whether
Catholic or Protestant, to pardon me. I have
no design to excite or to explain, or to main
tain, all the various doctrinal points, all the
articles of faith, which have been included
in the term of Christian dogmas. During
eighteen centuries Christian theology has very
often ventured to advance out of and beyond
the limits of the Christian religion: man has
confounded his own labors with the work of _
God. It is the natural consequence of the^
union of human activity and human imper
fection. This same result may be traced
throughout the history of the world, especially
in the history of the society and religion
upon which God has grafted the Christian
religion. At the time when God raised up Jesus Christ
among the Jews, the faith and the law of the
Jews were no longer solely and purely the faith
and law which God had given to them by
Moses. The Pharisees, the Sadducees, and

42 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
many others, had essentially modified, enlarged,
and altered both. Christianity too has had its
Pharisees and its Sadducees; in its turn it has
been made to feel the workings of human
\ thought and the influence of human passions
on its divine revelation. I cannot recognize, in
all the uncertain fruits of these labors, the
claim to the title of Christian dogmas. Never
theless I have no intention here to specify par
ticularly and to combat such tenets in the
Church and in Christian theology as I can
neither accept nor defend. It is not for me —
and I venture to say, it is not for any Chris
tian— -to scan critically the interior of the
edifice at a moment when its foundations are
ardently attacked. Far rather I prefer to rally
in a common defense all who abide within its
walls. I shall here allude only to the dogmas
- [common to them all, which I sum up in these
terms: The Creation, Providence, Original Sin,
/the Incarnation, and the Redemption. These
/constitute the essence of the Christian religion,

SECOND MEDITATION. 43
and all who believe in these dogm&s I hold to
be Christians.
One leading and common characteristic in
these dogmas strikes me at the outset: they
deal frankly with the religious problems natural
to and inherent in man, and offer at once the
solution. The dogma of Creation attests the
existence of God, as Creator and Legislator,
and it attests also the link which unites man
with God. The dbgma of Providence explains
and justifies prayer, that instinctive recourse
of man to the living God, to that supreme
Power which is ever present with him in life,
and which influences his destiny. The dogma
of Original Sin accounts for the presence of
evil and disorder in mankind and in the world.
The dogmas of the Incarnation and of Redemp
tion rescue man from the consequences of , evil,
and open to him a prospect in another life of the
re-establishment of order. Unquestionably the
system is grand, complete, well connected, and
forcible : it answers to the requirements of the

44 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
human soul, removes the burden which op
presses it, imparts the strength which it needs,
and the satisfaction to which it aspires. Has
it a rightful claim to all this power? Is its
influence legitimate, as well as efficacious ?
In my own mind I have borne the burden
of the objections to the Christian system, and
to each of its essential dogmas ; I have expe
rienced the anxieties of doubt. I shall state
how I have escaped from doubt, and the
ground upon which my convictions have been
founded.

I. CREATIOK

The only serious opponents of the dogma of
the Creation are those who maintain that the
universe, the earth, the man upon the earth,
have existed from all eternity, and, collectively,
in the state in which they now are. No one
however, can hold this language, to which facts
are invincibly opposed. How many ages man

SECOND MEDITATION. 45
has existed on the earth is a question that, has
been largely discussed, and is still under dis
cussion. The inquiry in no way affects the
dogma of the Creation itself: it is a certain
and recognized fact, that man has not always
existed on the earth, and that the earth has
for long periods undergone different changes
incompatible with man's existence. Man, there
fore, had a beginning : man has come upon the
earth. How has he come there ?
Here the opponents of the dogma of creation
are divided ; some uphold the theory of spon
taneous generation, others, the transformation
of species. According to one party, matter
possesses, under certain circumstances and by
the simple development of its own proper
power, the faculty of creating animated beings.
According to others, the different species of
animated beings which still exist, or have ex
isted at various epochs and in the different con
ditions of the earth, are derived from a small
number of primitive types which have pos-

46 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
sessed, through the lapse ofmillions and thou
sands of millions of ages, the power of develop
ing and perfecting themselves so as to gain ad
mission, through transformation,, into higher
species. Hence they conclude, with more or less
hesitation, that the human race is the result of
a transformation, or a series of transformations.
The attempt to establish the theory of spon
taneous production dates from a remote period.
Science has ever baffled it. The more its ob
servations have been exact and profound, the
more have they refuted the hypothesis of the
innate creative power of matter. This result
has been again recently established by the
attentive examination of men of eminent scien
tific attainments, within and without the walls
of the Academy of Sciences. But were it even
otherwise, could the advocates of the theory of
spontaneous production refer to experiments
hitherto irrefutable, these would furnish no
better explanation of the first appearance of
man upon earth, and I should retain my right

SECOND MEDITATION. 47
to repeat here what I have advanced elsewhere
on this subject:* "Such a»mode of generation
cannot, nor ever could produce any but infant
beings in the first hour and in the first state of
incipient life. It has, I believe, never been
asserted, nor will any person ever affirm, that,
by spontaneous generation, man, that is to say,
man and woman, the human couple, can have
issued, or that they have issued at any period,
from matter, of full form and stature, in posses
sion of all their powers and faculties, as Greek
Paganism represented Minerva issuing from the
brain of Jupiter. Yet it is only upon this sup
position that man, appearing for the first time
upon earth, could have lived there to perpetuate
his species and to found the human race. Let
any one picture to himself the first man, born
in a state of the earliest infancy, alive but inert,
devoid of intelligence, powerless, incapable of
satisfying his own wants even for a moment,
trembling, sobbing, with no mother to listen to
* L'Eglise et la Socie'te Chretienne en 1861, p. 27.

48 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
or feed' him ! And yet we nave in this a picture
of the first man as presented by the system of
¦ spontaneous generation. It is manifestly not
thus that the human race first appeared upon
earth." The system of the transformation of species is
no less refuted by science than by the instincts
of common sense. It rests upon no tangible
fact, on no principle of scientific observation or
historic tradition. All the facts ascertained, all
the monuments collected in different ages and
different places, respecting the existence of liv
ing species, disprove the hypothesis of their
having undergone any transformation, any nota
ble and permanent change. We meet with
them a thousand, two thousand, three thousand
years ago, the same as they are at the present
day. In the same species the races may vary
and undergo mutual changes; the species do
not change ; and all attempts to transform them
artificially, by crossings with allied species, have
only resulted in modifications, which, after two

SECOND MEDITATION. 49
'* 4 "
or three generations, have been strufcSf* with
barrenness, as if to attest the impotence of man
to effect, by the progressive transformation of
existing species, a creation of new species. Man
is not an ape transformed and perfected by
some dim imperceptible fermentation of the
elements of nature and by the operation of
ages. This assumed explanation of the origin
of the human species is a mere vague hypoth
esis, the fruit of an imagination ill comprehend
ing the spectacle that nature presents, and
therefore easily seduced to form ingenious con
jectures. These their authors sow in the stream
of events unknown and of time infinite, and
trust to them for the realization of their dreams.
The principle of the fundamental diversity and
the permanence of species, firmly upheld by
M. Cuvier, M. Flourens, M. Coste, M. Quatre-
fages, and by all exact observers of facts,
remains dominant in science as in reality.*
* Cuvier — Discours sur les Revolutions du Globe, pp. 117, 120,
124, (edit. 1825;) Flonrfins — Ontologie Faturelle, pp. 10-87,
4

50 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Besides these vain attempts to supersede God
the creator, and to explain, by the inherent and
progressive power of matter, the origin of man
and of the world, the Christian dogma of crea
tion has yet other adversaries. One party to
combat it seizes its arms from the Bible itself,
alleging the account there given of the success
ive facts of the creation, of which the world
and man were the result ; they cite and enumer
ate the difficulties of reconciling this account
with the observations and the conclusions of
science, I shall weigh the force of this class of
objections in treating of the inspiration of" the
Holy Scriptures, of their real object and true
meaning ; but I at once raise the dogma of
(1861 ;) Journal des Savants, (October, November, and Decem
ber, 1863 ;) three articles on the work of Ch. Darwin, On the
Origin of Species and the Laws of Progress among Organized
Beings ; Coste — Histoire Generate et Partieuliere du Developpe
ment des Corps Organises ; Discours Preliminaire, vol. i, p. 23 ;
Quatrefages — Metamorphoses de l'Homme et des Animaux, p.
225, (1862 ;) and his articles On the Unity of the Human Spe
cies, published in the " Eevue des Deux Mondes " in 1860 and
1861, and collected in one volume, (1861.)

SECOND MEDITATION. 51
creation above this attack, placing it at its
proper height and isolation. It is the general
fact, it is the very principle of creation which
constitutes the dogma; whatever may be the
obscurities or the scientific difficulties presented
by the biblical narrative, the principle and the
general fact of the creation remain unaffected ;
God the creator does not the less remain in pos
session of his work. The Christian religion, in
its essence, asserts and demands nothing more.
But lastly, the Christian dogma of creation is
met by the general objection raised against all
the facts and all the acts which are termed
supernatural : that is to say, against the exist
ence of God as well as the dogma of creation,
against all religions in common with Chris
tianity. Such a question requires to be consid
ered, not with reference to any particular
vdogma, or with a view to defend one side only
of the edifice of Christianity. This point, then,
I shall presently examine frankly and in all its
bearings.

52 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

II. PROVIDENCE.
God the creator is also God the preserver.
He lives, and is at the same time the source of
life. The union between him and his creature
does not cease when the creature is brought into
existence. The dogma of Providence is conse
quent upon that of creation.
Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the
desires or sorrows of the soul, seeking that sat
isfaction, strength, or consolation which it does
not find within itself; it is the expression of a
faith, instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear,
wavering or steadfast, in the existence, the
presence, the power, and the sympathy of the
Being to whom prayer is addressed. Without
a certain measure of faith and trust in God,
prayer would not burst forth, or would sud
denly be dried up in the soul. If faith every
where resists, and everywhere outlives all the
denials, all the doubts, and all the darkness

SECOND MEDITATION. 53
which oppress mankind, it is that man bears
within himself an imperishable consciousness
of the enduring bond which connects him
with God, and God with him.
Far from destroying this sentiment, experi
ence and the spectacle of life explain and con
firm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man rec
ognizes in it three different sources, and divides,
so to say, into three classes the facts which
make up the whole. He is conscious of being
subject to events which are the consequence of
laws, general, permanent, and independent
of his will, but which by his intelligence he
observes and comprehends. By the act of his
free will he also himself creates events, of
which he knows himself to be the author,
and these have their own consequences and
enter too into the tissue of his life. Lastly,
he passes through events, in his view, neither
the result of those general laws from which
nothing can withdraw him, nor the act
of his own liberty, events of which he per-

54 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ceives neither the cause, the reason, nor the
author. Man attributes this last class of events some
times to a blind cause, which he terms chance ;
at another, to an intelligent and supreme inten
tion which is in God. His mind at times
revolts at the inanity of this word chance,
which explains and defines nothing; and he
then pictures to himself a mysterious, impene
trable power, a merely necessary chain of un
known facts, to which he gives the name of
fatality, destiny. To account for this obscure
and accidental part of human life, which orig
inates neither from any general and conceivable
laws, nor from the free will of man himself, we
must choose between fatality and Providence,
chance and God.
I express my meaning without hesitation.
Whoever accepts as a satisfactory explanation
the theory of fatality and chance, does not truly
believe in God. Whoever believes truly in
God, relies upon Providence. God is not an

SECOND MEDITATION. 55
expedient, invented to explain the first link in
the chain of -causation, an actor called to open
by creation the drama of the world, then to
relapse into a state of inert uselessness. , By the
very fact of his existence, God is present with
his work and sustains it. Providence is the
natural and necessary development of God's
existence ; his constant presence and permanent
action in creation. The universal and insuper
able instinct which leads man to prayer, is in
harmony with this great fact ; he who believes
in God cannot but have recourse to him and
pray to him.
Objections are raised to the name itself of
God. He acts, it is said, only by general and
permanent laws : how can we implore his inter
ference in favor of our special and exceptional
desires ? He is immutable, ever perfect, and
ever the same: how is it conceivable that he
lends himself to the fickleness of human senti
ments and wishes ? The prayer which ascends
to him is forgetful of his real nature. Men

56 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
have treated the attributes of God as furnish
ing an objection to his providence.
This objection, so often repeated, never fails
to astonish me. The majority of those who
urge it, assert at the same time that God is
incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate
the secret of his nature. What then is this but
to pretend to comprehend God? and by what
right do they oppose his nature to his provi
dence, if his nature is to us an impenetrable
mystery ? I refrain from reproaching them for
their ambition ; ambition is the privilege and
the glory of man ; but in retaining it, let them
not overlook its legitimate limits. There is
only this alternative : either man must cease to
believe' in God, because he cannot comprehend
him, or in effect admit his incomprehensibility,
and still at the same time believe in him. He
cannot pass and repass incessantly from one sys
tem to the other, now declaring God to be
incomprehensible ; now speaking of him, of his
nature and his attributes, as if he were within

SECOND MEDITATION. 51
the province of human science. Great as is the
question of Providence, the one I have here to
consider is still greater, for it is the question of
the very existence of God ; and the fundamental
inquiry is to know whether he exists, or does
not exist. God is at once light and mystery:
in intimate relation with man, and yet beyond
the limits of his knowledge. I shall presently
endeavor to mark the limit at which human
knowledge stops, and indicate its proper
sphere ; but this I at once assume as certain :
whoever, believing in God and speaking of him
as incomprehensible, yet persists in endeavoring
to define him scientifically, and seeks to pene
trate the mystery, which he has yet admitted,
is in great risk of destroying his own belief,
and of setting God aside, which is one way of
denying him.
But I leave for a moment these two simul
taneous propositions, namely, the impossibility
of comprehending God, and the necessity of be
lieving in him ; and I proceed at onGe to that

58 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
objection to the special providence of God
which is drawn from the general character of
the laws of nature. This objection results from
confounding very different things, and overlook
ing a fundamental one, the fact characteristic
indeed of human nature. It is true that the
providence of God presides over the order of
the world which he governs by general and per
manent laws ; these laws would be more accu
rately designated by another name ; they are
the Will of God, continually acting upon the
world, for not only the laws but the Lawgiver
are there ever present. But when God created
man, he created him different from the physical
world ; free, and a moral agent ; and hence there
is a fundamental difference between the action
of God on the physical world, and his action on
man. I shall subsequently state my opinion as
to the full meaning of the expression, " Man is
a free being," and as to the nature of the con
sequences to which it leads ; for the present, I
assume, as a certain and incontestable fact, this

SECOND MEDITATION. 59
principle of human liberty, of the free determ
ination of man considered as a moral agent.
Admitting this, it cannot be said that God gov
erns mankind at large by general and perma
nent laws ; for what would this be but to ignore
or annul the liberty granted to man, that is to
say, to misconceive and mutilate the work of
God himself. Man exercises a free determina
tion, and in his own life actually gives birth to
events which are not the result of any general
and external laws. Divine Providence watches
the operations of man's volition, and records the
manner in which it has been exercised. It
does not treat man as it deals with the stars in
heaven and the waves of the ocean, which have
neither thought nor will ; with man it has
other relations than with nature, and employs
a different mode of action.
There is little wisdom in instituting compari
sons between objects or facts not essentially
analogous ; and the idea of God has been so
often disfigured by representing him in the

60 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
image of man, that I mistrust the efficacy of
any analogies borrowed from humanity to con
vey a conception of God. I cannot, however,
overlook the fact, that God has created man in
his own image, nor can I absolutely refrain
from seeking, in nature or the life of man,
some type to shadow forth the features of God.
Let us consider the human family : the father
and mother assist in directing the active devel
opment of the child ; they watch over it with
authority and tenderness ; they control its lib
erty without annulling it, and they listen to
its little prayers— now granting them, now re
fusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a
view to the child's main and future interests.
The child, without thought or design, by the
spontaneous instinct of its nature, recognizes
the authority and feels the tenderness of its
parents ; as it advances in age, it sometimes
obeys and sometimes resists their injunctions,
using or misusing its natural liberty ; but in all
the fickleness of its will, it asks, it entreats, full

SECOND MEDITATION. 61
of confidence — joyous and thankful when it
obtains from its parents what it desires ; yet,
when denied, still ready again to ask and to
entreat with the same confidence as before.
This is what takes place in the government
of the human family when ruled according to
the dictates of nature and right. An image
we have here, imperfect but still true — a shad-
owing-forth, faint yet faithful — of Divine Prov
idence. Thus it is that the Christian religion
qualifies and describes the action of God in the
life of man. It exhibits God as ever present
and accessible to man, as a father to his child ;
it exhorts, encourages, invites man to implore,
to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves ab
solutely the answer of God to that prayer ; he
will grant, or he will refuse : we cannot pene
trate his motives — " The ways of God are not
our ways." Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless
and ever renewed, the Christian dogma associ
ates the firm hope that " nothing is impossible
with God." This dogma is thus in full and

62 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
intimate harmony with the nature of man;
while recognizing his liberty, it does homage
to his dignity ; in tendering to him the resource
of an appeal to God it provides for his weak
ness. In science, it suppresses not the mystery
which cannot be suppressed ; but, in man's
life, it solves the natural problem which weighs
upon the soul. —

HI. ORIGINAL SIN.

The dogmas of Creation and Providence
bring us into the presence of God ; it is the
action of God upon the world and man that
they proclaim and affirm. The dogma of Orig
inal Sin brings us back to man ; it is the act of
man toward God, which stands at the very
beginning of the history of mankind.
In what does this dogma consist ? What are
the elements and the essential facts which con
stitute it, and upon which it is founded ?

SECOND MEDITATION. 63
The dogma of Original Sin implies and
affirms these propositions :
1. That God, in creating man, has created <
him an agent, moral, free, and fallible. }
2. That the will of God is the moral law of <¦
man, and obedience to the will of God is the
duty of man, inasmuch as he is a moral and
free agent.
3. That, by an act of his own free will, man
has knowingly failed in his duty by disobeying
the law of God.
4. That the free man is a responsible being,
and that disobedience to the law of God has
justly entailed on him punishment.
5. That that responsibility and that punish
ment are hereditary, and that the fault of the
first man has weighed and does weigh upon the
human race.
The authority of God, the duty of obedience
to the law of God, the liberty and responsi
bility of man, the heritage of human responsi
bility are, in their moral chronology, the prin-

64 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ciples and the facts comprised in the dogma of
Original Sin.
I turn away my attention for a moment from
the dogma itself, its source, its history, the
biblical and Christian tradition of this first step
in evil of the human race. And considering
man, his nature, and his destiny in their actual
and general state, I investigate and verify the
moral facts as they manifest themselves at the
present day, to the eyes of good sense, amid
the disputes of the learned.
Man, at his birth, is subjected to the moral
authority, as well as the physical power of the
parents who, humanly speaking, created him.
Obedience is to him a duty, and at the same
time a necessity. This physical necessity and
this moral obligation, however ultimately con
nected with each other, are not one and iden
tical ; and the child, in its spontaneous develop
ment, instinctively feels the moral obligation
long before it is conscious of the physical neces
sity. The instinctive feeling of the obligation

SECOND MEDITATION. 65
is united with the growing sentiment of affec
tion ; and the child obeys the look, the voice
of its mother, unconscious of its absolute de
pendence upon her.
As the sentiment of affection and the instinct
of obligatory obedience are the first dawn of
moral good in the development of the child, so
the impulse to disobedience is the first symptom,
the first appearance of moral evil. It is with
the voluntary disobedience of the child to the
will of its mother that the moral infraction
commences, and it is in disobedience that it
resides. It considers neither the motives nor
the consequences of its act; it is simply con
scious that it disobeys, and regards its mother
with a mingled feeling of restlessness and de
fiance ; it tries, with hesitation, the maternal
authority; it strives to be, and especially to
appear, independent of the natural and legiti
mate power which rules it, and which it recog
nizes at the very moment when it opposes its
own will to that higher law.
5

66 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
As the child, so is the man. As man is born
free, so he lives free ; and as he is born subject,
so he lives subject. Liberty coexists with au
thority and resists without annulling it. Au
thority exists before liberty, and as it does not
yield to it, so neither does it supersede it.
Man, inasmuch as he knows that he disobeys,
renders homage to authority by the very fact
of his disobedience. Authority, on its side,
recognizes the liberty of man, by the condemna
tion which it passes on him for having misused
it ; for he would not be responsible for his acts
were he not free. In the coexistence of these
two powers, authority and liberty, at one time in
accordance, at another in conflict, lies the great
secret of nature and of human destiny, the
fundamental principle of man and of the world.
Let it be clearly understood that I speak
here of the moral world, of the world of
thought and of will. In the physical world
there is neither authority nor liberty; there
are merely certain forces, forces acting inevita-

SECOND MEDITATION. 6Y
bly and unequally. If the question concerned
the material world, could I do better than
repeat what Pascal has admirably said : " Man
is but a reed — the weakest in nature — but he
is a reed which thinks ; the universe need not
rise in arms to crush him; a vapor, a drop of
water suffices to kill him. But were the uni
verse to crush him, man would still be nobler
than the power which killed him, for he knows
that he dies; and of the advantage which the
universe has over him, the universe knows
nothing." When man obeys or disobeys, he
knows just as well that authority confronts
him, as that liberty of action abides with him
self. He knows what he does, and he charges
himself with the responsibility. Moral order is
here complete.
Throughout all times and in aU places, in all
men, as in the first man, disobedience to legiti
mate authority is the principle and foundation
of moral evil, or, to call it by its religious name,
of sin.

68 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Disobedience has various and complicated
sources ; it" may spring from a thirst for inde
pendence, from ambition or presumptuous curi
osity, or from giving rein to human inclinations
and temptations ; but, whatever its origin, dis
obedience is ever the essential characteristic of
that free act which constitutes sin, as it is also
the source of the responsibility which accom
panies it.
Eminent men, eminently pious men, have
combated the doctrine of human liberty; un
able to reconcile it with what they term the
divine prescience, they have denied the fun
damental fact of the nature of man, rather than
fully acknowledge the mystery of the nature
of God. Others, equally eminent and sincere, ,
have limited themselves to raising doubts re
garding human liberty, and denying it the
value of an absolute and peremptory fact. In
my opinion they have confounded facts essen
tially different, although intimately blended;
they have ignored the special and simple char-

SECOND MEDITATION. 69
acter of the very fact of free will. During a
course of lectures which I delivered thirty-five
years ago at the Sorbonne, on the history of
civilization in France, having occasion to ex
amine the controversy of St. Augustine with
Pelagius on free will, predestination, and grace,
I explained these subjects in terms which I
repeat here, finding no others which appear to
me more exact and more complete :
" The fact which lies at the foundation of the
whole dispute," I said in 1829, "is liberty, free
will, the human will. To comprehend this fact
exactly we must divest it of every foreign ele
ment, and confine it strictly to itself. It is the
want of this precaution that has led to such
frequent misconception of the thing itself; men
have not looked simply at the fact of liberty,
and at that alone. It has been viewed and
described, so to speak, pMe-wMe with other
facts, closely connected to it, it is true, in the
moral life of man, but which are no less essen
tially different. For example, human liberty

TO . THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
has been said to consist in the act of deliberat
ing upon and choosing between motives; that
deliberation, and that choice and judgment
consequent upon it, have been regarded as the
essence of free will. Not so at all. These are
acts of the intellect, not of liberty ; it is before
the intellect that the various motives of resolu
tion and action, interests, passions, opinions,
and such like present themselves ; the intellect
considers, compares, estimates, weighs, and
judges them. This is a preparatory task
which precedes the act of volition, but which
does not in any way constitute it. When, after
deliberation, man has taken full cognizance of
the motives presented to him, and of their
value, there takes place a process entirely
new, and wholly different, that of free will;
man forms a resolution, that is to say, he com
mences a series of facts having their source in
himself, of which he regards himself as the
author; and these are effectuated because he
wills them; they would have no existence

SECOND MEDITATION. 71
did he not will it, and would be different if
he desired to produce them otherwise. Now,
let us imagine all remembrance of this process
of intellectual deliberation obliterated, the
motives so known and appreciated, forgotten;
concentrate your thought, and that of the
man who takes a resolution, upon the moment
when he says, 'It is my will, therefore I shall
do so ;' and ask yourself, ask too the man,
whether he could not will and act otherwise.
Without doubt, you will reply, as he will do,
'Assuredly,' and this it is that reveals the fact
of liberty ; it consists wholly in the resolution
which man takes after the deliberation is at
an end; it is the resolution that is the proper
act of man, which is through him and through
him alone ; a simple act, independent of all
the facts which precede or accompany it, iden
tical in the most varied circumstances, always
the same, whatever be its motives or its results,
"At the same time that man feels himself
free, and is conscious of the power of com-

72 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
mencing by his own will alone a series of
facts, he recognizes that his will is subjected
to^the empire of a certain law, which takes
different names, according to the circumstances
to which it is applied — moral law, reason, good
sense, etc. . . . Man is free, but according even
to man's own way of thinking his will is not
arbitrary ; he may use it in an absurd, senseless,
unjust, and culpable manner, and whenever he
uses it a certain rule must govern it. The
observance of this rule is his duty, the task
assigned to his liberty."
It is that act of a will (that is to say, of a
will strictly brought back to its central and
essential limits) acting freely in the intimate
'recesses of his being, which, in the case of
disobedience to the law of duty, constitutes
-in man sin, and entails on him its responsibility.
Is this responsibility exclusively personal,
and limited to the author of the act, or com
municated, so to say, by contagion, and trans
mitted in a certain measure to his descendants ?

SECOND MEDITATION. 73
I am still -considering only actual appreciable
acts, such as they produce and manifest them
selves in the moral life of the human race.
We find the poetry and mythology of nearly
all nations expressing the idea of an Utopian
state of existence, referred to times remote1
and primitive, to which they assign different/
names, as the Golden Age, the Age of the (
Gods, and which they picture as an epoch
when there existed no moral and physical evilv
in the world — an era of peace, bliss, and,
innocence. This is the more remarkable, as
it has no foundation, and finds no pretext in
any tradition of historical times, however re
mote ; for from the commencement of history,
from the time that we can discern any trace
of facts at all precise and authentic, it is not
the Golden Age; on the contrary, it is the
Iron Age which appears, an epoch of violence
and ignorance and barbarism, in which war
and force are rampant, and which has not in
effect the least resemblance to those beautiful

74 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
dreams of ancient poetry. Without now seek
ing to establish any relation between these
mythological dreams and the biblical tradi
tions, or, for the moment, drawing from the
Golden Age any argument in support of the
Garden of Eden, I merely point it out as a
great fact, as evidence of a general instinct,
so to say, of the human imagination. What
is the meaning of this ? Whence comes this
Utopia of innocence and bliss in the cradle of
the human race? To what does this idea of
a primal time, without strife, without sin, and
without pain, correspond ?
But from this cradle of man and this primi
tive poetry to revert to the present time, to
real life, to the cradle of the infant, why is it
that, apart from all personal affection, we so
readily term infancy the age of innocence?
How is it that we find it so charming to give it
this name and regard it under this aspect?
Physical ill is already present, for it begins
with the very beginning of life ; but moral ill

SECOND MEDITATION. 75
has not yet appeared ; life has not yet brought
to the soul its trials, nor called forth its failings,
and the idea of the soul without spot or stain
has for us an inexpressible attraction ; we feel
a deep joy in witnessing innocence, or at least
its image in the child when we no longer see it
around us, nor find it within ourselves.
What means this universal instinct, which in
the dreams of the imagination, as well as in the
intimate scenes of domestic life, whether we
turn in thought to the cradle of the human race
or to that of the infant, leads us to regard inno
cence as the primitive and normal state of man,
and makes us place in the spot where innocence
resides that which some term Paradise, and
others the Golden Age ?
Manifestly between the soul without spot and
the soul tainted with evil, between the creature
who is merely fallible and the creature who
has sinned, there is a very great change of
state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have
a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the

76 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
fall into this abyss ; and it is without premed
itation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that
we suffer our thoughts to bear us far, far be
yond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous
contemplation of a state anterior to the fall.
Hence spring, and thus are explained, the
power and the charm which the idea of inno
cence has for us; absolute innocence we have
never seen, but the idea is still vouchsafed to
us ; and so it appears to us in the cradle of the
world and in the cradle of the infant, and the
pleasure is infinite which we derive from
the ideal spectacle of purity which they each
suggest. Is this a pleasure foreign to all personal sen
timent, to all secret reference to ourselves, the
pleasure, that is to say, of a simple spectator?
No ; these impressions which the picture of in
nocence awakens in us are connected with and
carry us back to ourselves ; this change in the
state of man, that mysterious past which has
thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him,

SECOND MEDITATION. 77
nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it,
these were not the lot of the first man alone ;
the entire human race was, and remains subject
to them. Our present evil does not proceed
solely from ourselves ; we have received it as a
heritage before having brought it upon us as a
penalty. We are not merely fallible beings,
we are the children of a being who has sinned.
How can we feel surprise at this inheritance
of woe ? Have we not dayly the example and
the spectacle before our eyes? It is an inconA
testable and undisputed fact that two elements I
enter into the moral life of man: on the one
side, his innate dispositions, his natural and in- J
voluntary inclinations ; on the other, his inmost"
and individual will. The natural inclinations of
a man do not destroy his moral liberty, nor en
slave his will, but they render its exercise more
laborious and more difficult to him ; it is not a
chain which he carries, it is a burden that he
bears. Equally incontestable and undisputed is
it that the natural dispositions of men are differ-

78 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ent and unequally distributed; no one is en
tirely exempt from evil inclinations ; every man
is not only fallible, but prone to transgress, and
prone not only to transgress, but to transgress
in some particular direction or other. Nor can
the fact be disputed, although appreciable with
more difficulty, that the natural and special dis
positions of the individual descend to him in a
certain measure from his origin, and that par
ents transmit to their children such or such
moral propensities just as they do such or such
physical temperament, or such or such features.
Hereditary transmission enters into the moral
as well as the physical order of the world.
This inheritance must take effect ; it has done
so from the first days of man's existence upon
earth, for man has been created complete in his
whole nature. And while, at the same time as
complete, he has been created fallible, I ask,
Who shall measure the distance between man
fallible, but still without fault, and the first
transgression ? Who shall sound the depth of

SECOND MEDITATION. 79
the fall and of the change which it brought
into the moral condition of its author? Who
shall weigh the consequences of this change to
the state and the moral dispositions of man's
descendants? To appreciate the extent and
gravity of this awful fact, of this first appear
ance and this first heritage of moral evil, we
have but one test : the instinct we still preserve
of a state of innocence, and of the immense
space which this instinct irresistibly compels us
to place between native innocence and man's
first transgression ; but this test is unexception
able ; it dimly reveals to us, in this fatal trans
formation, the whole infirmity and responsibility '
of the human race. ^Ji£
An objection is raised to this as an injustice. /
How, it is said, can each man be responsible/i
for a fault which he has not himself committed, j
for the transgression of another man, separated k
from himself by so many ages ? I consider this
objection weak and frivolous. Such an objection
would attach to all the inequalities which exist

80 . THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
\ .','.'
among men, to the inequality of the destinies
as well as that of the nature of man, to the in
equality of his moral disposition as well as to
that of his physical powers. The objection
"would attach to the solidarity of successive
^generations, and the controlling influence which
jthe ideas, the acts, the destiny of each of them
exert on the ideas, the acts, the destiny of those
which follow it. The objection would attach to
the ties which unite the child with its parents,
and which are the cause of its sometimes inherit
ing their evil dispositions, and sometimes suffer
ing for their faults. It is, in short, the general
order of the world to which such an objection
must apply; it is the very existence of evil,
and its unequal distribution in a manner wholly
independent of individual merit which assumes
the character of a monstrous iniquity. And
when we come to this point, that we no longer
refer the source of evil to the fault and the
responsibility of man, placed here on earth in
a scene and period of transition and of trial,

SECOND MEDITATION. /, 81,
see to what alternative we are brought. \$*e^
must either regard evil as natural, eternal^
necessary, in the future as in the past, as the
normal state of man and of the world ; that is
to say, we must deny God, the creation, the
divine providence, human morality, liberty, re
sponsibility and hope ; or, on the other hand,
it is to God himself that we must impute evil,
and whom we must render accountable.
The dogma of Original Sin alone relieves the
human mind from this odious and unacceptable
alternative : far from being in contradiction
either with the history of humanity, or with
the facts and instincts which constitute man's
moral nature, this dogma admits, illustrates,
and explains them. The fact of original sin
presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it/y
consists essentially in disobedience to the will A
of God, which will is the moral law of man/-"
This disobedience, the sin of 'Adam, is an act©,
committed' everywhere and ^very day, arising ^
from the same causes, marked by the same

82 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
characters, and attended by the same conse
quences as the Christian dogma assigns to it.
At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden,
this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute
independence, the ambitious aspirings of curi
osity and pride, or weakness in the face of
temptation. At the present day, as in the
Garden of Eden, it produces an immense
change in the inmost state of man, a change,
the mere idea of which seizes upon the human
soul, and disturbs it to its very depths ; it trans
ports man from the state of innocence to the
state of sin. At the present day, as in the
Garden of Eden, the act which produces this
change involves and entails the responsibility
not only of its author, but of his descendants ;
sin is contagious in time as in space, it is trans-g
mitted, as well as diffused. The Christian*'
dogma exhibits the first man created fallible,
but born innocent ; innocent at the age of man,
proud in the plenitude of his faculties, not the
subject of any evil and fatal heritage. All at

SECOND MEDITATION. 83
once, for the first time, of his own will, man
disobeys God. Here lies Original Sin, the same
in its nature as sin at the present day, for they
both consist in disobedience to the law of God,
but it is the first in date in the history of man's
liberty, and the human source of that evil for
which the Christian religion, whilp- pointing it
out, offers to man the remedy and the cure.

IV. THE INCARNATION.
All religions have given a prominent place
to the problem of existence and the origin of
evil ; all have attempted its solution. The
good and the evil genius, Ormuzd and Ahri
man among the Persians ; God the Creator,
God the Preserver, and God the Destroyer —
Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva — in India ; the
Titans overwhelmed by the thunderbolts of
Jove while scaling Olympus ; Prometheus
chained to the rock for having snatched fire
fron^heaven ; all are so many hypotheses to

84 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
explain the conflict between good and evil,
between order and disorder in the world and
in man. But all these hypotheses are compli
cated, confused, and encumbered with chimeras
and fables ; all attribute the derivation of evil
to incongruous causes, none assign any term to
the conflict, nor find a remedy for the evil.
The Christian religion alone clearly states and
effectually solves the question ; it alone imputes
to man himself, and to him alone, the origin of
evil ; it alone represents God as intervening to
raise man from his fall, and to save him from
his peril.
In the course of the sixth and fifth centuries
before the Christian era a great fact appears in
history ; a breath of reform, religious, moral,
and social arises, and spreads from east to west,
among all the nations then at all progressing in
the path of civilization. Notwithstanding the
uncertainties of chronology, it may be said, ac
cording to the most recent and accurate re
searches, that Confucius in China, the Buddha

SECOND MEDITATION. 85
Cakya-Mouni in India, Zoroaster in Persia,'''
Pythagoras and Socrates in Greece, are all in
cluded in the limits of this epoch ;* men as
dissimilar as they are celebrated, but who have
all, in different ways and in unequal degrees,
undertaken a great work of reforming both the
men and the social institutions of their times.
Confucius was above all a practical moralist,
skilled in observation, counsel, and discipline ;
Buddha Cakya-Mouni, a dreamer, and a mys
tical and popular preacher ; Zoroaster, a legis
lator, religious and political ; Pythagoras and
Socrates, philosophers, bent upon instructing
the distinguished bands of disciples whom they
gathered around them. There is no doubt,
notwithstanding the trials of their life, that
neither power nor glory among their cotem
poraries was wanting to them. Confucius and
* Those researches give the following dates : 1. Confucius,
from 551 to 478 B. C. ; 2. Zoroaster, from 564 to 487, or from
589 to 512 B. 0 ; 3. Buddha Cakya-Mouni, in the seventh and
sixth centuries B. O, (he died, according to Burnouf, 543 B. 0. ;)
4. Pythagoras, from 680 to 500 B. C. ; 5. Socrates, 470 to 400
or 399 B. C.

86 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Zoroaster were the favorites and counselors of
kings. Buddha Cakya-Mouni, himself the son
of a king, became the idol of innumerable
multitudes. Pythagoras and Socrates formed
schools and pupils who were an honor to the
human mind. By their personal genius, and
by the excellence of some of their ideas and
actions, these men have insured themselves the
admiration of all posterity. Did they act up
to their teachings, and accomplish what they
attempted ? Did they really change the moral
and social condition of nations ? Did they
cause humanity to make any great progress,
and open to it horizons which it had not before
known ? By no means. Whatever fame at
taches to the names of these men, whatever
influence they may have exerted, whatever
trace of their passage may have remained, they
rather appeared to have power than really to
possess it ; they agitated the surface far more
than they stirred the depths; they did not
draw nations out of the beaten tracks in which

SECOND MEDITATION. 87
: f
they had lived. They did not transform souls.
In considering the facts at large, and notwith
standing the political and material revolutions
which they underwent, China after Confucius,
India after Buddha, Persia after Zoroaster,
Greece after Pythagoras and Socrates, followed
in the same ways, retained the same propensi
ties as before. Still more, among these very
different nations, stagnation was only to be
succeeded by decay. Where are these nations
at the present day, more than two thousand
years after the appearance of these glorious
characters in their history ? What great prog
ress, what salutary changes have been effected ?
What are they in comparison and in contact
with Christian nations ? Outside of Christian-^
ity there have been grand spectacles of activ
ity and force, brilliant phenomena of genius
and virtue, generous attempts at reform,
learned philosophical systems, and beautiful
mythological poems ; no real profound or fruit
ful regeneration of humanity and of society.

88 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
A few ages only after these barren efforts
among the great nations of the world, Jesus
Christ appears among a small, obscure people,
weak and despised. He himself is weak and
despised in the midst of his people ; he neither
possesses nor seeks any social power, any tem
poral means of action and of success; he col
lects around him only disciples weak and
despised as himself. Not only are they weak
and despised, they proclaim it themselves, and,
far from being troubled at this, they glory in
it, and derive from it confidence. St. Paul
writes to the Corinthians, "And I, brethren,
when I came to you, came not with excellency
of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the
testimony of God. For I determined not to
know anything among you, save Jesus Christ,
and him crucified. And I was with you in
weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.
. . . Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities,
in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in
distresses for Christ's sake : for when I am

SECOND MEDITATION. 89
weak, then am I strong."* And in truth,
Jesus Christ, the Master of St. Paul, is strong"
in his sufferings, and imparts his strength to
his disciples ; from his cross he accomplishes -
what erewhile, in Asia and Europe, princes
and philosophers, the powerful of the earth,
and sages, attempted without success; he
changes the moral state and the social state
of the world; he pours into the souls of men
new enlightenment and new powers; for all
classes, for all human conditions, he prepares
destinies before his advent unknown ; he liber
ates them at the same time that he lays down
rules for their guidance ; he quickens them
and stills them; he places the divine law and
human liberty face to face, and yet still in
harmony ; he offers an effectual remedy for
the evil which weighs upon humanity; to sin
he opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness
the door of hope.
Whence comes this power? What are its
* 1 Cor. ii, 1-3 ; 2 Cor. xii, 10.

90 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
source and its nature? How did those who
were its witnesses and instruments think and
speak of it at the moment when it was mani
fested I
-"* They all, unanimously, saw in Jesus Christ,
God; most of them, from the first moment,
suddenly moved and enlightened by his pres
ence and his words ; some, with rather more
surprise and hesitation, but soon penetrated
and convinced in their turn. " When Jesus
'came into the coasts of Cesarea Philippi, he
asked his disciples, saying, Whom do men say
that I, the Son of man, am? And they said,
Some say that thou art John the Baptist;
some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of
the prophets. He saith unto them, But whom
say ye that I am ? And Simon Peter answered
and said, Thou art the Christ, the son of the
living God. And Jesus answered and said
unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-jona:
for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto
thee, but my Father which is in heaven."

SECOND MEDITATION. 91
Another day, meeting with a similar instance
of doubt, Jesiis says to Thomas, "If ye had
known me, ye should have known my Father
also : and from henceforth ye know him, and
have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord,
show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus
saith unto him, Have I been so long time with
you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip ?
he that hath seen me hath seen the Father." *
It has been remarked that there are certain
variations in the language of the apostles,
and certain shades of difference in their lead
ing impressions ; and this is indeed true : they
call Jesus Christ at one time the Son of God,
at another the Son of man ; they regard him
and represent him now under his divine aspect,
at another under his human aspect; they do
not present exactly the same image of him;
they do not equally dwell upon the same traits
of his nature, or the same facts of his earthly
life. St. Matthew is more a narrator and mor-
* John xiv, 7-9.

92 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
alist; it is he who relates with fuller details
the birth and childhood of Jesus Christ, and
who gives at the greatest length the Sermon
on the Mount. St. John is more in the habit
of contemplating and depicting the divine
nature of Jesus Christ and his relation to God :
"In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God.
. . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt
among us, and we beheld his glory, the
glory as of the only-begotten of the Father,
full of grace and truth. . . . No man hath
seen God at any time; the only begotten Son,
which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath
declared him." * It is also St. John who relates
the testimony of the forerunner, St. John the
Baptist, answering to those who had said to
him that all men come to Jesus Christ: "Ye
yourselves bear me witness, that I said, I am
not the Christ, but that I am sent before him.
. . . He that cometh from above is above all.
* John i, 1, 14, 18.

SECOND MEDITATION. 93
. . . He whom God hath sent speaketh the
words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit
by measure unto him. The Father loveth the
Son, and hath given all things into his hand."*
St. Paul is more systematic, and enters more
fully into the 'questions and principles of the
Christian doctrine, and he regards the divinity
of -Jesus Christ as the first of these principles.
He writes to the Philippians : " Let this mind
be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:
who, being in the form of God, thought it no
usurpation to be equal with God: but made
himself of no reputation, and took upon him
the form of- a servant, and was made in the
likeness of men : and being found in fashion as
a man, he humbled himself, and became obedi
ent unto death, even the death of the cross."f
* John iii, 28, 31, 34, 35.
t Philippians ii, 5-8. I have given this verse in Osterwald's
translation, which is also that of the Vulgate ; but my son Guil-
laume, who is following out a careful course of study of Latin
and Greek philology in sacred and profane literature, reminds
me that the text of this passage presents a difficulty which fur
nished a field for the labors of Erasmus, Cameron, Grotius,

94 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
... It is he " who is the image of the invisible
God, the first-born of every creature : for by
Meric Casaubon, in the sixteenth century, as well as many
others before and after them. The Greek word agnayfiog ad
mits of two meanings, an active and a passive sense— it may
designate the action of ravishing, of carrying off oy force, or
the ooject carried off — the act of depredation, or the spoil. Sub
stantives derived from verbs frequently waver between these
two acceptations, and the word apnayfi, which is merely another
form of apKay/idc, is unquestionably a case in point. jEschylus,
Euripides, Herodotus, have employed it in the first sense;
iEschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, and Polybius in the second
sense. Now, in the passage of St. Paul, accordingly as one or
the other sense is adopted, these words must either be trans
lated thus, "He did not consider it a usurpation to be equal
to God;" or thus, "He did not display as a trophy his equality
to God;" that is to say: He did not display his equality with
God as the conquerors of the earth display the spoils and booty
which they have amassed ; he did not make use of his divinity
to reign, to triumph, to pride himself in it; he was not the
Messiah whom the carnal Jews expected, a visible king and
victorious in arms; but, on the contrary, "he humbled himself,
and took upon him the form of a servant," etc., etc. This
second interpretation seems more probable; the reasoning on
which it is founded is thus more connected and flowing, and
at the same time it leaves the doctrine of the apostle intact ; it
changes nothing in his conception or his conclusions. In this
passage, as in many others, St. Paul likewise affirms the divinity
of the Saviour whom he announces to men ; and it is from this
majesty, subjected to a Voluntary humiliation, vailed under the
form of a servant, obedient unto the death of the cross, that he
presents an august example and an imperative lesson for Chris
tians of humility and mutual support. It is thus that 'this
interpretation has been admitted and defended by two eminent
men, a scholar of the sixteenth and a theologian of the nine-

SECOND MEDITATION. 95
him were all things created, that are in heaven,
and that are in earth, visible and invisible,
whether they be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers: all things were cre
ated by him, and for him: and he is before
t all things, and by him all things consist."* St.
Peter and St. John, in their Epistles, speak in
the same terms as St. Paul. St. Peter says,
"We have not followed cunningly devised
fables, when we made known unto you the
power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he
received from God the Father honor and glory,
when there came such a voice to him from
the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son,
in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him."f
St. John writes : " Whosoever denieth the Son,
the same hath not the Father: but he that

teenth century, both of whom were strongly attached to the
dogma of the divinity of Jesus Christ — I allude to Meric Casau
bon (De Verborum Usu, pp. 138-146, at the end of the letters
of his father,) and M. A. Vinet (Homil6tique, p. 116.)
* Col. i, 15-17. 1 2 Peter i, 18, 17; Matt, xvii, 5.

96 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also." *
"Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every
Spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that
confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the
flesh is not of God." f
Such is the language of the apostles; such
are, at the same time, its shades of variance and
its harmony. They have all evidently the
same conception of Jesus Christ, they have all
the same faith in him. St. Matthew, as well as
St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul, alike regard
Jesus Christ as at once God and man, the rep
resentative of God on earth, and the Mediator
between God and men — come from God, and
reascended unto him as the source and center
of his being. The dogma of the Incarnation,
that is to say, of the divinity of Jesus Christ,
pervades the Holy Scriptures — the Gospels,
the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of the
Apostles, the writings of the first Fathers. It
* 1 John ii, 23. 1 1 John iv, 2, 3.

SECOND MEDITATION. 97 *,
is the common and fixed basis, the source and
essence of the Christian faith.
S- This was affirmed and declared by Jesus
Christ himself. WhSt*his diciples believed and
. related of him is what he himself told them of
himself, as well as what they themselves wit
nessed and thought of him : " All ¦ things are
delivered unto me of my Father : and no man
knoweth the Son, but the Father ; neither know
eth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son will reveal him."* " I and
my Father are one." f And when he approaches
the term of his mission, when, after having
announced to his disciples that the hour was com
ing when they would be dispersed, each going his
own way, leaving him alone, Jesus Christ raises
his thoughts to God and says, " Father, the hour
is come ; glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may
glorify thee : as thou hast given him power
over all flesh, that he should give eternal life
to as many as thou hast given him. And this
* Matt, xi, 27. t John x, 30.

98 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
is life eternal, that they might know thee the
only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou
hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth :
I have finished the work which thou gavest
me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou
me with thine own self with the glory which I
had with thee before the world was. I have
manifested thy name unto the men which thou
gavest me out of the world: thine they were,
and thou gavest them me ; and they have kept
thy word. Now they have known that all
things whatsoever thou hast given me are of
thee. For I have given unto them the words
which thou gavest me ; and they have re
ceived them, and have known surely that I
came out from thee, and they have believed
that thou didst send me. I pray for them :
I pray not for the world, but for them which
thou hast given me ; for they are thine. And
all mine are thine,' and thine are mine ; and I
am glorified in them. And now I am no more
in the world, but these are in the world, and I

^ SECOND MEDITATION. 99
come to thee. Holy Father, keep through
thine own name those whom thou hast given
me, that they may be one, as we are."*
I might multiply these texts; but these
surely suffice to show that the, words of Jesus
Christ in relation to himself, and those of his
apostles, are in perfect unison ; he speaks of
himself as they speak of him ; he qualifies him
self as they qualify him; he calls God his
"Father," as his disciples call him " the Son of
God." He has the same faith in himself, in
his nature, and in his mission, as St. Matthew,
St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul had in him.
It is a great source of error, in the study of
facts, not to know how to stop at their general
and essential features, and, losing sight of these,
to give prominence to partial and secondary
features. On the subject of the divinity of Jesus
Christ, that fundamental principle of the Chris
tian religion, the precise meaning and import of
such or such a word may be disputed ; such or
* John xvii, 1-11.

100 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
such an expression may be thought an interpo
lation, and so eliminated in any particular gospel,
in any particular epistle; nevertheless there
will always remain infinitely more than suffi
cient evidence of the fact that those who at the
present day believe in the divinity of Jesus
Christ, believe simply what the apostles be
lieved and said, and that the apostles them
selves only believed and said, nearly nineteen
centuries ago, what Jesus Christ himself said to
them. The opponents of the dogma of the Incarna
tion and of the divinity of Jesus Christ disre
gard equally man and history, the complex ele
ments of human nature, and the meaning of
the great facts which mark the religious life of
the human race.
What is man himself, but an incomplete and
imperfect incarnation of God ? The material
ists who deny the soul, and the naturalists who
deny creation, are alone consistent in rejecting
the Christian dogma. All who believe in the

SECOND MEDITATION. 101
distinction of spirit and matter, who do not be
lieve that man is the result of the fermentation
of matter, or of the transformation of species,
are constrained to admit the presence in human
nature of the divine element, and they must
necessarily accept these words in Genesis:
" God created man in his own image ;" that is
to say, they must acknowledge the presence of
God in frail and fallible humanity.
I open the histories of all religions, of all
mythologies, the most refined as well as the!
grossest ; I find at every step the idea and the
assertion of the Divine incarnation. Brahmin
ism, Buddhism, Paganism, all faiths, all religious
idolatries, abound in incarnations of every kind
and date, primitive or successive, connected
with this or that historical event, adapted to
explain this or that fact, to satisfy this or that
human propensity. It is the natural and uni
versal instinct of men to picture to themselves
the action of God upon the human race under
the form of the incarnation of God in man.

102 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Like all religious instincts, that of the belief
in the Divine incarnation may engender, and
has engendered, the most absurd superstitions,
the most extravagant hypotheses. In the same
way as the natural faith in God has been the
source of all idolatries, so the tendency to incar
nate God in man has given rise to, and admitted
every kind of strange imagining and spurious
tradition. Are we then to pronounce all divine incar
nation false, every tradition of it spurious ?
Rather let us say that it proceeds from the in
firmity of the human mind, if we see realities
and mere chimeras, truths and errors, in such
close proximity, if we find them calling one
another by the same names and unceasingly
confounding one another's attributes. The pre
tended incarnation of Brahma, or of Buddha,
proves no more against the divinity of Jesus
Christ than the adoration of idols proves against
the existence of God. Jesus Christ, God and
man, has characteristics which appertain to him

SECOND MEDITATION. 108
alone. These have founded his power and oc
casioned the success of his works, a power and a
success which belong to him alone. It is not a
human reformer, but God himself, who, through
Jesus Christ, has accomplished what no human
reformer has ever accomplished, or even con
ceived, the reform of the moral and social con
dition of the world, the regeneration of the
human soul, and the solution of the problems
of human destiny. It is by these signs, by
these results, that the divinity of Jesus Christ is
manifested. How was the Divine incarnation
accomplished in man? Here, as in the union
of the soul and the body, as in the creation,
arises the mystery ; but if we cannot fathom
the reason of it, the fact not the less exists.
When this fact has taken the form of dogma,
theology has sought to explain it. In my opin
ion this was a mistake ; theology has obscured
the fact in developing and commenting upon it.
It is the fact itself of the incarnation which
constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises

104 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
above all definitions and all theological contro
versies. To disregard this fact, to deny the
divinity of Jesus Christ, is to deny, to over
throw the Christian religion, which would
never have been what it is, and would never
have accomplished what it has, but that the
Divine incarnation was its principle, and Jesus
Christ, God and man, its author.

V. THE REDEMPTION.
I enter into the sanctuary of the Christian
faith. God has done more than manifest himself in
Jesus Christ. He has done more than place
upon the earth and before men his own living
image, the type of sanctity and the model of
life. The Creator has accomplished, through
Jesus Christ, toward man, his creature, an act
of his beneficence and at the same time of his
sovereign power. Jesus Christ is not only God

SECOND MEDITATION. 105
made man to spread the divine light upon men ;
he is God made man to conquer and efface in
man moral evil, the fruit of the sin of man. He
brings not only light and law, but pardon and
salvation. And it is at the price of his own
suffering, of his own . sacrifice, that he brings
these to them. He is the type of self-devotion
at the same time as of sanctity. He has sub
mitted to be a victim in order to be a saviour.
The incarnation leads to the cross, and the cross
to the redemption.
Here are the supreme dogma and mystery.
Here are revealed plainly the sense and the
import of Christianity. By what ways did
Jesus Christ penetrate the human soul to ac
complish this great work? How did he win
the human soul to the Christian faith in order
to snatch it from evil and to save, it ?
When man fails in the duty of which he
recognizes the law, when, he commits the wrong
which he is bound to shun, when, after sin,
repentance arises within him, and a sense of the

106 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
necessity of expiation is soon joined with this
sentiment of repentance, the moral instinct of
man teaches that repentance does not suffice to
efface the fault, and that it requires to be ex
piated. Reparation supposes suffering.
And when the religious sentiment is joined
to the moral sentiment, when man believes in
God, and sees in him the author and dispenser
of the moral law, he regards himself as guilty of
transgression toward God whom he has dis
obeyed, he feels the need of being pardoned and
of being restored to the favor of the sovereign
master whom he has offended.
Among all nations, in all religions, under all
social forms, these two instincts, as to the
/necessity of expiation to. ensue upon the fault,
and the necessity of pardon to follow the trans-
egression, appear natural and inherent in the
numan soul. They have been at all times and
in all places the source of a multitude of beliefs
and practices; some pure and touching, others
foolish and odious. These may all be briefly

SECOND MEDITATION. 107
comprised in the single expression, sacrifices.
The history of all nations, barbarous or civil
ized, ancient or modern, teem with sacrificial
rites of every description, whether they be of a
nature gross or mystical, of a performance mild
or bloody ; rites invented and celebrated either
to expiate the sins of man, or to appease the
anger of God and regain his favor.
Nor is this all ; we have here to note another
moral fact, not less rea*! although it seems
stranger to the eyes of superficial reason.
Mankind has believed that a fault might be \
expiated by another than its author, that inno
cent victims might be efficaciously offered up to
influence God, and to save the guilty. This
belief has led to sacrifices no less absurd than
atrocious: the pretended expiation has become
an additional crime : it has at the same time
been also the source of heroic acts and sublime
examples of self-devotion. Both the domestic
records of families and the public histories of
nations have furnished us with admirable

108 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
instances of innocence voluntarily offering itself
as a sacrifice, taking upon itself the penalty,
the suffering, the death, to expiate the sin of
others, and to win from Divine Justice — now
satisfied — the pardon of the offender.
And are we then to regard this merely as a
pious, a generous illusion, a devotedness as vain
as admirable ? Yes, such is the view that all
those must adopt who believe neither in Provi
dence nor prayer, ndr in the existence of any
efficacious relation between the actions of man
and the purposes of God ; no solidarity between
men, no connection between the sacrifice of him
who practices the act of self-devotion, and the
destiny of him who is its object. But those
who have faith in the living God, in his con
tinued presence, and his never-sleeping provi
dence, those who believe that nothing in man,
whether it be good or whether it be evil, is in
vain, that every moral act bears its fruit vis
ible or invisible, immediate or remote, such as
these cannot fail to feel, to have, as it were, a

SECOND MEDITATION. 109
presentiment, that in such self-sacrifice of the
innocent for the salvation of the guilty, there
exists a mysterious virtue. The secret of this
it may not be given them to fathom, but it
nevertheless gives life in their bosom to the
hope that such sublime devotion will not fail
of its object.
And now, to pass from this feeling, and from
the acts of man, whose reality no one can dis
pute, to the corresponding dogmas of Christian
ity, let me, by the side of these acts of devot
edness and self-sacrifice of the human creature
in his innocence seeking to atone for the sins of
the human creature who is guilty, place the
self-devotion and self-sacrifice of Jesus Christ,
the Man-God, tendered to ransom from sin the
race of mankind and to open to it the way of
salvation; who is not struck by this sublime
analogy ? What connection and harmony be
tween the purest, the most generous, instincts
of the human soul, and the dogma of God's
redemption? I touch upon none of the ques-

110 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
tions, I enter into none of the controversies
which have sprung up with respect to this
dogma of redemption ; I do not weigh with a
view to compare faith and works, nor do I
essay to assign the part due to divine grace or
to human virtue ; I do not define or seek to
number the elect, but I pause upon the fact
itself of the redemption by Jesus Christ, the
fact upon which the dogma itself reposes. All
that the most renowned heroes, the most glori
ous saints of humanity, have striven to accom
plish, in order to expiate the sins of any
creature or any nation, Jesus Christ the Elect
of God, the Son of God, the God-Man, came to
effect for all mankind, by means of incompara
ble sorrow, humiliation, and sufferings. And,
as was affirmed by St. Paul in the first century,
and by Bossuet in the seventeenth, this very
suffering, this humiliation, this martyrdom of
Jesus Christ, have constituted his victory and
his empire. And I would ask, What other
spectacle than that of God made man to con-

SECOND MEDITATION. Ill
stitute himself victim — made victim to become
the Saviour — could have excited in the soul
of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of
respect, and love, that ardent, invincible, and
contagious faith of which the apostles and the
primitive Christians have left us the evidences
and the example ? It was requisite that the
victim and the sacrifice should be equal to the
work. That work was the Christian religion,
that incomparable system of facts, dogmas,
precepts, promises, which, in the midst of all
the doubts and all the controversies of the
mind of man, have for nineteen centuries
afforded satisfaction and solution to those
aspirings of the human race which nature
prompts, whether they assume the form of
religious instincts or religious problems.

THIRD MEDITATION.

THE SUPERNATURAL.
To a system so grand, and in such profound
harmony with man's own nature, an objection
is made%which is thought decisive ; that system
proclaims the supernatural, has the supernat
ural for its principle and foundation. It is
objected that the supernatural itself has no
existence. This objection is not novel, but it has at this
moment in appearance assumed a more serious
and formidable . shape than ever. It is in the
name of science itself, of all the human
sciences, of the physical sciences, historical
science, philosophical science, that the preten
sion is made that is to reduce the supernatural
to a nonentity, and to banish it from the world
and from man.

THIRD MEDITATION.
The reverence that I feel for scie&oe^is in$r
nite. I would have it as free and unshacKiea as
I would desire to see it honored. But Ptould
at the same time like to see it deal somewhat
more rigorously and logically with itself. I
would like to see it less exclusively absorbed
by its own peculiar labors and occupations, its
momentary successes ; more careful not to for
get or omit any of the ideas or any of the facts
which bear upon the subject with which it
deals, and for which in its solution it has still
to account.
In whatever quarter, at this day, the wind
may be, the abolition of the Supernatural is a
difficult enterprise, for the belief in the Super
natural is a fact natural, primitive, universal,
.constant in the life and history of the human
race. We may interrogate mankind in all
times and places, in all states of society and
degrees of civilization, we find it always and
everywhere spontaneously believing in facts
and causes beyond the sphere of this palpable

114 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
world, of this living piece of mechanism termed
nature. In vain do we extend, explain, amplify
nature itself; the instinct of man, the instinct
of human masses, has never suffered that nature
to confine it: it has always sought and seen
something beyond.
It is this belief — instinctive, and hitherto in
destructible — which is qualified as a radical
error ; this universal and enduring fact in man's
history it is which men seek to abolish. They
go further ; they affirm that it is already abol
ished ; that the people no longer believe in the
Supernatural; and that any attempt to bring
them back to it would be vain. Incredible
conceit of man ! What, because in a corner of
the world in one day among ages brilliant
progress may have been made in natural and
historical science ; because in the name of the
sciences, and in brilliant books, the Super
natural has been combated, they proclaim the
Supernatural vanquished, abolished; and we
hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in

THIRD MEDITATION. 115
the name of the learned, but of the people !
Have you then completely forgotten, or have
you never thoroughly comprehended humanity
and the history of humanity? Do you ignore
absolutely what the people really is, and what
all those nations are that cover the surface of
the earth ? Have you never then penetrated
into those millions of souls in which the belief
in the Supernatural is and abides, present and
active even when the words which move their
lips disown it ? Are you then unconscious of
the immense distance which there is between
the depths and the surface of those souls,
between the variable breaths which only ruffle
the minds of men, and the immutable instincts
which preside over their very being? True,!
there are, in our days, among the people, many >
fathers, mothers, children, who believe them- '.
selves incredulous, and mock scornfully at mira
cles ; but follow them in the intimacy of their
homes, among the trials of their lives, how do !
these parents act when their child is ill, those i

116 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
farmers when their crops are threatened, those
sailors when they float upon the waters a prey
to the tempest? They elevate their eyes to
heaven, they burst forth in prayer, they invoke
that Supernatural power said by you to be
abolished in their very thought. By their
spontaneous and irresistible acts they give to
your words and to their own a striking disa
vowal. But to advance a step toward you, admitted
that the faith in the Supernatural is abolished ;
let us enter together that society and those
classes to whom this moral ruin is a triumph
and a vaunt. What then ensues ? In the
place of God's miracles, man's miracles make
their appearance. They are searched for ; they
are called for ; men are found to invent them,
and to contrive them to be recognized by thou
sands of beholders. It is not necessary to go
either far in time or wide in space to see the
Supernatural of Superstition raising itself in
the place of the Supernatural of Religion, and

THIRD MEDITATION. 117
Credulity hurrying to meet Falsehood half
way. ^But away with these unhealthy paroxysms
of humanitv ; and to return to its sober and
enduring history. We will admit that the
instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been
the source and abides the foundation of all
religions, of religion in the most general sense
of the word, and of essential religion. The
most serious, at the same time the most per
plexed, of the thinkers who in our days have
approached the subject, M. Edmond Scherer,
saw plainly enough that that was the question
at issue, and he has so put it in the third of his
" Conversations Theologiques," noble yet sad
imaging forth of the fermentation in his own
ideas and the struggles which they occasion in
his soul. "The Supernatural is not a some
thing external to religion," says one of the two
speakers between whom M. Scherer supposes
the discussion, *' it is religion itself." " No,"
says the other, "the Supernatural is not the

118 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
peculiar element of religion, but rather of su
perstition: the Supernatural fact has no rela
tion with the human soul, for it is the essence
of the Supernatural that it goes beyond all
those conditions which constitute credibility ;
its essence indeed is the being anti-human?
The discussion continues and becomes ani
mated : the contrary nature of the perplexities
experienced by the two speakers becomes mani
fest. " Perhaps," says the Rationalist, " the
Supernatural was a necessary form of religion
for ill-cultivated minds ; but rightly or wrong
ly, our modern civilization rejects miracles ;
without positive denial, it remains indifferent
to them. Even the preacher knows not how
to deal with them; the more he is in earnest,
the more his Christian feeling has inwardness
and vitality, the more does the miracle also
disappear from his teaching. Miracles for
merly constituted the great force of the ser
mon ; at the present day whaf are they but a
secret source of embarrassment ? Everybody

THIRD MEDITATION. 119
feels vaguely when confronted by the marvel
ous accounts in our sacred volumes, what he
feels when confronted by the Legends of the
Saints ; it is impossible for that to be religion,
it is only its superfcetation." " It is true," ex
claims with sorrow the hesitating Christian,
" we believe no longer in miracles ; you might
have added that neither do we any more
believe in God himself; the two things go
together. We hear much nowadays of Chris
tian Spiritualism, of the religion of the con
science, and you yourself seem to see that men
in giving up miracles are making progress in
religion. Ah ! why is it that the intimate ex
perience of my own heart cannot express itself
in a forcible protest against any such opinion ?
Whenever I find my faith in miraculous agency
vacillating within me, the image of my God
seems to be fading away from my eyes : He
ceases to be for me God the free, the living,
the personal ; the God with whom the soul
converses, as with a master and friend ; and

120 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
this holy dialogue once interrupted, what is
left us ? How does life become sad ? how does
it lose its allusions ? Reduced to the satisfac
tion of mere physical wants, to eat, to drink, to
sleep, to make money, deprived of all horizon,
how puerile does our maturity appear, how
sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our
anxieties !
" No more mystery, no more innocence, no
more infinity, no longer any heaven above our
heads, no more poesy. Ah ! be sure ; the incre
dulity which rejects the miracle has a tendency
to unpeople heaven, and to disenchant the
earth. The Supernatural is the natural sphere
of the soul. It is the essence of its faith, of its
hope, of its love. I know how specious criticism
is, how victorious its arguments often appear;
but I know one thing besides, and perhaps I
might here even appeal to your own testimony ;
in ceasing to believe in what is miraculous the
soul finds that it has lost the secret of divine
life; henceforth it is urged downward toward

THIRD MEDITATION. 121
the abyss, soon it lies on the earth, and not sel
dom in the dirt."
In his turn the disbeliever in the Supernatural
is troubled and saddened. " Listen," he says ;
"the history of humanity seems to be some
times moving in obedience to the following
scheme. The world begins with religion, and,
referring all phenomena to a first cause, it
sees God everywhere. Then comes philosophy,
which, having discovered the connection of sec
ondary causes, and the laws of their operation,
makes a corresponding deduction from the
direct intervention of divinity, and then found
ing itself upon the idea of necessity, (for it is
only necessity which falls within the domain of
science, and science is in fact but the knowledge
of what is necessary ;) philosophy tends in its
very fundamental principle to exclude God
from the world. It does more ; it finishes by
denying human liberty as it has denied God.
The reason is evident; liberty is a cause beyond
the sphere of the necessary connection of

122 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
causes, a first cause, a cause which serves as
cause to itself; and from that moment philos
ophy, unequal to any explanation, feels itself
disposed to deny that first cause. A philosophy
true to itself will ever be fatalistic. For from
that moment philosophy corrupts and destroys
itself. When it has no other God than the
universe, no other man than the chief of the
mammalia, what is it but a mere system of
Zoology? Zoology constitutes the whole sci
ence of the epoch of the Materialists, and to
speak plainly, that is our position at the present
day. But Materialism can never be the be-all
and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt
and enervated, society is passing through im
mense catastrophes, is falling in ruins ; the iron
harrow of revolution is breaking up mankind
like the clods of the field ; in the bloody furrows
germinate new races ; the soul in the agony of
its distress believes once more ; it resumes its
faith in virtue, it finds again the language
of prayer. To the age of the Renaissance

THIRD MEDITATION. 123
succeeded that of the Reformation ; to the Ger
many of Frederick the Great, the Germany of
1812. So faith springs up for ever and ever out
of its ashes. Ah, that I must add it, humanity
rises again but to resume the march which I
have just described. But can it be said of it
besides, that like this globe of ours it is making
any movement in advance while it is so turning
round itself, and if it does so advance, toward
what is it gravitating ?
' Whither, whither, O Lord, marches the earth in the
heavens?'"*
But it is not toward heaven that the earth
would march if it followed the path in which
the adversaries of the Supernatural are impel
ling it. It is this peculiarity, they say, of the
Supernatural, that being incredible, it is in its
very essence anti-human. Now it is precisely to
something not anti-human but superhuman that
the human soul aspires, and there seeks to real-
* Melange de Critique Religieuse, par Edmond Scherer — Con
versations Theologiques, pp. 169-187.

124 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ize these aspirations in the Supernatural. We
should be never weary of repeating it; the
whole finite world in its entirety, with all its
facts and all its laws, comprising indeed man
himself, suffices not for the soul of man ; it re
quires something grander and more perfect for
the subject of its contemplation, the object of
its love ; it desires to fix its trust in something
more stable; to lean upon something less fra
gile. This supreme and sublime ambition it is
to which religion, in its widest sense, - gives
birth and supplies nourishment; and this su
preme and sublime ambition it is also that the
religion of Christ more particularly responds to
, and satisfies. Let those, therefore, who flatter
...
themselves that although abolishing the belief
in the Supernatural, they leave Christians still
Christians, undeceive themselves; what they
are abolishing, destroying, is very religion, for
their arguments assail all religion in general,
and Christianity in particular. It may be that
they do not inflict upon themselves all this evil,

THIRD MEDITATION. 125
and that in retaining a sincere religious senti
ment they really believe^ themselves nearly
Christians ; the soul struggles against the errors
of the thought, and a moral suicide is a rare
spectacle. But the evil even in spreading un-
vails more plainly its nature and increases in
intensity ; besides, men, in masses, draw from
error far more logical conclusions than the man
ever did in whom the error had its origin. The
people are not the learned, neither are they
philosophers ; and only once succeed in destroy
ing in them all faith in the Supernatural, and
you may consider it certain that the faith in
Christ must have previously disappeared.
Have you well weighed all this? Have you
pictured to yourself what a man, what mankind,
what the soul of man, what human society
itself would become if religion were in effect
abolished, if religious faith entirely disap
peared? I will not give way to anguish of
soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hes
itate to affirm that no imagination can represent

126 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
with adequate fidelity what would take place
in us and around us if the place at present oc
cupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to
become vacant, and its empire annihilated.
No one could pronounce to what degree of dis
order and degradation humanity would be pre
cipitated. But awful indeed would be the
result if all faith in the Supernatural were ex
tinct in the soul, and if man had in a supernat
ural state neither trust nor hope.
It is not my design, however, to confine
myself here to the question regarded merely in
its moral, practical light ; I approach the super
natural as viewed with the eyes of free and
speculative reason.
It is condemned for its very name's sake.
Nothing is or can be, it is said, beyond and
above nature. Nature is one and complete ;
everything is comprised in it; in it, of neces
sity, all things cohere, enchain, and develop
themselves. We are here in thorough pantheism ; that is

THIRD MEDITATION. 127
to say, in absolute atheism. I do not hesitate
to give to pantheism its real name. Among
the men who at the present day declare them
selves the opponents of the Supernatural, most,
certainly, do not believe that they are nor do
they desire to be atheists. But let me tell
them that they are leading others whither they
neither think nor wish themselves to go. The
negation of the Supernatural, and that in the
name of the unity and universality of nature,
is pantheism, and pantheism is nothing more
nor less than atheism. In the sequel of these
Meditations, when I come to speak particularly
of the actual state of the Christian religion,
and of the different systems which combat it, I
will in this respect justify my assertion; at
present, I have to repel direct attacks upon the
Supernatural; attacks less fundamental than
those of pantheism, but not less serious, for in
truth, whether men know it or not, and whether
they mean it or not, all attacks in this warfare
reach the same object, and as soon as the Super-

128 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
natural is the aim, it is religion itself that
receives the shaft.
The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed
to ; that, say they, is the palpable and incon
testable fact established by the experience of
mankind, and upon which rests the conduct of
human life. In presence of the permanent
order of nature and the immutability of its
laws, we cannot admit any partial, any mo
mentary infractions; we cannot believe. in the
Supernatural, in miracles.
True, general and constant laws do govern
nature. Are we, therefore, to affirm that those
laws are necessary, and that no deviation from
them is possible in nature ? Who is there that
does not discern an essential, an absolute differ
ence between what is general and what is nec
essary ? The permanence of the actual laws of
nature is a fact established by experience, but
it is not the only fact possible, the only fact
conceivable by reason ; those laws might have
been other laws — they may change. Several

THIRD MEDITATION. 129
of them have not always been what they now
are, for science itself proves that the condition
of the universe has been different from what it
is at present ; the universal and permanent
order of which we form part, and in which we
confide, has not always been what we now see
it ; it has had a beginning ; the creation of the
actual system of nature and of its laws is a fact
as certain as the system itself is certain. And
what is creation but a supernatural fact, the act
of a Power superior to the actual laws of
nature, and which has power to modify them
just as much as it has had power to establish
them ? The first of miracles is God himself.
There is a second miracle — man. I resume >
what I have already said; by his title as a
moral being and free agent, man lives beyond
and above the influence of the general and per
manent laws of nature ; he creates by his will
effects which are not at all the necessary conse
quence of any pre-existent law ; and those
effects take their place in a system absolutely
9

130 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
distinct ahd independent from the visible order
which governs the universe. The moral lib
erty of man is a fact as certain, and natural, as
the order of nature, and it is at the same time
a supernatural fact — that is to say, essen
tially foreign to the order of nature and to its
laws. -
God is the being moral and free par excel
lence; that is to say, the being excellently capa
ble of acting as first cause beyond the influence
of causation. By his title as a moral being
and free agent, man is in intimate relation with
God. Who shall define the possible contin
gencies, or fathom the mysteries of this rela
tion ? Who dare to say that God cannot
modify, that he never does modify, according
to his plans with respect to the moral system
and to man, the laws which he has made and
which he maintains in the material order of
nature ?
Some have hesitated absolutely to deny the
possibility of supernatural facts ; and so their

THIRD MEDITATION. 131
attack is indirect. If those facts, say they, are
not impossible, they are incredible, for no par
ticular testimony of man in favor of a miracle
can give a certitude equal to that which, on
the opposite side, results from the experience
which men have of the fixity of the laws of
nature. "It is experience only," says Hume, "which
gives authority to human testimony; and it is
the same experience which assures us of the
laws of nature. When therefore these two
kinds of experience- are contrary, we have
nothing to do but subtract the one from the
other, and embrace an opinion, either on one
side or the other, with that assurance which
arises from the remainder. But according to
the principles here explained, this subtraction,
with regard to aE popular religions, amounts to
an entire annihilation : and therefore we may
establish it as a maxim, that no human testi
mony can have such force as to prove a miracle,
and make it a just foundation for any such sys-

132 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
tern of religion."* It is in this reasoning of
Hume that the opponents of miracles shut
themselves up as in an impregnable fortress
to refuse them all credence.
What confusion of facts and ideas! What
a superficial solution of one of the grandest
problems of our nature ! What ! a simple
operation of arithmetic, with respect to two
experimental observations, estimated in ciphers,
is to decide the question whether the universal
belief of the race of man in the Supernatural
is well-founded or simply absurd ; whether God
only acts upon the world and upon man by
laws established once for all, or whether he
still continues to make, in the exercise of his
power, use of his liberty ! Not only does the
skeptic Hume here show himself unconscious
of the grandeur of the problem; he mistakes
even in the motives upon which he founds

* Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, by David Hume ;
Essay on Miracles, vol. iii, pp. 119-145, Bale, 1793. [Same
work, p. 91, London, 16mo., 1860. — Tkanblatob.]

THIRD MEDITATION. 133
his shallow conclusion; for it is not from
human experience alone that human testimony
draws her authority : this authority has sources
more profound, and a worth anterior to expe
rience : it is one of the natural bonds, one of the
spontaneous sympathies which unite with one
another men and the generations of men. Is
it by virtue of experience that the child trusts
to the words of its mother, that it has faith
in all she tells it ? The mutual trust that men
repose in what they say or transmit to each
other is an instinct, primitive, spontaneous,
which experience confirms or shakes, sets up
again or sets bounds to, but which experience
does not originate.
I find in the same essay of Hume* this
other passage: "The passion of surprise and
wonder, arising from miracles, being an agree
able emotion, gives a sensible tendency toward
the belief of those events from which it is
derived." * Hume's Essay on Miracles, p. 128, vbi supra.

134 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Thus, if we are able to credit Hume, it is
merely for his pleasure, for the diversion of
the imaginative faculty, that man believes in
the Supernatural; and beneath this impression
— though real, still only a secondary nature —
which does no more than skim the surface of
the human soul, the philosopher has no glimpse
at all of the profound instincts and superior
requisitions which have sway over him.
But why an attack of this character, so in
direct and little complete? Why should
Hume limit himself to the proposition that
miracles can never be historically proved,
instead of at once affirming the impossibility
of miracles themselves ? This is what the op
ponents of the Supernatural virtually think;
and it is because they commence by regarding
miracles as impossible that they apply them
selves to destroy the value of the evidences
by which they are supported. If the evidence
which surrounds the cradle of Christianity, if
the fourth, if even the tenth part of it were

THIRD MEDITATION. 135
adduced in support of 'facts of a nature extra
ordinary, unexpected, or unheard-of, but still
not having a character positively supernatural,
the proof would be accepted as unexception
able: the facts for certain. In appearance, it
is merely the proof by witnesses of the Super
natural that is contested; whereas, in reality,
the very possibility of the thing is denied that
is sought to be proved. The question ought
to be put as it really is, instead of such a solu
tion being offered as is a mere evasion.
Lately, however, men of logical minds and
daring spirits have not hesitated to speak more
frankly and plainly. "The new dogma, they
say, the fundamental principle of criticism, is
the negation of the Supernatural. . . . Those
still disposed to reject this principle have
nothing'to do with our books, and we, on our
side, have no cause to feel disquietude at their
opposition and their censure, for we do not
write for them. And if this discussion is alto
gether avoided, it is because it is impossible to

136 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
enter into it without admitting an unacceptable
proposition, namely, one which presumes that
the Supernatural can in any given case be
possible* I do not reproach the disciples of the school
of Hume for having evinced greater timidity:
if they attacked the Supernatural by a side
way, not as being impossible in itself, but as
being merely incapable of proof by human
testimony, they did not do so designedly and
with deceitful purpose. Let us render them
more justice, and do them more honor. A
prudent and an honest instinct held them back
on the declivity upon which they had placed
themselves; they felt that to deny even the
possibility of the Supernatural was to enter
at full sail into pantheism and fatalism, that
is to say, was the same thing as at once dis
pensing with God and doing away with the

* Conservation, Revolution, et Positivisme, par M. Littre',
Preface, p. xxvi, and the following pages — M. Havet, Revue des
Deux Mondes, 1 Aout, 18C3.

THIRD MEDITATION. 137
free agency of man. Their moral sense, their
good sense, withheld them from any such course.
The fundamental error of the adversaries of
the Supernatural is that they contest it in the
name of human science, and that they class
the Supernatural among facts within the do
main of science, whereas the Supernatural
does not fall within that domain, and the very
attempt so to treat it has led, indeed, to its
being entirely rejected.

FOURTH MEDITATION.

THE LIMITS OF SCIENCE.
An eminent moralist, who was at the same
time not only a theologian, but a philosopher
well versed in the physical sciences, I mean
Dr. Chalmers, professor at the University of
Edinburgh, and corresponding member of the
Institute of France, wrote in his work on Nat
ural Theology a chapter entitled, On man's
partial and limited hnowledge of divme things.
The first pages are as follows :
"The true modern philosophy never makes
more characteristic exhibition of itself, than at
the limit which separates the known from the
unknown. It is there that we behold it in a
twofold aspect — that of the utmost deference
and respect for all the findings of experience
within this limit; that, on the othel" hand, of

FOURTH MEDITATION. 139
the utmost disinclination and distrust for all
those fancies of ingenious or plausible specula
tion which have their place in the ideal region
beyond it. To call in the aid of a language
which far surpasses our own in expressive
brevity, its office is Hndagare"1 rather than
'dwmare.'' The products of this philosophy
are copies and not creations. It may discover
a system of nature, but not devise one. It
proceeds first on the observation of individual
facts ; and if these facts are ever harmonized
into a system, this is only in the exercise of a
more extended observation. In the work of
systematizing, it makes no excursion beyond the
territory of actual nature — for they are the
actual phenomena of nature which form the
first materials of this philosophy — and they
are the actual resemblances of these phenomena
that form, as it were, the cementing principle,
to which the goodly fabrics of modern science
owe all the solidity and all the endurance that
belong to them. It is this chiefly which distin-

140 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
guishes the philosophy of the present day from
that of bygone ages. The one was mainly an
excogitative, the other mainly a descriptive
process — a description, however, extending to
the likenesses as well as to the peculiarities of
things ; and, by means of these observed like
nesses alone, often realizing a more glorious and
magnificent harmony than was ever pictured
forth by all the imaginations of the theorists.
" In the mental characteristics of this philos
ophy, the strength of a full-grown understand
ing is blended with the modesty of childhood.
The ideal is sacrificed to the actual ; and, how
ever splendid or fondly cherished a hypothesis
may be, yet if but one phenomenon in the real
history of nature stand in the way, it is forth
with and conclusively abandoned. To some
the renunciation may be as painful as the cut
ting off a right hand, or the plucking out a
right eye ; yet, if true to the great principle
of the Baconian school, it must be submitted
to. With its hardy disciples one valid proof

FOURTH MEDITATION. 141
outweighs a thousand plausibilities ; and the
resolute firmness wherewith they bid away the
speculations of fancy is only equaled by the
childlike compliance wherewith they submit
themselves to the lessons of experience.
"It is thus that the same principle which,
guides to a just and a sound philosophy in all
that lies within the circle of human discovery,
leads also to a most unpresuming and unpro-
nouncing modesty in reference to all that lies
beyond it. And should some new light spring
up on this exterior region, should the informa
tion of its before hidden mysteries break in
upon us from some quarter that was before
inaccessible, it will be at once perceived (on
the supposition of its being a genuine and not
an illusory light) that, of all other men, they
are the followers of Bacon and Newton who
should pay the most unqualified respect to all
its revelations. In their case it comes upon
minds which are without prejudice, because on
that very principle, which is most characteristic

142 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of our modern science, upon minds without pre
occupation. . . . The strength of his confi
dence in all the ascertained facts of the terra
cognita is at one or in perfect harmony with
the humility of his diffidence in regard to
all the conceived plausibilities of the terra
incognita. ""'
" And let it further be remarked of the self-
denial which is laid upon us by Bacon's Philos
ophy, that, like all other self-denial in the cause
of truth or virtue, it hath its reward. In giv
ing ourselves up to its guidance, we have often
to quit the fascinations of beautiful theory;
but in exchange for them, we are at length
regaled by the higher and substantial beauties
of actual nature. There is a stubbornness in
facts before which the specious imagination is
compelled to give way ; and perhaps the mind
never suffers more painful laceration than when,
after having vainly attempted to force nature
into a compliance with her own splendid gen
eralizations, she, on the appearance of some

FOURTH MEDITATION. 143
rebellious and impracticable phenomenon, has
to practice a force upon herself — when she thus
finds the goodly speculation superseded by the
homely and unwelcome experience. It seemed
at the outset a cruel sacrifice, when the world
of speculation, with all its manageable and
engaging simplicities, had to be abandoned ;
and on becoming the pupils of observation, we,
amid the varieties of the actual world around
us, felt as if bewildered, if not lost, among the
perplexities of a chaos. This was a period of
greatest sufferance ; but it has had a glorious
termination. In return for the assiduity where
with the study of nature hath been prosecuted,
she hath made a more abundant revelation of
her charms. Order hath arisen out of con
fusion, and in the ascertained structure of the
universe there are now found to be a state and
a sublimity beyond all that was ever pictured .
by the mind in the days of her adventurous
and unfettered imagination. Even viewed in
the light of a noble and engaging spectacle for

144 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
the fancy to dwell upon, who would ever think
of comparing with the system of Newton, either
that celestial machinery of Des Cartes, which
-was impelled by whirlpools of ether, or that
still more cumbrous planetarium of cycles and
epicycles which was the progeny of a remoter
age ? It is thus that at the commencement of
the observational process there is the abjura
tion of beauty. But it soon reappears in
another form, and brightens as we advance,
and at length there arises on solid foundation
a fairer and goodlier system than ever floated
in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor
is it difficult to perceive the reason of this.
What we discover by observation is the
product of divine imagination bodied forth by
creative power into a stable and enduring real
ity. What we devise by our own ingenuity is
but the product of human imagination. The
one is the solid archetype of those concep
tions which are in the mind of God: the
other is the shadowy representation of those

FOURTH MEDITATION. 145
conceptions which are in the mind of man. It
is just as with the laborer, who, by excavating
the rubbish which hides and besets some noble
architecture, does more for the gratification oF~"
our taste than if by his unpracticed hand he
should attempt to regale us with plans and
sketches of his own. And so the drudgery of
experimental science, in exchange for that
beauty whose fascinations it withstood at the
outset of its career, has evolved a surpassing
beauty from among the realities of truth and
nature. . . .
" The views contemplated through the me
dium of observation are found not only to have
a justness in them, but to have a grace and a
grandeur in them far beyond all the visions
which are contemplated through the medium
of fancy, or which ever regaled the fondest
enthusiast in the enchanted walks of specula
tion and poetry. But neither the grace nor
the grandeur alone would, without evidence,
have secured acceptance for any opinion. It
10

146 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
must first be made to undergo, and without
ceremony, the freest treatment from human
eyes and human hands. It is at one time
stretched on the rack of an experiment, at
another it has to pass through fiery trial in the
bottom of a, crucible. In another it undergoes
a long questioning process among the fumes
and the filtrations and the intense heat of a
laboratory ; and not till it has been subjected
to all this inquisitorial torture and survived it,
is it preferred to a place in the temple of
Truth, or admitted among the laws and lessons
of a sound philosophy."
No one certainly will contest that this is the
language of a fervent disciple of science. It is
impossible to have a keener apprehension of its
beauty, and to accept more completely its laws.
What mathematician, natural philosopher, phys
iologist, or chemist, could speak in terms of
greater respect and submission of the necessity
of observation, and of the authority of experi
ence ? Dr. Chalmers is not the less for that a

FOURTH MEDITATION. 147
true and fervent Christian ; his religious faith
equals his scientific exactitude : he receives
Christ, and professes Christ's doctrine with as
firm a voice as he does Bacon and Bacon's
method. Not that for him religious belief is the
mere result of education, of tradition, of habit ;
but it, on the contrary, springs as much from
reflection and learning, as his acquirements in
natural science themselves ; in each sphere he
has probed the very sources and weighed the
motives of his convictions. How did he, in
each instance, reach such a haven of repose ?
Whence in him this harmony between the
philosopher and the Christian ?
Let us again allow Dr. Chalmers to speak
for himself:
" It is of importance here to remark that the
enlargement of our knowledge in all the nat-#
ural sciences, so far from adding to our pre
sumption, should only give a profounder sense
of our natural incapacity and ignorance in ref
erence to the science of theology. It is just as

148 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
if in studying the policy of some earthly mon
arch we had made the before unknown discov
ery of other empires and distant territories
whereof we knew nothing but the existence
and the name. This might complicate the
study without making the object of it at all
more comprehensible, and so of every new
wonder which philosophy might lay open to
the gaze of inquirers. It might give us a
larger perspective of the creation than before,
yet, in fact, cast a deeper shade of obscurity
over the counsels and ways of the Creator.
We might at once obtain a deeper insight
into the secrets of the workmanship, and yet
feel, and legitimately feel, to be still more
deeply out of reach, the secret purposes of Him
who worketh all in all. Every discovery of an
•addition to the greatness of his works may
bring with it an addition to the unsearchable-
ness of his ways. . . .
" That telescope which has opened our way
to suns and systems innumerable, leaves the

FOURTH MEDITATION. 149
moral administration connected with them in
deepest secrecy. It has made known to us the
bare existence of other worlds ; but it would
require another instrument of discovery ere we
could understand their relation to ourselves, as
products of the same Almighty Hand, as parts
or members of a family under the same pater
nal guardianship. This more extended survey
of the Material Universe just tells us how little
we know of the Moral or Spiritual Universe.
It reveals nothing to us of the worlds that roll
in space, but the bare elements of Motion and
Magnitude and Number, and so leaves us at a
more hopeless distance from the secret of the
Divine administration than when we reasoned
of the Earth as the Universe, of our species as
the alone rational family of God that he had
implicated with body, or placed in the midst of
a corporeal system. . . .
" To know that we cannot know certain
things is in itself positive knowledge, and a
knowledge of the most safe and valuable na-

150 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ture. . . . There are few services of greater
value to the cause of knowledge than the
delineation of its boundaries."*
In holding this language, what in effect is
Dr. Chalmers doing ? He is separating what is
finite from what is infinite, the thing created
from the Creator, the world subject to govern
ment from the Sovereign that governs it ; and
in marking this line of demarcation, he says, in
his modesty to science, what God in his power
says to the ocean : " Thus far shalt thou go,
and no further."
Dr. Chalmers was right ; the limits of the
finite world are those also of human science.
How far within these vast limits science may
extend her empire, who shall affirm? But
what we certainly may assert is, that she never
can exceed them. The finite world alone is
within her reach, the only world that she can
fathom. It is only in the finite world that
* Chalmes's Works : Natural Theology, pp. 249-265. Glas
gow.

FOURTH MEDITATION. 151
man's mind can fully grasp the facts, observe
them in all their extent, and under all their
aspects, discriminate their relations and their
laws, (which constitute also a species of facts,)
and so verify the system to which they should
be referred. This it is that makes what we
term scientific processes and labor, and human
sciences are the results.
What need to mention that in speaking of
the finite world I do not mean to speak of the
material world alone? Moral facts there also
are which fall under observation and enter into
the domain of science. The study of man in
his actual condition, whether considered as an
individual or as forming a member of a nation,
is also a scientific study, subject to the same
method as that of the material world ; and it is
its legitimate province also to detect in the
actual order of this world the laws of those par
ticular facts to which it addresses itself.
But if the limits of the finite world are those
of human science, they are not those of the

152 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
human soul. Man contains in himself ideas and
ambitious aspirations extending far beyond and
rising far above the, finite world, ideas of and
aspirations toward the infinite, the ideal, the
perfect, the immutable, the eternal. These
ideas and aspirations are themselves realities
admitted by the human mind ; but even in ad
mitting them man's mind comes to a halt ; they
give him a presentiment of, or to speak with
more precision, a revelation of an order of
things different from the facts and laws of the
finite world which lies under his observation ;
but while man has of this superior order the
instinct and the perspective, he can have of it
no positive knowledge. It proceeds from the
sublimity of his nature if he has a glimpse of
infinity, if he aspires to it; whereas it results
from the infirmity of his actual condition if his
positive knowledge is limited by the world in
which he exists.
I was born in the south, under the very sun,
I have yet, for the most part, lived in regions

FOURTH MEDITATION. 153
either of the north, or bordering upon the north,
regions so frequently immersed in mists. When
under their pale sky we look toward the hori
zon a fog of greater or less density limits the
view; the vision itself might penetrate much
further, but an external obstacle arrests it ; it
does not find there the light it needs. Regard
now the horizon under the pure and brilliant
sky of the south ; the plains, distant as well as
near, are bathed in light ; the human eye can
penetrate there as far as its organization per
mits. If it pierces no further, it is not for want
of light, but because its proper and natural
force has attained its limit. The mind knows
that there are spaces beyond that which the
eye traverses, but the eye penetrates them not.
This is an image of what happens to the mind
itself when contemplating and studying the
universe. It reaches a point where its clear
sight, that is to say, its positive appreciation,
halts, not that it finds there the end of things
themselves, but the limit of man's scientific

154 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
appreciation of them; other realities present
themselves to him ; he has a glimpse of them ;
he believes in them spontaneously and naturally ;
it is not given to him to grasp them and to
measure them ; but he can neither ignore them
nor know them, neither have positive knowl
edge of them, nor refrain from having faith in
them. I cannot deny myself the pleasure of citing
what I wrote thirteen years ago upon the same
subject, when philosophically examining the real
meaning of the word faith. " The object of
every religious belief,", said I, " is in a certain, a
large measure, inaccessible to human science.
Human science may establish that object's real
ity ; it may arrive at the boundary of this mys
terious world, and assure itself of the existence
there of facts with which man's destiny is con
nected; but it is not given to it so to attain the
facts themselves as to subject them to its exam
ination. " Their incapacity to do so has struck more

FOURTH MEDITATION. 155
than one philosopher, and has led them to the
conclusion that no such reality exists, that
every religious belief contemplates subjects
simply chimerical. Others, shutting their eyes
to their own incompetency, have dashed dar
ingly forward toward the sphere of the Super
natural; and just as if they had succeeded in
penetrating into it, they have described its facts,
resolved its problems, assigned its laws. It is i
difficult to say who shows more foolish arro
gance, -'the man who maintains that that of
which he cannot have positive knowledge has
no real existence, or the man who pretends to
be able to know everything that actually exists.
However this may be, mankind has never for a
single day assented to either assertion. Man's
instincts and his actions have constantly dis
avowed both the negation of the disbeliever
and the confidence of the theologian. In spite
of the former, he has persisted in believing in
the existence of the unknown world, and in
the reality of the relations which connect him

156 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
with it; and notwithstanding the powerful
influences of the latter, he has refused to admit
their having attained their object — raised the
vail; and so man has continued to agitate the
same problems, to pursue the same truths, as
ardently and as laboriously as at the first day,
just as if nothing had been done at all." *
I have just read again the excellent com
pendium given by M. Cousin in his General
History of Philosophy from the most Ancient
Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century.
He establishes that all the philosophical labors
of the human understanding have terminated
in four great systems — sensualism, idealism,
skepticism, and mysticism — the sole actors in
that intellectual arena where, in all ages and
among all nations, they are in turn in the posi
tion of combatants and of sovereigns. And,
after having clearly characterized in their
origin and their development these four sys
tems, M. Cousin adds, "As for their intrinsic
* Meditations et Etudes Morales, p. 170. Paris, 1851.

FOURTH MEDITATION. 157
merits, habituate yourselves to this principle:
they have existed; therefore they had their
reason to exist; therefore they are true at
least*in part. Error is the law of our nature:
to it we are condemned ; and in all our opinions
and all our words there is always a large
allowance to be made for error, and too often
for absurdity. But absolute absurdity does (
not enter into the mind of man; it is the ex
cellence of man's thought, that without some
leaven of truth it admits nothing, and absolute '
error is impossible. The four systems which
have just been rapidly laid . before you have
had each their existence ; therefore they contain
truth, still without being entirely true. Par
tially true, and partially false, these systems
reappear at all the great epochs. Time can
not destroy any one. of them, nor can it beget
any new one, because time develops and per
fects the human mind, though without chang
ing its nature and its fundamental tendencies.
Time does no more than multiply and vary

158 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
almost infinitely the combinations of the four
simple and elementary systems. Hence origin
ate those countless systems which history col
lects and which it is its office to explain." *
M., Cousin excels in explaining these num
berless philosophical combinations, and in trac
ing them all back to the four great systems
which he has defined ; but there is a fact still
more important than the variety of these com
binations, and which calls itself for explanation.
Why did these four essential systems, sensual
ism, idealism, skepticism, and mysticism, appear
from the most ancient times? why have they
continued to reproduce themselves always and
everywhere, with deductions more or less
logical, with greater or less ability, but still fun
damentally always and everywhere the same?
Why, upon these supreme questions, did the
human mind achieve at so early a period what
* Histoire Generate de la Philosophie depuis les temps les
plus anciens jusqu'a la fin du XVHI Siecle, par M. Victor
Cousin, pp. 4-31. 1863.

FOURTH MEDITATION. 159
may be termed, it is true, but essays at a solu
tion, but which essays in some sort have ex
hausted the mind rather than satisfied it?
How is it that these different systems, invented
with such promptitude, have never been able
either to come to an accord, nor has any one
been able to prevail decidedly against another
and to cause itself to be received as the truth ?
Why has philosophy, or, to speak more pre
cisely, why have metaphysics, remained essen
tially stationary : great at their birth, but des
tined not to grow: whereas the other sciences
— those styled natural sciences — have been
essentially progressive: at first feeble, and
making in succession conquest after conquest;
these they have been able to retain, until they
have formed a domain day by day more
extended and less contested ?
The very fact that suggests these questions
contains the answer to them. Man has, upon
the fundamental subject of metaphysics, a
primitive light, rather the heritage and dowry

160 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of human nature, than the conquest of human
science. The metaphysician appropriates it as
a torch to lighten him on his obscure and ill-
defined path. He finds in man himself a point
of departure at once profound and certain;
but his aim is God, that is to say, an aim above
his reach.
Must we, then, renounce the. study of the
great questions which form the subject of
metaphysics as a vain labor, where the human
mind is turning indefinitely in the same circle,
incapable not only of attaining the object which
it is pursuing, but of making any advance in
its pursuit?
Often, and with more ability than has been
evinced by the Positive school of the present
day, , has this judgment been pronounced
against metaphysics. But that judgment man's
mind has never accepted, and never will ac
cept; the. great problems which pass beyond
the finite world lie propounded before him;
never will he renounce the attempt to solve

FOURTH MEDITATION. 161
them ; he is impelled to it by an irresistible
instinct, an instinct full of faith and of hope,
in spite bf ,the repeated failure of his efforts.
As man 13 in the sphere of action, so is he also
in that of thought ; he aspires 'higher than it
is possible to achieve: this is his nature and
his glory; to renounce his aspirations would
be declaring his own forfeiture. But without
any such abdication, it is still necessary that
he should ,know himself, it is necessary that
he should understand that his strength here
below is infinitely less than his ambition, and
that it is not given him to have any positive
scientific knowledge of that infinite and ideal
world toward which he dashes. The facts and
the problems which he there encounters are
such, that the methods and the laws which
direct the human mind in the study of the
finite world are inapplicable. The infinite is
for us the object not of science but belief, and
it is alike impossible for us either to reject
or penetrate it. Let man, then, feel a pro-
11

162 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
found sentiment of that double truth : let him,
without sacrificing the ambitious aspirations
of his intelligence, recognize the limits imposed
upon his achievements in science; he will not
then be long in also recognizing that, in the
relations of the finite with the infinite — of him
self with God — he stands in need of super
human assistance, and that this does not fail
him. God has given to man what man never
can conquer, and revelation opens to him that
world of the infinite over which, by his own
exertions and of itself alone, man's mind never
could spread light. The light man receives
from God himself.

FIFTH MEDITATION.

REVELATION.
When it was objected to Leibnitz "that
there is nothing in the intelligence that has
not first been in the sense," Leibnitz replied,
" if not the intelligence itself." *
In the answer of Leibnitz I will change but
a single word, and substitute for intelligence, /
soul. / Soul is a term more comprehensive and
... 1
more complete than intelligence; it embraces
everything in the human being that is not
body and matter ;| it is not the mere intelli
gence, a special faculty of man ; it is all the :
intellectual and moral man.
The soul possesses itself and carries with it
* Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. Nisi
intellectus ipse.

164 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
into life native faculties and an inborn light:
these manifest and develop themselves more
and more as they come into relation with the
exterior world ; but they had still an existence
prior to those relations, and they exercise an
important influence upon what results. The
external world does not create nor essentially
change the intellectual and moral being that
has just come into life, but it opens to it a
stage where that being acts in accordance at
once with its proper nature, and the conditions
and influences in the midst of which the action
takes place. The hypothesis of a statue en
dowed with sensibility is a contradiction; in
seeking to explain man's first growth, it loses
sight of the entire intellectual and moral
being. When, as I said before, man first entered
the world, he did not enter it, he could not
enter it, as a new-born babe, with the mere
breath of life ; he was created full grown, with
instincts and faculties complete in their power

FIFTH MEDITATION. 165
and capable of immediate action. We must
either deny the creation and be driven to
monstrous hypotheses, or admit that the human
being who now developes himself slowly and
laboriously, was at his first appearance mature
in body and in mind.
The creation implies then the revelation, a
revelation which lighted man at his entrance
into the world, and qualified him from that
very moment to use his faculties and his in
stincts. Do we, can we, picture to ourselves
the first man, the first human couple, with a
complete physical development, and yet with
out the essential conditions of intellectual
activity, physically strong and morally a non
entity, the body of twenty years and the soul
in the first hour of infancy? Such a fact is
self-contradictory, and impossible of con
ception. What was the positive extent of this primal
revelation, the necessary attendant upon cre
ation, which occurred in the first relation of

166 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
God with man? No man can say. I open
the book of Genesis and there I read :
"And the Lord God took the man, and put
him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to
keep it. And the Lord God commanded the
man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou
mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not
eat of it : for in the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die. And the Lord
God said, It is not good that the man should
be alone; I will make him a help meet for
him. And out of the ground the Lord God
formed every beast of the field, and every
fowl of the air ; and brought them unto Adam
to see what he would call them: and whatso
ever Adam called every living creature, that
was the name thereof. And Adam gave
names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air,
and to every beast of the field ; but for Adam
there was not found a help meet for him.
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall

FIFTH MEDITATION. 167
upon Adam, and he slept ; and he took one of
his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof.
And the rib, which the Lord God had taken
from man, made he a woman, and brought her
unto the man. And Adam said, This is now
bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. . . .
Therefore shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and shall cleave unto his wife : and
they shall be one flesh."* According, then, to
the Bible, the primitive revelation essentially
bore upon the three points, marriage, language,
and the duty of man's obedience to God his
Creator : Adam received at the hand of God
the moral law of his liberty, the companion of
his life, and the faculty by which he was
enabled to name the creatures that were
around him : in other words, the three sources
of religion, of family, and of science were im
mediately unclosed to him. It is not necessary
here to enter upon any of the questions which
have been raised, as to the human origin of
* Genesis ii, 15-24.

168 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
language, the primitive language, or the
formation of families, with their influence upon
the great organization of society : the limits of
the primitive revelation cannot be determined
scientifically ; the fact of the revelation itself is
certain. This is the light which lighted the
first man from his first entrance upon life, and
without which it is impossible to conceive that
he could have survived.
The primitive revelation did not abandon
mankind on its development and dispersion ;
it accompanied it everywhere, as a general and
permanent revelation. The light which had
lighted the first man spread among all nations
and throughout all ages, assuming the charac
ter of ideas, universal and uncontested ; of
instincts, spontaneous and indestructible. No
nation has been without this light, none left to
its own unassisted efforts to grope its way
through the darkness of life. Let not the
human understanding pride itself too much
upon its works ; the glory does not belong to it

FIFTH MEDITATION. 169
alone: what it has accomplished it has accom
plished by aid of the primitive principles re
ceived from God ; in all his works and all his
progress man has had for point of departure
and support that primitive revelation. All the
grand doctrines, all the mighty institutions,
which have governed the world, whatever inter
mixture of monstrous and fatal errors they may
have contained, have preserved a trace of the
fundamental verities which were the dowry of
humanity at its birth. God has forsaken no
portion of the human race ; and not less amid
the errors into which it has fallen than in the
noble developments which constitute its glory,
we recognize signs of the primitive teaching
derived from its Divine Author.
After the revelation made to the first man,
and in the midst of the general revelation dif
fused over all mankind, a great event occurs in
history : a special revelation takes place, and
has for its seat the bosom of an inconsiderable
nation, that had been shut in during sixteen

170 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
centuries in a little corner of the world ; and it
was thence that, nineteen centuries ago, that
revelation proceeded to enlighten and to sub
due, according to the predictions of its Author,
all the human race.
A man of an imagination as fertile as his
knowledge is profound, who, with an admira
ble candor has in his works associated hypothe
sis and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the Uni
versity of Gottingen, has recently thus charac
terized this event : " The history of the old
Jewish people is fundamentally the history of
the true religion, proceeding from step to step
to its complete development, rising through all
kinds of struggles, until it achieves a supreme
victory, and finally manifesting itself in all ita
majesty and power, in order to spread irresisti
bly, by its proper virtue, so as to become the
eternal possession and blessing of all nations." *
How is the great event thus characterized
* H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus. Sec
ond edition, vol. i, p. 9. Gottingen, 1851.

FIFTH MEDITATION. 171
by M. Ewald proved ? By what marks can
we distinguish the Divine origin of this special
revelation that became the Christian religion ?
What does it affirm itself in support of its
claim to the moral conquest of mankind ?
At the very outset, in proving her dogmas
and precepts to have come from God, the
Christian revelation asserts that the documents
in which it is written are themselves of divine
origin. The divine inspiration of the sacred
volume is the first basis of the Christian Faith,
the external title of Christianity to authority
over souls. What is the full import of this
title ? What the signification of the inspira
tion of the sacred volumes ?

SIXTH MEDITATION.

THE INSPIRATION OP THE SCRIPTURES.
I have read the sacred volumes over and
over again, I have perused them in very dif
ferent dispositions of mind, at one time study
ing them as great historical documents, at
another admiring them as sublime works of
poetry. I have experienced an extraordinary
impression, quite different from either curiosity
or admiration. I have felt myself the listener
of a language other than that of the chronicler
or the poet, and under the influence of a
breath issuing from other sources than human.
Not that man does not occupy a great place
in the sacred volumes ; he displays himself
there, on the contrary, with all his passions, his
vices, his weaknesses, his ignorance, his errors ;

SIXTH MEDITATION. 173
the Hebrew people shows itself rude, barbar
ous, changeable, superstitious, accessible to all
the imperfections, to all the failings of other
nations. But the Hebrew is not the sole actor
in his history ; he has an Ally, a Protector, a
Master, who intervenes incessantly to command,
inspire, direct, strike, or save. God is there,
always present, acting —
" Et ce n'est pas un Dieu comme vos dieux frivoles,
Insensibles et sourds, impuissants, mutil6s,
De bois, de marbre, ou d'or, comme vous le voulez." *
" Not such a god as are your friv'lous gods,
Insensible and deaf, weak, mutilated,
Of wood, or stone, or gold, as you will have them."
It is the God One and Supreme, All Power
ful, the Creator, the Eternal. And even in
their forgetfulness and their disobedience, the
Hebrews believe still in God : he is still the
object at once of their fear, of their hope, and
of a faith that persists in the midst of the infi
delity of their lives. The Bible is no poem in
which man recounts and sings the adventures
* Corneille, Polyeucte, acte iv, sc. 8.

174 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of his God combined with his own ; it is a real
drama, a continued dialogue between God and
man personified in the Hebrews ; it is, on one
side, God's will and God's action, and on the
other, man's liberty and man's faith, now in
pious association, now at fatal variance.
The more I have perused the Scriptures the
more surprised I feel that earnest readers
should not have been impressed as I have been,
and that several should have failed to see the
characteristic of divine inspiration, so foreign to
every other book, so remarkable in this one.
That men who absolutely deny all supernatural
action of God in the world, should not be
more disposed to admit it in the sources of the
Bible than elsewhere, is perfectly comprehensi- .
ble ; but the attack upon the divine inspiration
of the sacred books has another motive, and
one more likely to prove contagious. It is not
without deep regret that I proceed in this
place to contradict ancient traditions, at once
respected and respectable, and perhaps to offend

SIXTH MEDITATION. 175
sober and sincere convictions. But my own
conviction is stronger than my regret, and it is
still more so because accompanied by another
conviction, which is, that the system that it is my
intention to contest, has occasioned, continues
to occasion, and may still occasion, an immense
ill to Christianity.
Whoever reads without prejudice in the
Hebrew and Greek the original texts of the
Scriptures, whether of the Old or New Testa
ment, meets there often in the midst of their
sublime beauties, I do not say merely faults of
style, but of grammar, in violation of those
logical and natural rules of language common
to all tongues. Are we to infer that these
faults have the same origin as the doctrines
with which they are intermixed, and that they
are both divinely inspired ? *
And yet this is what is pretended by fervent
* I indicate, in a note placed at the end of this volume, some
instances of these grammatical faults met with in the Scriptures,
and to which it is impossible to assign the character of divine
inspiration.

176 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
and learned men, who maintain that all, abso
lutely all, in the Scriptures is divinely inspired,
the words as well as the ideas, all the words
used upon all subjects, the material of lan
guage as well as the doctrine which lies at its
base. In this assertion I see but deplorable con
fusion, leading to profound misapprehension
both of the meaning and the object of the
sacred books. It was not God's purpose to
give instruction to men in grammar, and if not
in grammar, neither was it any more God's pur
pose to give instruction in geology, astronomy,
geography, or chronology. It is on their rela
tions with their Creator, upon duties of men
toward him and toward each other, upon the
rule pf faith and of conduct in life, that God
has lighted them by light from heaven. It is
to the subject of religion and morals, and to
these alone, that the inspiration of the Scrip
tures is directed.
Among the principal arguments alleged to

SIXTH MEDITATION. 177
prove that everything in the sacred volumes is
divinely inspired, particular use has been made
of the Second Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy,
where in effect we find the passage :
" All Scripture is given by inspiration of
God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
for correction, for instruction in righteousness :
" That the man of God may be perfect,
thoroughly furnished unto all good works." *
Is it possible to determine in words of
greater precision the religious and moral object'
of the inspiration ?
Appeal is made to a consideration of a dif
ferent description. If, it is said, we at the
same time admit, on the one side, the inspira
tion of the sacred books, and on the other, that
this inspiration is not universal and absolute,
who shall make the selection between these
two parts ? who mark the limit of the inspira
tion ? who say which texts, which passages are
inspired, and which are not ? So to divide the
* 2 Timothy iii, 16,17.
12

178 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Holy Scriptures is to strip them of their super
natural character, tg destroy their authenticity,
by surrendering them to all the incertitudes, all
the disputes of men: a complete and uninter
rupted inspiration alone is capable of command
ing faith.
Never-dying pretension of man's weakness!
Created intelligent and free, he proposes to use
largely his intelligence and his freedom ; at the
same time, conscious how feeble his means are,
how inadequate to his aspirations, he invokes a
guide, a support ; and from the very moment
that his hope fixes upon it, he will have it
immutable, infallible. He searches a fixed point
to which to attach himself with absolute and
permanent assurance. In creating man, God
did not leave him without fixed points; the
divine revelation, and the inspiration of the
Scriptures, had precisely for object and effect to
supply these, but not on all subjects alike and
without distinction. I refer here again to what
I lately said respecting the separation of the

SIXTH MEDITATION. 179
finite and the infinite, of the world created, and
of its Creator. At the same time that the
limits of the finite world are those of human
science, it is to human study and human science
that God has surrendered the finite world ; it is
not there that God has set up his divine torch ;
he has dictated to Moses the laws which regu
late the duties of man toward God, and of man
toward man; but he has left to Newton the
discovery of the laws which preside over the
universe. The Scriptures speak upon all sub
jects ; circumstances connected with the finite
world are there incessantly mixed with per
spectives of infinity ; but it. is only to the latter,
to that future of which they permit us to
snatch a view, and to the laws which they
impose upon men, that the divine inspiration
addresses itself; God only pours his light in
quarters which man's eye and man's labor can
not reach ; for all that remains, the sacred
books speak the language used and understood
by the generations to whom they are addressed.

180 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
God does not, even when he inspires them,
transport into future domains of science the
interpreters he uses, or the nations to whom he
sends them ; he takes them both as he finds
them, with their traditions, their notions, their
degree of knowledge or ignorance as respects
the finite world, of its phenomena and its laws.
It is not the condition, the scientific progress of
the human understanding ; it is the condition
and moral progress of the human soul which
are the object of the divine action, and God
requires not, for the exercise of his power on
the human soul, science either as a precursor or
a companion ; he addresses himself to instincts
and desires the most intimate and most sublime
as well as the most universal in man's nature,
to instincts and desires of which science is
neither the object nor the measure, and which
require to be satisfied from other sources.
Whatever true or false science we find in the
Scriptures upon the subject of the finite world,
proceeds from the writers themselves or their

SIXTH MEDITATION. 181
cotemporaries; they have spoken as they
believed, or as those believed who surrounded
them when they spoke : on the other hand, the
light thrown over the infinite, the law laid
down, and the perspective opened by that same
light, these are what proceed from God, and
which he has inspired in the Scriptures. Their
object is essentially and exclusively moral and
practical ; they express the ideas, employ the
images, and speak the language best calculated
to produce a powerful effect upon the soul, to
regenerate and to save it. I open the Gospel
according to St. Luke, and I there read the
admirable parable :
"There was a certain rich man, which was
clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared
sumptuously every day :
" And there was a certain beggar named Laz
arus, which was laid at his gate, full of sores,
"And desiring to be fed with the crumbs
which fell from the rich man's table : moreover
the dogs came and licked his sores.

182 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
" And it came to pass, that the beggar died,
and was carried by the angels into Abraham's
bosom: the rich man also died, and was
buried ;
" And in hell he lifted up his eyes, being in
torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and
Lazarus in his bosom.
"And he cried and said, Father Abraham,
have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he
may dip the tip of his finger in water, and
cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this
flame. " But Abraham said, Son, remember that
thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things,
and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he
is comforted, and thou art tormentedJ
"And beside all this, between us and you
there is a great gulf fixed : so that they which
would pass from hence to you cannot; neither
can they pass to us, that would come from
thence. " Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father,

SIXTH MEDITATION. 183
that thou wouldest send him to my father's
house :
" For I have five brethren ; that he may
testify unto them, lest they also come into this
place of torment.
" Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses
and the prophets ; let them hear them.
" And he said, Nay, father Abraham : but
if one went unto them from the dead, they
will repent.
"And he said unto him, If they hear not
Moses and the prophets, neither will they be
persuaded, though one rhose from the dead."*
Was it the intention of Jesus, and of the
evangelist who has repeated his words, to
describe, as they really are, the condition of
men after their earthly existence, their positive
local position after God's judgment, and their
relations either with each other or with the
world which they have quitted? Certainly
not; the material circumstances intermixed
* Luke xvi, 19-31.

184 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
with this dialogue are only images borrowed
from actual common life. But what images so
strike, so penetrate the soul? What more
solemn warning addressed to men in this life,
to rouse them to a sense of their duties toward
God and their fellow-creatures in the name of
the mysterious future that awaits them ?
Nothing is further from my thought than
to see in the sacred books mere poetical images
and symbols; those books are really, with
respect to the religious problems that beset
man's thoughts, the Light and the voice of
God; still, that light only lights, that voice
only reveals revelations of God with man,
duties which God enjoins men in the course
of their present life, and prospects which he
opens to them beyond the imperfect and
limited world where this life passes. As for
this life itself, it is the object of human study
and science, not of the inspiration of the sacred
Scriptures. In disregarding this limit, in pre
tending to attribute to the language of the

SIXTH MEDITATION. 185
Scriptures, used with reference to the phe
nomena of the finite world, the character of
divine inspiration, men have fallen with respect
both to thought and act into, deplorable errors.
Hence proceeded the trial of Galileo, and
numerous other controversies, numerous other
condemnations still more absurd, still more to
be regretted, in which Christianity was imme
diately placed in opposition to human science,
and constrained to inflict or receive remark
able disavowals. The same is the case at
the present day with respect to numerous
objections made in the name of the natural
sciences to Christianity, and which from the
learned circles where they have their birth,
spread over a world at once curious and frivo
lous, where they cause the Christian faith itself
to be regarded as ignorant credulity. Nothing
of this kind could ever occur, no necessity of
such a conflict could await the Christian re
Hgion, if on the one side the limits of human
science, and on the other those of divine in-

186 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
spiration, were recognized as they really are,
and respected according to their rightful claims.
I might cite in aid of the opinion I support
numerous and great authorities. I will refer
to but three, appealed to by Galileo himself
in 1615 in his letters to the Grand Duchess
Christina of Lorraine,* (who could appeal to
authorities more august ?) " Many things,"
says St. Jerome, "are recounted in the Scrip
tures according to the judgment of the times
when^ they happened, and not according to the
truth." f "The purpose of the Holy Scrip
tures," says the Cardinal Baronius, " is to teach
us how to go to heaven, and not how the
heavens go." "This," says Kepler, "is the
counsel I give to the man so ill-informed as
not to understand the science of astronomy, or
so weak as to regard adhesion to Copernicus
as proof of want of piety. Let him at once
* Opere Complete di Galileo-Galilei, t. ii, chap, ii, pp. 26-64.
Florence, 1843.
t CEuvres de St. Jer6me, Comment, in Jeremiam, ed. Vallars,
t. ix, p. 1,040.

SIXTH MEDITATION. 187
leave the study of astronomy and the exam
ination of the opinions of philosophers ; instead
of devoting himself to those arduous researches,
let him remain at home, till his fields, and
occupy himself with his proper business ; and
thenee, raising toward the admirable vault of
heaven his eyes, which constitute for him his
sole mode of vision, let him pour forth his
heart in thanksgivings and praises to God his
Creator. He may rest assured that he is thus
rendering to God a worship as perfect as that
of the astronomer himself, to whom Gpd has
accorded the gift of seeing clearer with the
eyes of his intelligence; but who, above all
the worlds and all the heavens that he attains,
knows and wills to find his God." *
I discard, then, as absolutely foreign to the
grand question that occupies me, all the diffi
culties suggested to the Scriptures in the name
of those sciences whose province is finite nature.
I seek and consider in these books only what
* Kepler, Nova Astronomia, Introduotio, p. 9. Prague, 1609.

188 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
is their sole object — the relations of God with
man, and the solution of those problems which
these relations cause to weigh upon the human
soul. The deeper we go in the study of the
sacred volumes, restored to their real object,
the more the divine inspiration becomes mani
fest and striking. God and man are there
ever both present, both actors in the same
history. Of this history it is my present object
to illustrate the grand features.

SEVENTH MEDITATION.

GOD ACCORDING TO THE BIBLE.
It is far from my intention to evade the
questions which concern the authenticity of the
Bible, and of the respective books which com
pose it. I shall enter upon them in the second
series of these Meditations, when I touch upon
the history of the Christian religion. Those
questions, however, have no bearing upon the
subject which occupies me at the present .mo
ment ; the Bible, whatever its antiquity, what
ever the comparative antiquity of its different
parts, has been ever that witness of God in
which the Hebrews believed, and under the
law of which they lived, the great monument
of the religion in the bosom of which the
Christian religion took its birth. It is this

190 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
God of whom in the Bible, and in the Bible
alone, it is my purpose to seek the peculiar and
true character.
The nations of Semitic origin have been hon
ored for their primitive and persistent faith in
the unity of God. Under different forms, and
amid events very dissimilar, nearly all nations
have been polytheistic ; the Semitic nations
alone have believed firmly in the one God.
This great moral fact has been attributed to
different and to complex causes ; but the fact
itself is generally acknowledged and admitted.
In two respects in this assertion there is ex
aggeration. On one side, among the nations of
Semitic origin, several were polytheistic ; the
descendants of Abraham, the Hebrews, and the
Arab Ishmaelites, alone remained really mono
theistic ; on the other side, the idea of the
unity of God was not entirely strange even to
the polytheistic nations. The greater part, like
the Hindoos and the Greeks, admitted one sole
and primordial Power anterior and superior to

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 191
their gods ; idea, vague and searched from afar,
derived from the instinct of man or the reflec
tion of the philosopher, and which among those
nations became neither the basis of any religion
that deserves the name, nor any efficacious
obstacle to idolatry. The God of the Bible is
no such sterile abstraction ; he is the one God
at the present time as in the origin of all
things, the personal God, living, acting, and
presiding efficiently over the destinies of the
world that he has created.
He has besides another characteristic, one far
more striking, which belongs to him more
exclusively than that of Unity. The gods of
the polytheistic nations have histories filled
with events, vicissitudes, transformations, ad
ventures. The mythology of the Egyptians, of
the Hindoos, of the Greeks, of the Scandina
vians, and numerous others, is but the poetical
or symbolical recital of the varied and agitated
lives of their gods. We detect in these recitals
sometimes the personification of the fancies of

192 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
nations described in accordance with their
actual phenomena, sometimes the reminiscences
of human personages who have struck the im
agination of the people. But whatever their
origin, whatever their name, each of those gods
has his individual history more or less over
laden with incidents and acts, now heroic, now
licentious, now elegantly fantastic, now grossly
eccentric. All the polytheistic religions are
collections of biographies, divine or legendary,
allegorical or completely fabulous, in which the
careers and the passions, the actions and the
dreams of men reproduce themselves under the
forms and names of deities.
The God of the Bible has no biography,
neither has he any personal adventures.
Nothing occurs to him, and nothing changes
in him ; he is always and invariably the same,
a Being real and personal, absolutely distinct
from the finite world and from humanity, iden
tical and immutable in the bosom of the uni
versal diversity and movement. " I Am That

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 193
I Am," is the sole definition that he vouchsafes
of himself, and the constant expression of what
he is in all the course of the history of the
Hebrews, to which he is present and over
which he presides without ever receiving from
it any reflex of influence. Such is the God of
the Bible, in evident and permanent contrast
with all the gods of polytheism, still more dis
tinct and more solitary by his nature than by
his Unity.
This is, indeed, so peculiarly the proper and
essential character of the God of the Bible, that
this character has passed into the very lan
guage of the Hebrews, and has become there
the very name of God. Several words are
employed in the Bible as appellations of God.
One of these, El, Eloah, in the plural Elohim,
expresses force, creative power, and is applied
to the manifold gods of Paganism as well as to
the one God of the Hebrews. > El Shaddai is
translated by the all-powerful. Adonai signi
fies Lord. The word .Yahwe or Yehwe, which
13

194 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
becomes in Hebrew pronunciation Jehovah,
means simply He is, and means self-existence,
the Being Absolute and Eternal. This name
occurs in no other of the Semitic languages,
and it is at the epoch of Moses that it appears
for the first time among the Hebrews : " And
God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am
the Eternal," ( Yahwe, Jehovah?) " And I ap
peared unto Abraham, Isaac, and unto Jacob,
by the name of the All-powerful, (El Shaddm,)
but by my name Eternal was I not known to
them."* Yahwe, Jehovah, is at once the true
God, and the national God of Israel, f
The history of the Hebrews is neither less
significant nor less expressive than their lan
guage ; it is the history of the relations of the
God, One and Immutable with the people
chosen by him to be the special representative
* Exodus vi, 2, 3.
1 1 have consulted, respecting the precise sense and the dif
ferent Bhades of meaning of the terms expressing God in Hebrew,
my learned confrere at the Academy of Inscriptions, M. Munk,
who has replied to all my inquiries with as much clearness as
courtesy.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 195
of the religious principle, and the regenerating
source of religious life in the human race.
This people undergoes the destiny and trials
common to all nations ; it demands, and be
comes subject to, a variety of different govern
ments ; it falls into the errors and faults usual
to nations ; it frequently succumbs to the
temptations of idolatry; like the others, it has
its days of virtue and of vice, of prosperity and
of reverses, of glory and of abasement. Amid
all the vicissitudes and errors of the people' of
the Bible, the God of the Bible remains inva
riably the same, without any tincture of an
thropomorphism, without any alteration in the
idea which the Hebrews conceive of his nature,
either during their fidelity or disobedience to
his Commandments. It is always the God who
has said, " I Am That I Am," of whom his
people demand no other explanation of him
self, and who, ever present and sovereign, pur
sues the designs of his providence with men,
who either use or abuse the liberty of action

196 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
which that God had accorded to them at their
creation. I wish to retrace, according to the Bible,
the principal phases and the principal actors in
this history. The more I study, the more I
feel that I am watching, as M. Ewald has
expressed it, "the career of the true religion,
advancing step by step to its complete develop
ment ;" that is to say, that I am there observing
the action of God upon the first steps and
upon the religious progress of the human race.

I. GOD AND ABRAHAM.
The history of the Hebrews, temporal and
spiritual, opens with Abraham. At his first
appearance in the Bible Abraham is a nomad
chief, who has quitted Chaldea and the town
of Haran, where his father, Terah, descended
from Shem, is still living. He is wandering
with his family, his servants, and his flocks, at

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 197
fir-st on the frontiers and afterward in the
interior of the land of Canaan, halting wherever
he finds water and pasturage, and conducting
his tents and his tribe at one time through the
mountainous districts, at another along the
plains below. Why has he left Chaldea?
According to the Bible itself, his father was an
idolater. "Your fathers," said Joshua to the
people of Israel, " dwelt on the other side of
the flood " (the Euphrates) " in old time, even
Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father
of Nachor : and they served other gods." *
The book of Judith contains a similar asser
tion ;f and the Jewish and Arabian traditions
confirm, at the same time that they amplify,
the statement : the father of Abraham, they
say, was an idolatrous fanatic, and his son
Abraham, having set himself against the
practice of idolatry, was upon his charge
thrown into a burning furnace, from which a
miracle alone preserved him. The historian
* Joshua xxiv, 2. t Judith v, 6-9.

198 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Josephus speaks of the insurrections which
took place among the Chaldeans on the occa
sion of their religious dissensions.
The Bible makes no allusion to these tradi
tions ; from the very beginning God intervenes
in the history of the father of the Hebrews.
" The Eternal had said unto Abram, Get thee
out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and
from thy father's house, unto a land that I will
shew thee : I will make thee a great nation,
and I will bless thee, and make thy name
great ; . . . and in thee shall all families of
the earth be blessed. ... So Abram departed,
. . . and Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot
his brother's son, and all their substance that
they had gathered, and the sons that they had
gotten in Haran ; and they went forth to go
into the land of Canaan ; and into the land of
Canaan they came."* How had God spoken
to Abraham ? By a voice from without or by
an internal inspiration? The writer of the
* Genesis xii, 1-5.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 199
biblical narrative occupies himself in no respect
with the question. God is for him, present
and an actor in the history just as much as
Abraham is; the intervention of God has in
his eyes nothing but what is perfectly simple
and natural. The same faith animates Abra
ham ; he issues forth from Chaldea and
wanders through Palestine, according to the
word and under the direction of the Eternal.
He wanders through the midst of popula
tions already established upon the land of
Canaan, and with these he lives in peace, but
still not uniting with them ; bringing them
succor when attacked by foreign chieftains ;
fighting in their behalf as a faithful ally,
sometimes, perhaps, in the character of a
valiant condottiere, but remaining isolated in his
capacity of nomad Patriarch, with his family
and his tribe ; repelling even the gifts and fa
vors which might perhaps lower his charac
ter or affect his independence. Everywhere
that he halts, or that any incident of import-

200 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ance occurs to him, at Sichem, Bethel, Beer-
sheba, Hebron, he raises an altar to his God.
In his wandering uncertain life, a famine im
pels him on one occasion even as far as Egypt :
the first perhaps of those shepherd chiefs who
issued from Asia, and who were so soon to
invade that rich country. Abraham passes
in Egypt several years, well treated by the
reigning Pharaoh ; on excellent terms with the
Egyptian priests, imparting to them and re
ceiving from them such knowledge of astron
omy or of natural philosophy as they mutu
ally possessed, but maintaining ever carefully
the isolation of his family, of his tribe, and
of his religion. Of his own accord, or at
the instance of the Pharaoh, he quits Egypt,
carrying with him not only his flocks and
his camels, but his Egyptian slaves, and among
others Hagar. He returns to the country
of Canaan, again wanders through several of
its districts, takes part in different events —
internal troubles or foreign wars, and finally

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 201
settles with his family and dependents at He
bron, near the oaks of Mamre, among the tribe
of the children of Heth ; but still always in his
capacity as a foreigner, and always careful as
such to preserve his character and his independ
ence. When his wife Sarah died, the book of
Genesis tells us that,
"Abraham stood up from before his dead,
and spake unto the sons of Heth, saying,
"I am a stranger and a sojourner with you:
give me a possession of a buryingplace with
you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight.
"And the children of Heth answered Abra
ham, saying unto him,
" Hear us, my lord : thou art a mighty prince
among us : in the choice of our sepulchres bury
thy dead ; none of us shall withhold from thee
his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy
dead. "And Abraham stood up, and bowed him
self to the people of the land, even to the
children of Heth.

202 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
" And he communed with them, saying, If it
be your mind that I should bury my dead out
of my sight, hear me, and entreat for me to
Ephron the son of Zohar,
" That he may give me the cave of Machpe-
lah, which he hath, which is in the end of his
field ; for as much money as it is worth he shall
give it me for a possession of a buryingplace
among you.
"And Ephron dwelt among the children of
Heth : and Ephron the Hittite answered Abra
ham in the audience of the children of Heth,
even of all that went in at the gate of this city,
saying, " Nay, my lord, hear me : the field give I
thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee ;
in the presence of the sons of my people give I
it thee : bury thy dead.
"And Abraham bowed down himself before
the people of the land.
" And he spake unto Ephron in the audience
of the people of the land, saying, But if thou

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 203
will give it, I pray thee, hear me : I will give
thee money for the field ; take it of me, and I
will bury my dead there.
"And Ephron answered Abraham, saying
unto him,
"My lord, hearken unto me : the land is worth
four hundred shekels of silver; what is that
betwixt me and thee ? bury therefore thy dead.
"And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron;
and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver,
which he had named in the audience of the sons
of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current
money with the merchant.
" And the field of Ephron, which was in
Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field,
and the cave which was therein, and all the
trees that were in the field, that were in all the
borders round about, were made sure
" Unto Abraham for a possession in the pres
ence of the children of Heth, before all that
went in at the gate of his city.
"And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his

204 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah be
fore Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land
of Canaan.
" And the field, and the cave that is therein,
were made sure unto Abraham for a possession
of a buryingplace by the sons of Heth." *
Little importance does Abraham attach to
his precarious condition as a wanderer and a
stranger; he has faith in God. God commands,
and Abraham obeys. God promises, and Abra
ham trusts. One day, however, with a feeling of
anxious humility, Abraham makes the following
prayer to God : " Lord Eternal, what wilt thou
give me, seeing I go childless, and there is Eli-
ezer of Damascus shall be my heir ? And be
hold the word of the Lord came unto him,
saying, This shall not be thine heir, but he that
shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall
be thine heir. I am God, the mighty, all-power
ful ; walk before my face, be thou perfect. I will
establish my covenant between me and thee, and
* Genesis xxiii, 3-20.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 205
thy seed after thee, in their generation, for an
everlasting possession, and I will be their God.
But thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou
and thy seed after • thee, in their generations.
And Abraham believed in the Lord; and the
Eternal counted it to him for righteousness." *
In these- days, in the bosom of Christian civ
ilization, obedience to God and confidence in
God are the first precepts, the first virtues of
Christianity. They were also the virtues of
Abraham, and the precepts inculcated by
Abraham's history in the Bible. And the God
of Abraham, the God of the Bible, is the same
who is the object of adoration to the Christian
of the . present day ; the same conception as
that of those philosophers of the present day
who believe in God, and believe in him as in
God Absolute and Perfect, Self-dependent,'
Eternal, without the possibility or attempt to
define him otherwise. Thousands of years have
changed nothing as to the biblical notion of
* Genesis xv, 1-6, and xvii, 1-9.

206 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
.God in the human soul, nor as to the essential
laws regulating the relation of man with God.
Historical tradition fully confirms the moral
fact here mentioned. Abraham has not been
the object of any mystical conception, or any
mythological metamorphosis ; nowhere has he
been transformed into demigod or son of God ;
he has ever remained the model of religious
faith and submission, the type of the pious man
in intimate relation with God. Throughout all
antiquity, and in all the East, as much for the
primitive Christians as for the Jews and Arabs,
as much for the Mussulmans as for the Jews
and Christians, God is the God of Abraham ;
Abraham is the friend of God, the father and
the prince of believers; these are the very
names that the Gospel gives him ; * and the
Koran, too, celebrates him in these words :
" And when the night overshadowed him he
saw a star, and he said, This is my Lord ; but
* St. Paul's Epistle to the Komans iv ; Galatians iii ; Epistle
of St. James ii, 23.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 207
when it set, he said, I like not gods which set.
And when he saw the moon rising, he said,
This is my Lord ; but when he saw it set, he
said, Verily, if my Lord direct me not, I shall
become one of the people who go astray. And
when he saw the sun rising, he said, This is my
Lord, this is the greatest ; but when it set, he
said, O my people, verily I am clear of that
which ye associate with God. I direct my face
unto him who hath created the heavens and
the earth."*
The Eternal, the God One and Immutable, is
the God of Abraham ; Abraham is the servant
and adorer of the true God.

n. GOD AND MOSES.
The true idea of God, and the faith in his
effectual and continued providence, are the two
great religious principles which the name of
Abraham suggests. This is the beginning of
* Koran vi.

208 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
the history of the Hebrews, and the origin of
that ancient Covenant which, in passing from
the Pentateuch to the Gospel, has become the
new Covenant, the Christian Religion.
About five centuries later we find the He
brews settled in Egypt, in the land of Goshen,
between the lower Nile, the Red Sea, and the
Desert, in a condition very different from that
in which they had first been when attracted to
the court of Pharaoh by the prosperity of
Joseph, the great-grandson of Abraham. The
new Pharaoh oppresses them cruelly ; they are
a prey to the miseries of slavery, the contagion
of idolatry, to all the evils, all the perils, phys
ical and moral, which can afflict a nation nu
merically weak, fallen under the yoke of one
powerful and civilized. The Hebrews never
theless persist in their religious faith, cling to
their national reminiscences ; they do not suffer
their nationality to be lost in and confounded
with that of their masters ; they endure with
out offering any active resistance ; they will

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 2*09
not deliver themselves, but they have never
ceased to believe in their God, and they await
their Deliverer.
Moses has been saved from the waters of the
Nile by Pharaoh's own daughter. He has
been brought up at Heliopolis, in the midst of
the pomp of the court, and instructed in the
sciences of the Egyptian priests. He has
served the sovereign of Egypt ; he has com
manded his troops and made war for him
against the Ethiopians. He has received an
Egyptian name, Osarsiph, or Tisithen. Every
thing seems to concur to make him an Egyp
tian. But he remains a faithful Israelite : true
to the faith and to the fortunes of his brethren.
Their oppression rouses his indignation ; he
avenges one of them by killing his oppressor.
The victims of oppression, alarmed, disavow
Moses, instead of supporting him. Moses flees
from Egypt and takes refuge in the Desert,
among a tribe of wandering Arabs, the Mid-
ianites, sprung, like himself, from Abraham.
14

210 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Their chief, the sheik of the tribe, Jethro,
called also Hobab, receives him as a son, and
gives him his daughter Zipporah in marriage.
The proud Israelite, who has declined to
remain an Egyptian, becomes an Arab, and
leads, several years, the nomadic life of the
hospitable tribe. It is now in the peninsula of
Sinai that Moses wanders with the servants
and flocks of his father-in-law. In the center
of that peninsula, of yore a province in the
empire of the Pharaohs, but which had fallen
into the possession of the pastoral Arabs, rises
Sinai, a mount with which from time imme
morial, among the neighboring tribes, have
been connected as many sacred traditions as
have ever been assigned to Mount Ararat in
Armenia, or the Himalayas in India. In this
venerable spot, before a burning bush, Moses,
with a heart full of faith, hears God calling
him and commanding him to lead his people,
the children of Israel, out of Egypt. Moses is
humble, distrustful of himself, just as Abraham

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 211
before him had been. "Who am I, that I
should go unto Pharaoh, and, that I should
bring forth the children of Israel out of
Egypt? . . . When I come unto the children
of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of
your fathers hath sent me unto you ; and they
shall say to me, What is his name ? What
shall I say unto them? And God said unto
Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus
shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am
hath sent me unto you." *
Moses receives his mission from Jehovah, and
feels no other disquietude than arises from the
desire to accomplish it.
In the presence of such facts, with this associa
tion of God and man in the same work, the oppo
nents of the supernatural still clamor. " Why,"
ask they, " this confusion of divine action and
of human action? Has God need of man's
concurrence ? Can he not, if he will, accomplish
all his designs by himself, and through the full-
* Exodus iii, 11, 13, 14.

212 THE christian religion.
ness of his omnipotence ?" In my turn, I would
ask them if they know why God created man,
and if God has put them into the secret of his
intentions toward the instrument whom he em
ploys for his designs ? There precisely lies the
privilege of humanity ; man is God's associate,
subject to him, yet a free agent independent of
him ; he intervenes by his proper action in plans
of which only an infinitely small part is re
vealed to his intelligence and reserved for his
execution. Western Asia and its history are
full of the name of Moses. Jews, Christians,
and Mohammedans style him the First Prophet,
the Great Lawgiver, the Great Theologian;
everywhere, in the scene of the events them
selves, the places retain a memory of him.
The traveler meets there the Well of Moses,
the Ravine of Moses, the Mountain of Moses,
the Valley of Moses. In other countries and
other ages this name has been given as the
most glorious that the saints could receive. St.
Peter has been styled the Moses of the Christian

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 213
Church ; St. Benedict, the Moses of the Monas
tic Orders ; Ulphilas, the Moses of the Goths.
*
What did Moses do to obtain a renown so great
and so enduring ? He gained no battles ; he
conquered no territory ; he founded no cities ;
he governed no state; he was not even a man
in whom eloquence replaced other sources of
influence and power : " And Moses said unto
the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, nei
ther heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto
thy servant ; but I am slow of speech, and of a
slow tongue."*
There is not in this whole history a single
grand human action, a single grand event, pro
ceeding from human agency ; all, all is the work
of God ; and Moses is nothing on any occasion
but the interpreter and instrument of God. To
this mission he has consecrated soul and life ; it
is only by virtue of this title that he is power
ful, and that he shares, as far as his capacity as
a man permits, a work infinitely grander and
* Exodus iv, 10.

214 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
more I enduring than that accomplished by all
the /heroes and all the masters that the
world ever acknowledged.
I know no more striking spectacle than that
of the unshakable faith and inexhaustible en
ergy of Moses in the pursuit of a work not his
own, in which he executes what he has not con
ceived, in which he obeys rather than com
mands. Obstacles and disappointments meet
him at each turn ; he has to struggle with weak
nesses, infidelity, caprices, jealousies, and sedi
tions, and these not merely in his own nation, but
in his own family. He has himself his moments
of sadness, of disquietude : " And Moses cried
unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto
this people? they be almost ready to stone
me.* ... I beseech thee, shew me thy
glory." And God answers him, "I will
make all my goodness pass before thee. . . .
Thou canst not see my face; for there shall
no man see me and live." And Moses trusts
* Exodus xvii, 4 ; xxxiii, 18-20.

.-.V
SEVENTH MEDITATION. 215*
in God, and continues to triumph while he
obeys him. \
The work of deliverance is consummated;
Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt,
has surmounted the first perils and the first suf
ferings of the desert. They advance through
the group of mountains in the peninsula of
Sinai. Passing from valley to valley, they
arrive "at the entrance of a large basin sur
rounded by lofty peaks. Of these the one
which commands the most extensive view is
covered with enormous blocks, as if the
mountain had been overthrown by an earth
quake. A deep cleft divides the peak into
two. "No one who has approached the Ras Suf-
safeh through that noble plain, or who has
looked down upon the plain from that majestic
height, will willingly part with the belief that
these are the two essential features of the view
of the Israelitish camp. That such a plain
should exist at all in front of such a cliff is so

216 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
remarkable a coincidence with the sacred nar
rative, as to furnish a strong internal argument,
not merely of its identity with the scene, but
of the scene itself having been described by
an eye-witness. The awful and lengthened
approach, as to some natural sanctuary, would
have been the fittest preparation for the coming
scene. The low line of alluvial mounds at the
foot of the cliff exactly answers to the 'bounds'
which were to keep the people off from ' touch
ing the mount.'* The plain itself is not broken
and uneven, and narrowly shut in, like almost
all others in the range, but presenting a long
retiring sweep, against which the people could
'remove and stand afar off' The cliff, rising
like a huge altar in front of the whole congre
gation, and visible against the sky in lonely
grandeur from end to end of the whole plain, is
the very image of the ' mount that might not
be touched,' and from which ' the voice ' of God
might be heard far and wide over the stillness
* Exodus xix, 12.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 217
of the plain below, widened at that point to its
utmost extent by the confluence of all the con
tiguous valleys. Here, beyond all other parts
of the peninsula, is the adytum, withdrawn, as
if ' in the end of the world,' from all the stir
and confusion of earthly things." * Such was
three, thousand five hundred years ago, and
such is still the place where Moses received
from God and gave to the people of Israel that
law of the Ten Commandments which resound
still through all the Christian Churches as the
first foundation of their faith and the first
moral rule of Christian nations.
The Hebrews, at the moment when the Dec
alogue became their fundamental law, were in a
crisis of social transformation ; they were upon
the point of passing from the pastoral nomadic
condition to that of farmers and settlers. It
seems that, at such an epoch, the political insti
tutions of a people would, as the basis of their
* Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History. By
Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, pp. 42, 43. London. 1862.

218 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
government, be its most natural and most urg
ent business. The Decalogue leaves the sub
ject entirely untouched; makes to it not the
remotest, the most indirect allusion. It is a
law exclusively religious and moral, which only
busies itself about the duties of man to God and
to his fellow-creatures, and admits, by its very
silence, all the varying forms of government
that the external or internal state of society
may seem to require. Characteristic, grand,
and original, not to be met with in the prim
itive laws of any other nascent state, and an
admirable and remarkable manifestation of the
divine origin of this one ! It is to man's natu
ral and his moral destiny that the Decalogue
addresses itself; it is to guide man's soul
and his inmost will that it lays down rules ;
whereas it surrenders his external, his civil
condition to all the varying chances of place
and of time.
Another characteristic of this law is not less
original or less urgent. It places God, and

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 219
man's duties toward God, at the head and front
of man's life and man's duties; it unites inti
mately religion and morality, and regards them
as inseparable. If philosophers, in studying,
discriminate between them; if they seek in
human nature the special principle or principles
of morality ; if they consider the latter by it
self and apart from religion, it is the right of
science to do so. But still the result is but a
scientific work, only a partial dissection of
man's soul, addressed to only one part of its
faculties, and holding no account of the
entirety and the reality of the soul's life.
The human body, taken as one whole, is by na
ture at once moral and religious ; the moral
law that he finds in himself needs an author
and a judge ; and God is to him the source and
guarantee, the Alpha and Omega of morality;
A metaphysician may, from time to time,
affirm the moral law, and yet forget its Divine
Author. A man may, now and then, admit,
may respect the principles of morality, and yet

220 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
remain estranged from religion ; all this is pos
sible, for all this we see. So small a portion of
truth sometimes satisfies the human mind !
Man is so ready and so prone to misconceive
and to mutilate himself! His ideas are by
nature so incomplete and inconsequent, so
easily dimmed or perverted by his passions or
the action of his free will ! These are but the
exceptional conditions of the human mind, mere
scientific abstractions ; if men admit them, their
influence is neither general nor durable. In
the natural and actual life of the human race,
morality and religion are necessarily united ;
and it is one of the divine characteristics of the
Decalogue, as it is also one of the causes of that
authority which has remained to it after the
lapse of so many centuries, that it has pro
claimed and taken as its foundation their inti
mate union.
This is not the place to consider the laws of
Moses in civil and penal matters, nor to refer to
his ordinances respecting the worship, or to

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 221
those that regard the organization of the priest
hood of the Hebrews. In the former of these
two branches of the Mosaic code, numerous
dispositions, singularly moral, equitable, and
humane, are found in connection with circum
stances indicating a state of manners gross and
cruel even to barbarism.
The legislator is evidently under the empire
of ideas and sentiments infinitely superior to
those of the people, to whom, nevertheless, his
strong sympathies attach him. When we con
sider the Mosaic legislation, we find that in
everything which concerns the external forms
and practices of worship, the ideas of Egypt
have made great impression upon the mind of
the Lawgiver, and the frequent use that he has
made of Egyptian customs and ceremonies is not
less visible. But far above these institutions
and these traditions, which seem not seldom
out of place and incoherent, soars and predomi
nates constantly the idea of the God of Abra
ham and of Jacob, of the God one and eternal,

222 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of the true God. The laws of Moses omit no
occasion of inculcating the belief in that God,
and of recalling him to the recollection of the
Hebrews. And this, not as if they were re
calling a principle, an institution, a system ; but
as if they propose to place a sovereign, a lawful
and living sovereign, in the presence of those
whom he governs, and to whom they owe obe
dience and fidelity.
Moses never speaks in his own^name, or in
the name of any human power, or of any por-
' tion of the Hebrew nation. God alone speaks
and commands. God's word and his commands
Moses repeats to the people. At his first as
cending Mount Sinai, when he had received the
first inspiration from the Eternal, " Moses came
and called for the elders of the people, and laid
before their faces all these words which the
Lord commanded him. And all the people
answered together, and said, All that the Lord
hath spoken we will do." *
* Exodus xix, 7, 8.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 223
When Moses, again ascending Mount Sinai,
had received from God the Decalogue, he re
turned, "And he took the book of the covenant,
and read in the audience of the people: and
they said, All that the Lord hath said will we
do, and be obedient." *
As the events develop themselves, the He
brews are found far from rendering a constant
obedience: they forget, they infringe — and
that frequently — these laws of God which
they have accepted ; and God sometimes pun
ishes, sometimes pardons them; still it is
always God alone that is acting ; it is from him
alone that all emanates ; neither the priests who
preside over the ceremonies of his worship, nor
the elders of Israel whom he summons to pros
trate themselves from afar before him, nor
Moses himself — his sole and constant inter
preter — do anything by themselves, demand
anything for themselves. The Pentateuch is
the history and the picture of the personal
* Exodus xxiv, 7.

224 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
government by God of the Israelites. " Our
legislator," says the historian Josephus, "had
in his thoughts not monarchies, nor oligarchies,
nor democracies, nor any one of those political
institutions: he commanded that our govern
ment should be (if it is permitted to make use
of an expression somewhat exaggerated) what
may be styled a theocracy." *
The eminent writers who have recently
studied most profoundly the Mosaic system —
M. Ewald in Germany,f Mr. Milman and Mr.
Arthur Stanley in England, M. Nicolas in
France — have adopted the expression of Jose
phus, attaching to it its real and complete
sense. "The term theocracy," says Mr. Stan
ley, "has been often employed since the time
of Moses, but in the sense of a sacerdotal gov
ernment : a sense the very contrary to that in
which its first author conceived it. The theoc
racy of Moses was not at all a government by
* Josephus, contra Apionem, ii, c. 17.
t Gesohichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus, ii, 188. Gdttin-
gen, 1858.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 225
priests, or opposed to kings ; it was the govern-
ment by God himself, as opposed to a govern
ment by priests or by kings." *
" Mosaism," says M. Nicolas, " is a theocracy
in the proper sense of the word. It would be
a complete error to understand this word in
the sense which usage has given to it in our
language. There is no question here in effect
of a government exercised by a sacerdotal caste
in the name and under the inspiration, real or
pretended, of God. In the Mosaic legislation
the priests are not the ministers and instru
ments of the divine will ; God reigns and gov
erns by himself. It is he who has given his
laws to the Hebrews. Moses has been, it is
true, the medium between the Eternal and the
people, but the people has taken part in the
grand spectacle of the Revelation of the Law ;
of this the people, in the exercise of its free
dom, has evinced its acceptance ; and in the
covenant set on foot between the Eternal and
* Lectures on the Jewish Church, p. 157.
15

226 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
the family of Jacob, Moses has been, if I may
be allowed the expression, only the public offi
cer who has propounded the contract. He was
himself, besides, not within the pale of the sac
erdotal caste ; and the charge of keeping,
amending, and seeing to the carrying out of the
body of laws was not confided to the priests." *
Let the learned men who thus characterize
the Mosaic theocracy pause here and measure
the whole bearing of the fact which they com
prehend so well. It is a fact unique in the his
tory of the world. The idea of God is, among
all nations, the source of religions; but in
every case, except that of the Hebrews, scarcely
has the source appeared before it deviates and
becomes troubled ; men take the place of God ;
God's name is made to cover every kind of
usurpation and falsehood ; sometimes sacerdotal
corporations take possession of all government,
civil and religious: sometimes secular power
overrules and enslaves religious faith and relig-
* Etudes Critiques sur la Bible — Ancien Testament, p. 172.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 227
*
ious life. In the Mosaic dispensation we have
nothing of the kind; its very origin and its
fundamental principles condemn and prohibit
even the attempt at any such deviations. No
paramount priesthood here ; no secular power
playing the part of the oppressor. God is con
stantly present, and sole master. All passes
between God and the people ; all, I say, so
passes through the agency of a single man
whom God inspires, and in whom the people
have faith, asking no other authority than that
of the revelation which he receives. No sign
here of a fact of human origin : just as the God
of the Bible is the true God, the religion that
descended, by Moses, from Sinai upon the elect
people of God is the true religion destined to
become, when Jesus Christ ascends Calvary, the
religion of the human race.

228 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

HI. GOD AND THE KINGS.
Moses having brought out of Egypt the peo
ple of Israel, and having conducted it through
the Desert as far as the eastern bank of the
Jordan, in sight of Canaan, the Promised Land,
his mission terminates. " Get thee up," says
the Eternal to him ; " get thee up into the top
of Pisgah, and lift up thine eyes westward, and
northward, and southward, and eastward, and
behold it with thine eyes : for thou shalt not
go over this Jordan. But charge Joshua, and
encourage him, and strengthen him : for he
shall go over before this people, and he shall
cause them to inherit the land which thou shalt
see." *
Moses has been, in the name of Jehovah, the
liberator and the legislator ; Joshua is the con
queror, the rough warrior, of yet signal piety
and modesty, the ardent servant of Jehovah,
*Deut. iii, 27, 28.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 229
the faithful disciple of Moses. After passing
the Jordan, traversing the land of Canaan in
every direction, and giving battle in succession
to the greater part of the tribes that inhabit it,
he destroys, or expels, or negotiates with them,
and divides their lands among the twelve tribes
of Israel. These exchange their wandering life
for that settled agricultural life of which Moses
has given them the law. The descendants of
Abraham settle as masters in the soil in which
Abraham had demanded as a favor the privi
lege of purchasing a tomb.
The consequences of this new situation are
not long in showing themselves. The conquest
is , protracted and difficult : the violence and
rapine that characterize a state of war, one of
dispossession and of extermination, replace among
the Hebrews the adventures and the pious
emotions of the Desert. In spite of their suc
cesses, the conquest nevertheless remains incom
plete : several of the Canaanitish tribes defend
themselves efficaciously, and cling, side by side

230 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
with the new comers, to their territory, their
laws, their gods. The twelve tribes of Israel
disperse and settle, each on its own account,
upon different and distant points, some being
even separated by the Jordan. The unity of
the Hebrew nation, of its faith, of its law, of its
government, and of its destiny, weakens rap
idly; the tendency to idolatry, which the He
brews had so often evinced when wandering in
the Desert, reappears and developes itself,
fomented by the vicinity of the Polytheistic
tribes of Canaan. Not, however, that we can
precisely say that Polytheism prevails, against
the One God ; but rather that material images
of Jehovah become, in the midst of particular
tribes, the object of the idolatrous worship so
strongly prohibited by the Decalogue. " And
the children of Israel did evil in the sight of
the Lord, and forgat the Lord their God, and
served Baalim and the groves." *
Under such influences the moral and social
* Judges iii, 7.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 231
state of the people of Israel undergoes pro
found changes ; the barbarism, which had been
formerly among them fanatical and austere,
becomes unruly and licentious ; their chiefs,
their Judges, during the epoch which bears
their name, no longer possess, sometimes no
longer merit their confidence ; even the heroic
acts of some among them — of Gideon, of Debo
rah, of Samson — present rather a strange than
an august character. The Mosaic Theocracy
vails itself; the Hebrew nation becomes disor
ganized ; day by day the religious and political
«
anarchy in Israel extends and becomes aggra
vated. But where the Divine Light has once shone,
it is never completely extinguished ; and when
the voice of God has once spoken, the sound is
never entirely lost, even to ears that no longer
listen. It has been affirmed that after Joshua,
in the lapse of time that took place between
the government of the Judges and the end of
the reign of Solomon, the recollection of Moses,

232 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of his actions and his laws, had almost entirely
disappeared — had lost all authority in Israel.
Some passages from the biblical narrative will
suffice to remove this error. I read in the
Book of Judges, with respect to the Canaanit-
ish tribes who resisted and survived in their
countries the conquest and settlement of the
Hebrew tribes : These nations " were to prove
Israel, to know whether they would hearken
unto the commandments of the Lord, which he
commanded their fathers by the hand of
Moses."* And again, in the Book of Samuel,
it is the Eternal " that advanced Moses and
Aaron , . . which brought forth your fathers
out of the land of Egypt, and made them dwell
in this place." f And in the Book of Kings, J
David, on the point of expiring, says to his son
Solomon, " Keep the charge of the Lord thy
God, to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes,
and his commandments, and his judgments, and
his testimonies, as it is written in the law of
* Judges iii, 4. 1 1 Samuel xii, 6, 8. J 1 Kings ii, 3.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 233
Moses." And when Solomon, after the solemn
dedication of his Temple, had addressed to God
his prayer of thanksgiving, " he stood, and
blessed all the congregation of Israel with a
loud voice, saying, Blessed be the Lord, that
hath given rest unto his people Israel, accord
ing to all that he promised: there hath not
failed one word of all his good promise, which ,
he promised by the hand of Moses his serv
ant."* In the customs and ln*es of the Israelites
these "good promises" had not practically, it
is true, preserved all their efficacy : the worship
of Jehovah and the legislation of Moses had
fallen into sad oblivion, and undergone serious
changes. But, in the national sentiment, Jeho
vah the Eternal was ever the One God, the
True God, and Moses his interpreter. Moral
and social disorder had invaded the Hebrew
Confederation ; the Divine Law and Tradition
were incessantly violated, still not ignored:
* 1 Kings viii, 65, 66.

234 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
they ever continued the Divine Law and Tra
dition, the objects of the faith and veneration
of Israel.
When the evil of anarchy had brought with
it great national reverses — when the Philistines
on the south, the Ammonites on the east, and
the Mesopotamians on the north had placed in
jeopardy the Hebrew settlement in Canaan — a
general cry arose ; on all sides the tribes de
manded a strong government, a single chief,
one capable of maintaining order within, and
supporting abroad the position and the honor
of Israel. A great and faithful servant of Je
hovah, the last of the judges, and the greatest
of the prophets since Moses — Samuel — had
recently governed Israel, and strenuously strug
gled to arrest the progress of popular vice and
misfortune ; but he had become old, and his
sons whom he had made "judges over Israel
. . . walked not in his ways, but turned aside
after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted
judgment. Then all the elders of Israel gath-

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 235
ered themselves together, and came to Samuel
unto Ramah, and said unto him, Behold, thou
art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways :
now make us a king to judge us like all the
nations." *
The demand had in it nothing singular ;
even at the epoch when God, by his servant
Moses, was personally governing Israel, the
chance of the establishment of a human king
dom had been foreseen and provided for be
forehand by the Divine Law : " When thou
art come unto the land which the Lord thy
God giveth thee, and "shalt possess it, and
shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a
king over me, like as all the nations that
are about me ; thou shalt in any wise set him
king over thee, whom the Lord thy God
shall choose : one from among thy brethren
shalt thou set king over thee : thou mayest not
set a stranger over thee, which is not thy
brother." f
* 1 Samuel viii, 1-5. t Deut. xvii, 14, 15.

236 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Although thus provided .for by the Divine
Law, the demand of a king was extremely dis
pleasing to Samuel ; "'for the kingly rule was
odious to him," says the historian Josephus ;
" he had an innate love of justice, and was
ardently attached to the aristocratical form of
government, as to the form of polity which
rendered men happy and worthy of God."*
But the Eternal " said unto Samuel, Hearken
unto the voice of the people in all that they
say unto thee : for they have not rejected thee,
but they have rejected me, that I should not
reign over them. . . . Now therefore hearken
unto their voice : howbeit yet protest solemnly
unto them, and show them the manner of the
king that shall reign over them." f
Samuel predicted to the Hebrews how much
the kingly form of government would cost
them, all that they would have to suffer in their
families, their property, and their liberties:
* Josephus, Ant. Jud., vol. vi, ch. iii, 8.
1 1 Sam. viii, 7-9.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 237
" Nevertheless the, people refused to obey the
voice of Samuel ; and they said, Nay ; but we
will have a king over us ; that we also may be
like all the nations ; and that our king may
judge us, and go out before us, and fight our
battles. And Samuel heard all the words of
the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears
of the Lord. And the Lord said to Samuel,
Hearken unto their voice, and make them a
king." *
The world's history offers no example where
the merits and defects of absolute monarchy
were so rapidly developed, where they were
displayed so strikingly, as in this little Hebrew
monarchy, instituted with a view of escaping
from anarchy by the express desire of the peo
ple itself. Three kings succeed to the throne,
in origin, character, conduct, and reign abso
lutely dissimilar. Saul is a warrior, chosen by
Samuel for his strength, bodily beauty, and
courage; ever ready for the combat, but with-
* 1 Samuel viii, 19-22.

238 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
out foresight, without perseyerance in his mili
tary operations ; easily intoxicated with good
fortune ; hurried away by brutal, capricious, or
jealous passions ; now engaged in furious strug
gles, now appearing in a dependent position,
with his patron Samuel, his son Jonathan, his
son-in-law David ; a genuine barbarian king,
arrogant, changeable of humor, impatient of
control, prone to superstition, a moment serv
ing Israel against her enemies, but incapable of
governing Israel in the name of its God.
David, on the contrary, is the faithful and con
sistent representative of religious faith and
religious life in Israel ; the fervent and submiss
ive adorer of the Eternal ; he is so at all the
epochs and in the most varying aspects of his
career, whether of humility or of grandeur ; at
once warrior, king, prophet, poet; as ardent to
celebrate his God in his character of poet, as to
serve him in the capacity of warrior, or to obey
him in that of king; equally sublime in his
thanksgiving to the Eternal for his triumphs as

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 239
in his invocation to, him in his distresses ; accessi
ble to the most culpable human weaknesses, but
prompt to repent the offense once committed ;
and giving always to impulses of joy or pious
sadness the .first place in his soul ; very king of
the nation that adores the very God. David
accomplishes the work of his time : he obtains
the object for which the monarchy had been
demanded and instituted: he leaves behind
him the tribes of Israel reunited at home, and
reassured against foreign enemies, proceeding
too in the path of good order and confidence.
Heir to his father's work, his father's success,
Solomon comes next, and reigns forty years —
years of almost as much repose as splendor :
"God gave Solomon wisdom and understand
ing exceeding much, and largeness of heart,
even as the sand that is on the sea-shore."*
" And he had peace on all sides round about
him. And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every
man under his vine and under his fig-tree, from
* 1 Kings iv, 29.

240 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Dan even to Beersheba, all the days of Solo

mon." *

The kingdom and the kingly authority rose
under the government of Solomon, and through
out all Western Asia, to a degree of power and
splendor before unknown to the Hebrews. A
prosperity out of all proportion with the posi
tion of a new king and a small state, and which
reminds us of the rapid histories and the polit
ical comets of the East. Solomon at this point
lost sight of both wisdom and virtue : the first
hereditary prince of the Hebrew monarchy term
inated his life like a voluptuous sovereign of
Ecbatana or of Nineveh ; the son of the pious
King David became a skeptical moralist ; al
though a profound observer of the nature and
destiny of man, such observation had led but to
feelings of disgust. Nor did the monarchy sur
vive the monarch : the nation became effemi
nate and' corrupt, in the effeminacy and corrup
tion of its sovereign. Scarcely was Solomon
* 1 Kings iv, 24, 25.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 241
dead, when his monarchy was divided into two
kingdoms, which, at first rivals, became soon
openly hostile to each other ; sometimes a prey
to tyranny, sometimes to anarchy, and almost
always to war. It was not, as formerly, merely
a bad phase of transition in the history of the
Hebrew nation ; it was the commencement of
national decline — decline irremediable, hope
less. But what, in this decline, will become of the
law revealed on Sinai to Moses ? Is it destined
to fall with the monarchy of Solomon, or to
languish and die out in the midst of the strug
gles and disasters of Judah and of Israel?
Quite the contrary : the religious faith and law
of the Hebrews will not only perpetuate them
selves, but will again shine forth at this epoch
of political ruin.
Above the fortune of states are the designs
of God, to which instruments are never want
ing; the kings continue to perpetrate acts of
violence, and the people to show marks of
16

242 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
weakness ; but amid all, the prophets of Is
rael will maintain the ancient Covenant, and
prepare the coming of that new Covenant
which is to make of the God of Israel the God
of mankind.

IV. GOD AND THE PROPHETS.
A celebrated political writer — a freethinker
belonging to the Radical school, somewhat also
to the school of Positivism — Mr. John Stuart
Mill, has recently said, in his work on Govern
ment, "The Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal
despotism of China, were very fit instruments
for carrying those nations up to the point of
civilization which they attained. But, having
reached that point, they were brought to a per
manent halt, for want of mental liberty and
individuality ; requisites of improvement which
the institutions that had carried them thus far,
entirely incapacitated them from acquiring;
and, as the institutions did not break down

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 243
and give place to others, further improvement
stopped. In contrast with these nations, let us
consider the example of an opposite character
afforded by another and a comparatively insig
nificant Oriental people — the Jews. They, too,
had an absolute monarchy and a hierarchy, and
their organized institutions were as obviously
of sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos.
These did for them what was done for other
Oriental races by their institutions — subdued
them to industry and order, and gave them a
national life. But neither their kings nor their
priests ever obtained, as in those other coun
tries, the exclusive moulding of their character.
Their religion, which enabled persons of genius
and a high religious tone to be regarded and to
regard themselves as inspired from heaven,
gave existence to an inestimably precious un
organized institution — the Order (if it may be
so termed) of Prophets. Generally under the
protection — it was not always effectual — of
their sacred character, the prophets were a

244 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
power in the nation, often more than a match
for kings and priests, and kept up in that little
corner of the earth the antagonism of influence,
which is the only real security for continued
progress. Religion consequently was not there
— what it has been in so many other places — a
consecration of all that was once established,
and a barrier against further improvement.
The remark of a distinguished Hebrew, M. Sal
vador, that the prophets were, in Church and
State, the equivalent to the modern liberty of
the press, gives a just but not an adequate con
ception of the part fulfilled in national and uni
versal histories by this great element of Jewish
life ; by means of which, the canon of inspira
tion never being complete, the persons most
eminent in genius and moral feeling could not
only denounce and reprobate, with the direct
authority of the Almighty, whatever appeared
to them deserving of such treatment, but could
give forth better and higher interpretations of
the national religion. Conditions more favor-

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 245
able to progress could not easily exist ; accord
ingly the Jews, instead of being stationary like
other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the
most progressive people of antiquity, and,
jointly with them, have been the starting-point
and main propelling agency of modern cultiva
tion." *
Mr. Mill is right, only he does not go far
enough. Modern civilization is in effect de
rived from the Jews and from the Greeks. To
the latter it is indebted for its human and intel
lectual, to the former for its divine and moral
element. Of these two sources, we owe to the
Jews, if not the more brilliant, at all events the
more sublime and dearly acquired one. After
the development of power and grandeur which
took place among the Jews in the reigns of
David and Solomon, their history is but a long
series of misfortunes and reverses — an eventful,
painful decline. The Hebrew state is divided
* Considerations on Representative Government. By John
Stuart Mill. Pp. 41-43. London.

246 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
into two kingdoms, almost constantly at war
with each other. And while the kingdom of
Israel is a prey to continual usurpations and
revolutions, making it the scene of all- the vio
lence and all the vicissitudes of a tyranny, the
kingdom of Judah has a line of princes, in turn
good or bad, who keep it unceasingly in a state
of trouble and of jeopardy. Religion falls be
neath the yoke of secular government ; idola
try appears in the kingdom of Israel, and
braves audaciously the ancient national faith.
The kingdom of Judah, however, remains more
faithful to Jehovah and his law, to the tradi
tions of Moses, and to the race of David ; but
its languishing faith is no longer strong enough
to arrest its march in the path of decline. In
the two kingdoms, internal disorders are aggra
vated by reverses abroad ; in the mean time,
around them mighty empires spring up and
succeed to each other. First Israel and then
Judah are invaded by strangers ; they are sub
jugated in turn by the Assyrians, the Egyptians,

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 247
the Syrians, the Babylonians. The Hebrews
are not only vanquished and reduced to sub
jection, but exiled, transported, led captive far
from their country. A new conqueror, Cyrus,
permits them to return to Jerusalem, but not
to resume their independence ; at first subjects
of the Persian kings, they soon pass from their
empire to that of the Greek generals, who have
divided among one another the conquests of
Alexander ; then to the rule of the Greeks suc
ceeds that of the Romans. During this succes
sion of servitudes, scarcely are they allowed
any moments of existence as a free nation, and
even this freedom is more apparent than real.
Judea, like Greece, is subjugated, but under cir
cumstances of greater humiliation and distress.
And shall, then, the Hebrews oppose no effi
cacious resistance to the reverses ? What is to
become, in this absolute ruin of the nationality
of the Jews, of their God and their faith ?
Shall the miracles of Sinai have no more virtue
than the mysteries of Eleusis, and Jehovah

248 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
languish away and vanish in the routine of sac
erdotal ceremonies, or in philosophical skepti
cism? By no means : in the midst of his people's
decay, the God of Israel maintains interpreters
who struggle with indomitable fidelity against
public calamities and popular errors. The first
of the prophets, Moses, had spoken in the name
and according to the commandment of Jeho
vah. After him there never were wanting to
Israel men who inherited or pretended to the
heritage of the same divine mission. "I will
raise them up a prophet from among their
brethren, like unto thee," said the Eternal unto
Moses, " and will put my words in his mouth ;
and he shall speak unto them all that I shall
command him. . . . But the prophet, which
shall presume to speak a word in my« name,
which I have not commanded him to speak, or
that shall speak in the name of other gods,
even that prophet shall die." *
* Deut. xviii, 18, 20.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 249
From Moses to Samuel, the series of the
prophets is continued ; some of them are of
renown, like Nathan in the reigns of David and
Solomon; but the greater number without
name in history, and appearing scattered over a
long course of years. They are called the
seers* the inspired.^ Their speech gushes
forth like a well under the breath of God.
When the government of the Judges gives
place to that of the Kings, the great actor in
this drama of transition, Samuel, opens for the
prophets a new era ; dedicated from his infancy
to God's service, he feels beforehand and abides
the divine inspiration : " Speak, Lord ; for thy
servant heareth." %
Not long after, his renown spreads among the
people ; he is not pontiff, he is not. even priest.§
But he is pre-eminently the seer : " Is not the
seer here ?" Such is the question addressed to
some young maidens by the men who are in
*Eoeh or Chozeh, in Hebrew. fNabi. % 1 Sam. iii, 9, 10.
§ Samuel propheta fuit, judex fuit, levita fuit, non pontifex, ne
sacerdos quidem. — St. Jerom adv. Jovinianum.

250 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
search of Samuel. Saul meets him without
knowing him, and says to him, " I pray thee
tell me where the house of the seer is." " I am
the seer," replied Samuel ; and soon after it is
Samuel himself, who, in compliance with the
popular vote, approved by God, proclaims Saul
king. But at the moment when he thus
changes the theocracy in Israel into a mon
archy, he foresees the vices and perils attendant
upon the new government, and opposes to them
the element of resistance drawn from their
national beliefs and traditions; he transforms
the order of prophets into a permanent institu
tion ; he founds schools of prophets, independ
ent servants of Jehovah, consecrated to the de
fense of his law and the enunciation of his will ;
constituting a sort of congregation independent
of both Church and State ; leading, in fixed and
appointed places — at Rama, Bethel, Jericho,
Jerusalem — a life in common, but without
exclusive privileges; the sons of the prophets
are brought up near their fathers ; but still the

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 251
mission of prophecy is accessible to all who
have the call from God : " Go, thou- seer," said
the priest Amaziah, in his anger, to the prophet
Amos, " flee thee away into the land of Judah,
and there eat bread, and prophesy there : but
prophesy not again any more at Bethel : for it
is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court.
Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I
was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son ;
but I was a herdman, and a gatherer of syca
more fruit : and the Eternal took me as I fol
lowed the flock, and the Lord said unto me,
Go, prophesy unto my people Israel." *
The prophets are neither priests nor monks.
Sprung from all the classes of the Jewish na
tion, their vocation is essentially independent.
They belong to God alone, and await divine
inspiration to oppose, as it may happen, at one
time the tyranny of the kings, at another the
passions of the populace, at another the corrup
tion of the priesthood. Their only arms, the
?Amos vii, 12-15.

252 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
commands of God and the gift of prophecy.
The functions assigned to them are as different
as the places and circumstances of their life;
but they are ready to take any part and to en
counter any peril. Some of them, like Elijah
and Elisha, are men of action and of combat ;
the others, like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos,
are narrators, moralists, prophets ; some devote
themselves to attacks upon the acts of violence
and impiety committed by the kings, the others
to the vices and corruption of the people; the
same spirit, however, animates them all ; they
are all interpreters and laborers of Jehovah;
they defend, all of them, the faith of God
against idolatry, justice and right against
tyranny, the national independence against
foreign dominion. In the name of the God of t
Abraham and of Jacob they labor and succeed
in maintaining or in reanimating religious and
moral life amid the decay and servitude of
Israel." " All the time," says St. Augustine,
"from the epoch when the holy Samuel began

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 253
to prophesy, to the day when the people of
Israel was led captive into Babylonia, is the
period of the prophets." *
To accomplish their mission, to insure their
hard-earned successes, they had other arms
than lamentations and exhortations arising out
of what was past and inevitable ; other expe
dients than pious reproaches and expressions of
regret. These defenders of the ancient faith of
Moses do not shut themselves up within the
external forms and rites of their religion ; they
pursue the moral object that it proposes ; they
insist upon the spirit that vivifies it. "Your
new moons and your appointed feasts my soul
hateth : (said the Lord, according to Isaiah,)
" they are a trouble unto me ; I am weary to
bear them. And when ye spread forth your
hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea,
when ye make many prayers, I will not hear :
your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make
you clean ; put away the evil of your doings
* De Civitate Dei, 1, xvii, ch. 1.

254 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; learn
to do well; seek judgment, relieve the op
pressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the
widow." *
" Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,"
(said the prophet Micah,) " and bow myself
before the high God ? shall I come before him
with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old ?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of
rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul ?
He hath shewed thee, O man, what is- good;
and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to
do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk
humbly with thy God ?"f
Even while calling the people of Israel back
to the faith of their fathers, the prophets open
to them new perspectives. While reproaching
them with the errors that have led to their
decay and servitude, they permit them yet to
* Isaiah i, 14-17. t Micah vi, 6-8.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 255
see the future delivery and regeneration. It
is their divine character to live at once in the
past and in the future ; to confide alike to the
ordinances of the Eternal and to his promises.
They move forward, but they change not ;
they believe, they hope; they are faithful to
Moses while they announce the Messiah.

V. EXPECTATION OF THE MESSIAH.
Controversy has the mischievous power of
the Homeric Jupiter ; it collects clouds amid
which the light that we seek for disappears.
The Old and the New Testament, the his
tory of the Jews, and the history of Jesus
Christ, lie before us. Do these two monu
ments form but one single edifice? That
second history, is it comprised and written be
forehand in the first ? Such is the question
which has for the last eighteen centuries occu
pied and divided the learned. Some affirm

256 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
that Jesus Christ was foreseen and predicted
among the Jews, and that the series of proph
ecies continued from the very time of Moses
until the advent of Christ. Others lay stress
upon the hiatus, the want of connection and
cohesion, the contradictions to be detected here
between the Old and New Testament; and
thence they conclude that the text of the Old
Testament by no means contains the facts that
appear in the New Testament, and that the
miraculous history of Jesus Christ was, in the
bosom of Israel, neither miraculously foreseen
nor predicted.
Why was it, and how was it possible, that
two assertions so contradictory came to be both
adopted and maintained by men most of them
as sincere as learned ?
¦They have all committed the fault of plung
ing into the petty details of facts and texts,
searching in all places, without exception, for
the complete demonstration of their particular
theses, and losing sight of the great fact, the

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 257
general and dominant fact to which we should
refer as alone capable of solving the question.
They descend into the mazy paths which per-
plex the plain below, instead of grasping from
the summit of the mountains the whole com
prehensive view, and the grand road leading to
the goal itself. Believers have insisted upon
discovering, fact by fact, in the biblical prophe
cies the whole mission and all the life of Jesus.
The incredulous, on the other hand, have mi
nutely adverted to all the discrepancies, all the
difficulties, suggested by a comparison of the
texts of the Old Testament and of the Gospel
narrative ; they have contrasted the glories of
the Messiah, the powerful King of Israel, so
often announced by the prophets, with the
tumble life, the cruel death of Jesus, and with
the ruin of Jerusalem. In my opinion, they
have on both sides lost sight of the inward and
essential characteristic of this sublime history;
the special action of God is revealed therein,
but without suppressing the action of men;
17

258 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
miracles take their place in the -midst of the
natural course of events ; the ambitious aspira
tions of the Jews connect themselves with the
religious perspective opened to them by the
prophets ; the divine and the human, the in
spiration from on high and the impulse of the
national imagination, appear together. These
two elements should be disentangled : the mind
should be raised above the perplexing influ
ences which they exercise, and the attention
directed to that, heavenly beam which pierces
the vapors of this earthly atmosphere. Thus,
all the embarrassment that controversy occa
sioned vanishing, the history yields to us its
profound meanings, and, in spite of complica
tions having their origin in the wordy explana
tions of man, the design of God makes itself
manifest in all its majestic simplicity.
Discarding all discussion and commentary,
let us merely collect, from epoch to epoch, the
principal texts which speak of the advent of
the future Messiah. I might here multiply

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 259
citations, but T limit myself to those where the
allusion is evident. It is the Bible, and the
Bible alone, that is speaking.
The first act of disobedience to God, the act
of original sin, has just been committed. The
Eternal God says to the serpent that has
sedueed Eve: "Because thou hast done this,
thou art cursed above all cattle, and above
every beast of the field. . . . And I will put
enmity between thee and the woman, and
between thy seed and her seed .; it shall bruise
thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." *
He that shall bruise the head of the serpent
shall belong, says the Book of Genesis, to the
race of Shem, to the posterity of Abraham and
Jacob, to the kingdom of Judah. " But thou,
Beth-lehem Ephratah, though thou be little
among the thousand^, of Judah, yet out of thee
shall he come forth unto me that is to be
Ruler in Israel." f
*%¦
* Genesis iii, 14, 15.
t Genesis ix, 26 ; xii, 3 ; xlix, 10 ; Micah v, 2. ,

260 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Israel is at its apogee of splendor: David
prophesies alike the sufferings and the glory of
that Saviour of the world who is to be not
merely the King of Zion, but " the Son and
the Anointed of the Eternal ;" " My God, my
God, why hast thou forsaken me ?" is the ex
pression attributed to him by the prophet
king. . . . "All they that see me laugh me to
.scorn : they shoot out the lip, they shake the
head. . .' . They gave me also gall for my
meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar
to drink. . . . They part my garments among
them, and cast lots upon my vesture. . . . He
trusted on the Lord that he would deliver
him ; let him deliver him, seeing he delighted
in him. ... Ye that fear the Lord, praise
him ; all ye the seed of Jacob, glorify him ; and
fear him, all ye the seed of Israel. . . . All the
ends of the earth shall remember and turn
unto the Lord: and all the kindreds of the
nations shall worship before thee."* The
* Psalms ii, 2, 6, 7; xxii, 1, 7; lxix, 21 ; xxii, 18, 8, 23, 27.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 261
kingdom of David and of Solomon has begun
to decay ; Judah and Israel are separating ;
both kingdoms have their prophets, who at
one time struggle against the crimes and evils
of their respective ages, and, at another, oc
cupy themselves in disclosing prospects of the
future. " Hear ye now, Q house of David. . . .
" Therefore the Lord himself shall give you
a sign ; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and
bear a son, and shall call his name Imman-
uel. ...
" The people that walked in darkness have
seen a great light : they that dwell in the land
of the shadow of death, upon them hath the
light shined. . . .
" For unto us a child is born, unto us a son
is given : and the government shall be upon
his shoulder : and his name shall be called
Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The
everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. . . .
"And there shall come forth a rod out of

262 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out
of his roots :
" And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon
him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of
knowledge and of the fear of the Lord ;
"... and he shall not judge after the sight
of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of
his ears :
" But with righteousness shall he judge the
poor, and reprove with equity, for the meek of
the earth. . . .
"Listen, 0 isles, unto me-; and hearken, ye
people, from far ; The Lord hath called me
from the womb ; from the bowels of my
mother hath he made mention of my name. . . .
" And said unto me, Thou art my servant, O
Israel, in whom I will be glorified.
" Then I said, I have labored in vain, I have
spent my strength for nought, and in vain : yet
surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my
work with my God.

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 263
" And now, saith the Lord that formed me
from the womb to be his servant, to bring
Jacob again to him, Though Israel be not
gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of
the Lord, and my God shall be my strength.
" And he said, It is a light thing that thou
shouldest be my servant to raise up the tribes
of Jacob, and to restore the preserved of
Israel : I will also give thee for a light to the
Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation
unto the end of the earth. . . .
" Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion ; shout,
O daughter of Jerusalem : behold, thy King
cometh unto thee : he is just, and having sal
vation ; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and
upon a colt the foal of an ass.
"... For he shall grow up before him as a
tender plant, and as a root out of a dry
ground : he hath no form nor comeliness ; and
when we shall see him, there is no beauty that
we should desire him.
" He is despised and rejected of men ; a man

264 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we
hid as it were our faces from him ; he was
despised, and we esteemed him not.
" Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried
our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted.
" But he was wounded for our transgressions,
he was bruised for our iniquities : the chastise
ment of our peace was upon him ; and with his
stripes we are healed.
"All we like sheep have gone astray; we
have turned every one to his own way ; and
the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us
all. " He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet
he opened not his mouth : he is brought as a
lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before
her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his
mouth. " He was taken from prison and from judg
ment : and who shall declare his generation ?
for he was cut off out of the land of the living :

SEVENTH MEDITATION/ 265
for the transgression of my people was he
stricken. . . .
" Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him ; he
hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make
his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed,
he snail prolong his days, and the pleasure of
the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
" He shall see of the travail of his soul, and
shall be satisfied : by his knowledge shall my
righteous servant justify many ; for he shall
bear their iniquities.
" Therefore will I divide him a portion with
the great, and he shall divide the spoil with
the strong ; because he hath poured out his
soul unto death: and he was numbered with
the transgressors ; and he bare the sin of many
and made intercession for the transgressors." *
Whatever controversies may arise out of
these texts, and many others which I might
cite, one fact subsists and rises above all ques-
* Isaiah vii, 13, 14; ix, 2-6; xi, 1-4; xlix, 1-6; Zechariah
ix, 9 ; Isaiah Iiii.

266 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
tion and all controversy. Seventeen centuries
passed in the interval between the Decalogue
being received by Moses upon Mount Sinai,
and the actual approach of the Messiah an
nounced by the prophets ; and at the end of
these seventeen centuries, the God from whom
Moses received the Decalogue, he who defined
himself to be " I am that I am." Jehovah still
is, has never ceased to be the God, the sole God
of Israel. Israel has passed through all gov
ernments, undergone all vicissitudes, fallen into
all the errors to which it is possible for a nation
to succumb : the Jews have had a hierarchy,
and judges, and kings ; they have been altern
ately conquerors and conquered, masters and
slaves ; they have had their days of power and
their days of humiliation, their temptation to
idolatry and paroxysms of impiety ; still they
have ever returned to the One God: to the
true God ; their faith has survived all their
faults and all their misfortunes ; and after those
seventeen centuries, Israel is waiting at the

SEVENTH MEDITATION. 267
hand of Jehovah a Messiah, to be, according to
the affirmation of its greatest prophets, the Lib
erator and the Saviour, not of Israel alone, but
of all nations. Fact without parallel in his
tory ! In vain shall men exhaust against it all
their science, and all their skepticism : there is
here more than the work of man ; the fact
itself is not human. But what more shall that
fact become, and what shall be our belief, when
all shall have received its consummation — the
prophecies their accomplishment— -when Jeho
vah shall have given to the world Jesus
Christ ?

h

EIGHTH MEDITATION.

JESUS CHRIST ACCORDING TO THE GOSPEL.
Need I say that by the words " the Gospel,"
here used, I understand the four Gospels, the
Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, all the
books, in fact, which compose the Canon of the
New Testament as it is received by all Chris
tians ?
These books have been variously studied :
now with the design of disproving, now of
explaining the life of Jesus Christ ; now with
the object of a controversialist, now with that
of a commentator. I approach the subject in
neither character. I would wish to study
Jesus Christ in the New Testament solely to
know him well, and to make him well known ;
to place him before the reader, and to depict
him faithfully according to the evidence of his

EIGHTH MEDITATION. / ^26$

l

history. I propose hereafter, in a second ^ries
of these Meditations, to examine its authMlik;*
ity, and the degree of credit to which it is
entitled. For the moment I assume the testi
mony as good and valid. Beyond all doubt, at
the outset, it is at least entitled to this respect.
The powerful influence of these books, and
of the accounts which they contain, such as
they remain to us, has been put to the test
and proved. They have overcome paganism.
They have conquered Greece, Rome, and bar
barous Europe. They are actually overcoming
the world. And the sincerity of the authors is
no less certain than the virtue of the books:
however possible it may be to . contest the en
lightenment, the critical sagacity of the original
historians of Jesus Christ, their good faith is
beyond all question : it appears in their lan
guage; they believed what they said; they
sealed their assertions with their blood. '*I
believe," said Pascal, " only those histories, the
witnesses to which confirm their attestation by

270 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
submitting to death." Although not always a
sufficient reason to believe an account, it con
stitutes a decisive motive to believe in the sin
cerity of the witness.
I have before cited from the Old Testament
some of the texts which contain the promises
made to Israel of the Messiah. These promises
had evidently excited lively attention among
the Jews ; the satisfaction felt at their accom
plishment expressed itself loudly at the birth
of Jesus Christ: "And behold, there was a
man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon . . .
waiting for the consolation of Israel ; and the
Holy Ghost was upon him. . . . Lord, now let-
test thou thy servant depart in peace, according
to thy word : For mine eyes have seen thy sal
vation, which thou hast prepared before the
face of all people ; a light to lighten the Gen
tiles, and the glory of thy people Israel." *
Besides Simeon, a pious woman, Anna, " of
about fourscore and four years, which departed
*Luke ii, 25-82.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 271
not from the temple, but served God with fast
ings and prayers night and day. And she com
ing in that instant gave thanks unto the Lord,
and spake of him to all them that looked for
redemption in Jerusalem." *
But there was far more than merely the
demonstrations of Simeon and Anna, than these
impulses of joy on the part of the faithful
followers of Jehovah. "In those days came
John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness -
of Judea. . . . And the same John had his
raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle
about his loins ; and his meat was locusts and
wild honey. . . . And saying, Repent ye, for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is
he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias,
saying, The voice of one crying in the wilder
ness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make
his paths straight. ... I indeed baptize you
with water unto repentance. . . . But there
standeth one among you, whom ye know not.
* Luke ii, 37, 38.

272 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
He it is who, coming after me, is preferred
before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not
worthy to unloose. . . . And I knew him not :
but that he should be made manifest to Israel,
therefore am I come baptizing with water. . . .
And I saw, and bare record that this is the
Son of God." *
Attempts have sometimes been made, al
though with no very great confidence on the
part of the propounders of the theory, to rep
resent Jesus as the most eminent among several
reformers, who, about the same epoch, aspired
to the title and character of the Messiah pre
dicted by the prophets and expected by Israel.
Reference has been particularly made to one of
his predecessors, Judas the Gaulonite, who, a
few years after the birth of Jesus, on the occa
sion of a census ordered by the Imperial Le
gate Quirinius, undertook to raise Judea in in
surrection against this measure, against the
tribute that it imposed, and against the empe-
* Matt, iii, 1-5 ; Mark i, 2-11 ; Luke iii, 1-18 ; John i, 26-34.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 273
ror himself, proclaiming that to God alone
belonged the appellation Master, and that
liberty was worth more than life*
These comparisons, I forbear to use the word
assimilations, are entirely without foundation.
These men, who, as it is pretended, anticipated
the career of Jesus, were simply men who op
posed the Roman dominion, and who stood up,
like the Maccabees before them, in the name
of national independence, and in a spirit of re
action in favor of the Mosaic government.
Jesus was not so anticipated. His mission had
no relation with any previous essay; and his
sole forerunner was John the Baptist, as strange
as himself to any political view or conspiracy,
and as humble before him, before the true, the
sole Messiah, as Judas the Gaulonite and his
adherents were bold and daring toward the
emperor. There is an interval of thirty years between
* Josephus, Antiq. Jud. 1, xvii, ch. 6 ; 1, xviii, ch. 1. Acts of
the Apostles, ch. v, 34-39. 18

274 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
the birth of Jesus and the day when he enters
actively on the performance of his divine
mission* These thirty years, however, were
not idly passed, nor were they without their
peculiar testimony to Christ and the future in
store for him :
"And Joseph and his mother marvelled at
those things which were spoken of him. . . .
" And the child grew, and waxed strong in
spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of
God was upon him.
"Now his parents went to Jerusalem every
year at the feast of the Passover.
"And when he was twelve years old, they
went up to Jerusalem after the custom of the
feast.
* The question as to the precise epoch of the birth of Jesus
Christ, as well as of tbe commencement and the duration of his
public career, has been well and concisely considered in the
Synopsis Evangelica of M. Constantin Tischendorf, (pp. 16-19.
Leipzig, 1864.) The preferable conclusion from these researches
is, that Jesus Christ was born in the year of Rome 750, that he
commenced his divine mission toward the end of the year of
Eome 780, and that his death took place in the fourth month of
the year of Eome 783.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 275
" And when they had fulfilled the days, as
they returned, the child Jesus tarried behind
in Jerusalem; and Joseph and his mother
knew not of it.
" But they, supposing him to have been in the
company, went a day's journey ; and they sought
him among their kinsfolk and acquaintance.
" And when they found him not, they turned
back again to Jerusalem, seeking him.
" And it came to pass, that after three days
they found him in the temple, sitting in the
midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and
asking them questions.
" And all that heard him were astonished at
his understanding and answers.
"And when they saw him, they were
amazed: and his mother said unto him, Son,
why hast thou thus dealt with us? Behold,
thy father and I have sought thee sorrowin'g.
"And he said unto them, How is it that ye
sought me ? wist ye not that I must be about
my Father's business ?

276 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
" And they understood not the saying which
he spake unto them.
" And he went down with them, and came to
Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his
mother kept all these sayings in her heart.
" And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature,
and in favour with God and man." *
Thus begins that manifestation in the person
of the child Jesus Christ, that mixture of
humanity and divinity, of natural life and mi
raculous life, which is his peculiar and sublime
characteristic. In the opinion of the men who,
in principle, reject the supernatural, this mixed
divine-human nature, and consequently Jesus
Christ himself, is at once incomprehensible and
inadmissible. What wonder if Christ has in
these days to encounter such adversaries ? Had
he not to do so when invested with the attri
butes of humanity, among cotemporaries, and
even in his own family ? In his first days of
human existence, his mother, Mary, saw him
* Luke ii, 33, 40-52.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 277
and understood him not. And nevertheless
"Mary kept all these sayings in her heart."
Expression at once profound and touching,
revealing the mysterious complication of the
nature of man ! Man is not content to resign
himself to the limits imposed by the actual
laws of the finite world ; his aspirations tend
elsewhere. And still, when called upon to rise
above the present order of nature, that order
which he is able to appreciate, he experiences a
certain astonishment, a certain hesitation; he
does not know if he ought to believe in that
supernatural that he was recently invoking, and
that he never ceases to invoke ; for, like Mary,
he preserves the instinct in his heart! It is
just at the present day as it was nineteen cen
turies ago." Jesus has ever to encounter such
contradictory moods of human nature. He is
confronted at once by the hope of, the thirsting
after the supernatural inherent in the human
soul, and by all the objections, all the doubts
that the supernatural itself suggests to the

278 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
human mind. He has to satisfy that hope, to
surmount those doubts. The Gospel opens the
history of this solemn struggle that gave rise to
Christianity, and is the source of all those agita
tions which afflict Christians at the present day.

I. JESUS CHRIST AND HIS APOSTLES.
On entering upon the active purposes of his
mission, it is the will of Jesus to have, and he
has Disciples — Apostles. He knows the power
of an association founded upon faith and love.
He knows also that faith and love are virtues
as rare as they are efficacious. It is not num
bers that he seeks. He surrounds himself
with a select band of believers^ and lives
with them in a complete and enduring in
timacy. In the midst of these intimate relations, Jesus
declares his authority primitive and supreme :
"Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 279
you, and ordained you, that ye should go and
bring forth fruit." *
But the authority of the Master does not
prevent him from evincing a tenderness full of
trust, and from respecting himself the dignity
of his disciples : " Henceforth I call you not
servants ; for the servant knoweth not what
his lord doeth : but I have called you friends ;
for all things that I have heard of my Father I
have made known unto you." f
He evinces on all occasions toward his apos
tles the trust that He feels in them, and shows
his sense of the superiority of the position to
which He has elevated them. His language
sometimes fills them with astonishment, and
they are more peculiarly struck by the numer
ous parables in which, while addressing the
assembled multitude, He clothes his precepts :
"And the disciples came, and said unto him,
Why speakest thou unto them in parables ?
He answered and said unto them, Because it is
* John xv, 16. t John xv, 16.

280 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
given unto you to know the mysteries of the
kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not
given. . . . But unto those that are without,
all these things are done in parables." *
The confidingness of Jesus, however, never
descends to weak compliance ; when, in an im
pulse of vanity and ambition, one of his apos
tles asks for a particular favor, Jesus rebukes
him with severity : " James and John, the sons
of Zebedee, come unto him, saying, Master, we
would that thou shouldest do for us whatso
ever we shall desire. And he said unto them,
What would ye that I should do for you ?
They said unto him, Grant unto us that we may
sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on
thy left hand, in thy glory. But Jesus said
unto them, Ye know not what ye ask : can ye
drink of the cup that I drink of? and be bap
tized with the baptism that I am baptized
with ? And they said unto him, We can.
And Jesus said unto them, Ye shall in-
* Matt, xiii, 10, 11 ; Mark iv, 10, 11.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 281
deed drink of the cup that I drink of; and
with the baptism that I am baptized withal
shall ye be baptized : but to sit on my right
hand and on my left hand is not mine to give ;
but it shall be given to them for whom it is
prepared. . . . Ye know that they which are
accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise
lordship over them ; and their great ones exer
cise authority upon them. But so shall it not
be among you: but whosoever will be great
among you, shall be your minister." *
Jesus having thus selected and intimately
attached to him his apostles, commissions them
to carry forth his law : " Go not into the way of
the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samari
tans enter ye not: but go rather to the lost
sheep of the house of Israel. And as ye go,
preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at
hand. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise
the dead, cast out devils : freely ye have re
ceived, freely give. Provide neither gold, nor
* Mark x, 35-43 ; Matt, xx, 20-26.

282 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION..
silver, nor brass in your purses, nor scrips for
your journey, neither two coats, neither shoes,
nor yet staves : for the workman is worthy of
his meat. . . . Behold, I send ye forth as sheep
in the midst of wolves : be ye therefore wise as
serpents and harmless as doves." *
It is, in effect, prudence side by side with
absolute self-denegation that Jesus, in his first
instructions, enjoins upon his disciples ; at the
very commencement of their mission he limits
its object ; he recommends to them particularly
" the lost sheep of the house of Israel ;" he de
clares his will to be that, instead of a pertinac
ity without bounds, " they should depart,
shaking off the dust from their feet, out of the
city that should not receive them nor hear
their words." But he adds immediately, as if
to give to their mission all its grandeur :
" What I tell you in darkness, that speak ye in
light : and what you hear in the ear, that
preach ye upon the house-tops. And fear not
* Matt, x, 5-10, 16 ; Luke x, 1-12.

. 4 EIGHTH MEDITATION. 283
them which kill the body, but are not able to
kill the soul : but rather' fear him which is able
to destroy both soul and body in hell." *
Jesus knows that his disciples will need the
firmest courage, and, far from promising them
any of the goods of this world, any temporal
successes, he discloses to them unceasingly all
the perils they will incur, all the invectives
they will have to endure. " But beware of
men : for they will deliver you up to the coun
cils, and they will scourge you in their syna
gogues ; and ye shall be brought before
governors and kings for my sake, for a testi
mony against them and the Gentiles. . . . And
ye shall be betrayed both by parents, and
brethren, and kinsfolks and friends ; and some
of you shall they cause to be put to death.
And ye shall be hated of all men for my
name's sake."f
What Reformer, other than Jesus Christ,
ever held to his followers such language?
* Matt, x, 27, 28. t Matt, x, 17-22 ; Luke xxi, 12-17.

284 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Who else than God could have imparted to
their language such virtue that they would in
obedience to it sacrifice with joy not merely all
the good things of this life, but life itself?
Nevertheless, one of those apostles, and the
first of them all, Peter, evinces some dis
quietude, if not at their lot in this world, at
least at their destinies in the kingdom of heav
en. " Then answered Peter and said unto him,
Behold, we have forsaken all, and followed
thee ; what shall we have therefore ? And
Jesus said unto them, Verily I say unto you,
That ye which have followed me, in the regen
eration when the Son of man shall sit in the
throne of his glory, ye also shall sit upon
twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of
Israel. And every one that hath forsaken
houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or
mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my
name's sake, shall receive a hundredfold, and
shall inherit everlasting life." *
* Matt, xix, 27-29.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 285
But Jesus does not intend that the prospect
of their lofty inheritance should inspire in the
minds of any of his apostles, and not more in
that of Peter than the rest, any proud presump-
tuousness, and he immediately adds, "But
many that are first, shall be last ; and the last
shall be first." * The world's history may be
perused and reperused ; the causes of all the
revolutions that have taken place in the world,
whether religious or political, may be probed
and investigated ; but we shall nowhere be
able to trace in the dealings of chiefs and ac
complices, of originators and fellow-workmen,
the divine characteristics of absolute and un
compromising sincerity that reign throughout
the actions and language of Jesus Christ in his
conduct toward his apostles. Them he has
chosen and loved; to them he has intrusted
his work ; but he practices with them no arts
of worldly wisdom ; he withholds nothing from
them ; here is no faltering encouragement, no
* Matt, xir, 30.

286 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
exaggeration in the promises that he makes or
in the hope that he holds forth ; he speaks to
them the language of pure truth, and it is in
the name of that truth that he gives them, his
commands and transfers to them his mission.
" Never did man speak like this man," * nor so
deal with men.

n. JESUS CHRIST AND HIS PRECEPTS.
i
Jesus speaks : and it is at one time with his
disciples alone, at another surrounded by eager,
astonished multitudes; now from the mount,
now on the shore of the sea of Gennesareth,
from a bark ; by the roadside ; in the house of
the Pharisee, Simon, and the toll-gatherer, Levi;
in the synagogue of Nazareth, in the Temple of
Jerusalem: Jesus speaks, "not like the scribes,"
not like the philosophers ; he expounds no sys
tem ; he discusses no question ; he does not
pace up and down like Socrates with his
* John vii, 46.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 287
learned friends in the gardens of the Academy,
nor lose himself in the mazes of the human
understanding. Jesus speaks to men, to all
men without distinction ; he speaks' to them of
man's life, man's souj, man's destiny, of matters
that touch all alike. And he speaks to them
" as one having authority."
What does he say to them ? What teach,
what command, in that speech full of au
thority ?
He teaches them, he enjoins them, to have
faith, hope, charity : those virtues which have
now borne his name nineteen centuries, those
virtues which are essentially Christian.
Is it, then, in his own name that -Jesus
Christ teaches and commands ? By no means :
"My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent
me. If any man will do his will, he shall
know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or
whether I speak of myself.
"He that speaketh of himself seeketh his
own glory : but he that seeketh his glory that

288 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
sent him, the same is true, and no unrighteous
ness is in him. . . . Then cried Jesus in the
Temple as he taught, saying, Ye both know
me, and ye know whence I am : I am not come
of myself, but he that sent me is true, whom ye
know not.
" But I know him : for I am from him, and
he hath sent me." *
While he refers everything to God, Jesus
Christ seeks not to define or explain him ; he
affirms him and demonstrates him ; God is the
first cause, the point from which all things
spring; faith in God is the paramount source
of virtue, and of power, as well as virtue, of
hope and of resignation.
For Jesus Christ has npt only a perfect faith
in God, he has also a profound knowledge of
man : he knows that, unaided, man's soul can
not, without despair, without withering, bear
the burden imposed by the injustice of the
world and of life, of the miseries and erroneous
* John vii, 16-18, 28, 29.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 289
appreciation of mankind. To this injustice and
this wretchedness Jesus Christ never ceases to
oppose God, God's justice, God's benevolence,
God's succor : he recommends to him all the
forsaken, all the oppressed, all the wretched,
all the victims of society. He enjoins to these
not resignation alone, but Hope as the sister
and companion of Faith. Nor does he hold
forth to those that suffer the realization of
earthly expectations, the restoration of worldly
prosperity, as their resource and their consola
tion. He has nothing to do with remedies
deceitful like these. He acts with the most
perfect truthfulness and sincerity toward man- .
kind in general, as he also1 does with his dis
ciples : he only promises them the re-establish
ment of justice, and the reward of virtue, in
that mysterious future where* God alone reigns,
and of which he discloses to them the perspect
ive without unfolding the secrets.
Nothing strikes me more in the Gospel than
this double character of austerity and of love,
19

290 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
of severe purity and tender sympathy, which
constantly appears, which reigns in the actions
and the words of Jesus Christ in everything
that touches the relation of God and mankind.
To Jesus Christ the law of God is absolute,
sacred ; the violation of the law, and sin, are
odious to him ; but the sinner himself irresisti
bly moves him and attracts him : " What man
of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose
one of them, doth not leave the ninety and
nine in the wilderness, and go after that whieh
is lost, until he find it ? And when he hath
found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing.
And when he cometh home, he calleth together
his friends and neighbors, saying unto them,
Rejoice with me ; for I have found my sheep
which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise
joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that re-
penteth, more than over ninety and nine just
persons, which need no repentance."* Jesus
said unto them, "They that are whole need
* Luke xv, 4-7.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 291
mot a physician, but they that are sick. . . .
For I am not come to call the righteous, but
sinners to repentance." *
What is the signification of this sublime
fact ; what the meaning in Jesus of this union,
this harmony of severity and of love, of saint
like holiness and of human sympathy ? It is
Heaven's revelation of the nature of Jesus him
self, of the God-man. God, he made himself
man. God is his father, men are his brethren.
He is pure and holy like God : he is accessible
and sensible to all that man feels. Thus the
vital principles of the Christian faith, the
divine and the human nature united in Jesus,
start to evidence, in his sentiments and lan
guage respecting the relations between God
and man. The dogma is the foundation of the
principles. Another fact is not less significant. At the
same time that the divine and mysterious char
acter of Jesus Christ appears in the Gospel, his
*Matt.ix, 12, 13.

292 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
acts and his words have a character essentially
simple and practical. He pursues no learned
object, no scientific plan; he develops no sys
tem ; his object is something infinitely grander
than the triumph of any logical abstraction : it
is to pervade the human soul, to establish him
self in it — to save it. He speaks the language,
he appeals to the ideas most calculated to insure
him success. Sometimes he addresses himself
to the task of inspiring in men the most poig
nant disquietude as to their future destiny, if
they violate the laws of God; at other times
he causes to shine before their eyes the realiza
tion of the most magnificent hopes, if with sin
cerity they persist in faith. He knows the
generation that he is addressing; he knows
human nature in its universality, and what it
will be in future generations : his object is to
produce upon it an effect at once positive, gen
eral, durable ; he chooses the ideas, he employs
the images suitable to his design for the regen
eration and the salvation of all. God's Era-

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 293
bassador is the most penetrating and able of
human moralists.
More than once the attempt has been made
to find him at fault, to detect in his language
exaggerations, contradictions, incoherencies, ir
reconcilable with his divine authority. Sur
prise, for instance, has been expressed, that he
should have one day said, according to St. Mat
thew : " He that is not with me is against me ;
and he that gathereth not with me scattereth
abroad ;" * and that he should another day, ac
cording to St. Mark, have used the expression,
" For he that is not against us is on our part." f
These two passages' have been characterized as
furnishing " two rules of proselytism entirely
opposed to each other, and as involving a contra
diction growing out of some impassioned strug
gle." J In my turn I observe that it astonishes
me how earnest men can fall into any such error.
Jesus does not lay down in these two passages
* Matt, xii, 30. fMark ix, 40.
I Vie de Jesus, par M. Renan, p. 229.

294 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. f
two contradictory rules of proselytism, he mere
ly observes and refers in turn to two different
facts: who has not learned, in the course of
actual life, that, according to the difference
of circumstances and persons, the man who
abstains from active concurrence, who keeps
himself aloof, by that very fact may at one
time give support and strength, and at another
injure and impede ? These two assertions, fer
from being in contradiction, may be both true,
and Jesus Christ, in uttering them, spoke as a
sagacious observer, not as a moralist who is
enunciating precepts. I have heard other
critics reproachfully regard another passage as
a sort of blasphemy. According to St. Luke :
" There was in a city a judge, which feared not
God, .neither regarded man ; and there was a
widow in that city ; and she came unto him,
saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And
he would not for a while : but afterward he
said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor
regard man ; yet because this widow troubleth

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 295
me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual
coming she weary me." *
Is it possible to infer from these words an
intention on the part of Jesus to liken God to
an unjust judge, and to make the mere impor
tunate persistence in praying a claim to God's
grace ? He only cited an occurrence which
made noise in his time, in order to instill a
lively impression of the utility of persever
ance. To attain his end, he never makes use of
out-of-the-way or impure expedients; but he
draws from the ordinary events of human life
examples and reasons to illustrate and render
intelligible the divine precepts, and to insure
their acceptance. All the parables have this
meaning and object.
Next to the precepts which refer to the rela
tions of man with God come those which
respect the relations of men with one another.
While Faith and Hope regard God, Charity
has man for its object. * Luke xviii, 1-5.

296 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Charity, it has often been repeated, is the
great principle of Jesus Christ, pre-eminently
the Christian virtue. I know not, however,
whether the source whence Christian charity
derives its character and grandeur has been
adequately perceived or remarked.
In the different pagan religions, whether of
character gross or learned, we have deifications
of the different forces of nature or of men
themselves. And even in those religions in
which gods in their turn are said to assume
man's shape, it is man particularly that is pre
dominant, and that lives in the incarnation of
God. Whereas in Christianity it is not a god
sprung from nature or of human origin that
becomes man, but the God self-existent, ante
rior, and superior to all beings, the God, One,
Eternal. The Hebrew religion, alone of all
religions, shows God essentially and eternally
distinct from the nature and the mankind that
he has created, and that he governs. The
Christian faith alone shows God one and eter-

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 297
nal ; the God of Abraham and of Moses mak
ing himself man, and the divine nature uniting
itself to the human nature in the person of Je
sus. And in this union it is the divine nature
that shines forth, that speaks, that sets in move
ment. And this incarnation is unparalleled
like the God its author.
And why did God make himself man ?
What is the object of this unparalleled, this
mysterious incarnation ? It is God's purpose
to rescue man from the evil and the peril
which have continued to weigh upon him since
the fault committed by his first progenitor.
It is God's purpose to ransom the human race
from the sin of Adam, the heritage of Adam's
children, and to bring it back to the ways of
eternal life. These are the designs, loudly
proclaimed, of the divine incarnation in
Jesus, and the price of all the sufferings
and agonies which he endured in its accom
plishment. Need I say more ? Who does not see how

298 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
this sublime fact exalts man's dignity at the
same time that it illustrates the worth of man's
nature? By "the mere fact of God having
assumed his form is man's nature glorified ; and
all men, so to say, have their share of the
honor done by God to humanity in uniting
himself with it, and in accepting, for a moment
of time, all the conditions of humanity. But
as far as mankind is here concerned, it is far
more than a mere accession of an honor or a
glorifying of his nature: it is a striking mani
festation of the value that all men have in the
eyes of God. For it is not for some of them
only, for some class or nation, or portion of
humanity, it is for all humanity that God
became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and that
Jesus Christ has submitted to all human suffer
ings. Every human soul is the object of this
divine sacrifice, and called upon to gather the
fruit. This is the source, this the privilege of Chris
tian charity. The dogma makes the force of

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 299
the precept itself. Jesus crucified is God's
charity toward man. Impossible that men
should not feel themselves bound to act toward
each other as God has done to them ; and
toward what man is not charity a duty ?
Without the divinity and sacrifice of Jesus
Christ, the value of man's soul, if I may be
pardoned the expression, sinks — neither his
salvation nor the example of his Saviour is any
longer the question — charity becomes nothing
more than human goodness ; a sentiment, how
ever noble and useful, still limited both in
impulsive energy and in efficacy; having ita
source in man alone, it can but incompletely
solace the unequally distributed sufferings of
mortality. It is not suited to inspire any long
effort or great sacrifice : it is not adequate to
convert the longing desire for the moral amend
ment, the physical relief of humanity, into that
inextinguishable sympathy and untiring and
impassioned emotion which really constitute
charity, and which the Christian Faith, in the

300 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
history of the world, has alone been able to
inspire. Thus the essential precepts of Jesus, the vir
tues which he commands as the basis and
source of all the others, have an intimate con
nection with his doctrine, a doctrine " which is
not," he tells us himself, " his, but of him that
sent him ;" that is to say, they are connected
with the fundamental dogmas of the Christian
religion. No one denies the perfection, the
sublimity of the Gospel morality ; men indeed
seem to feel a sort of self-complacency, a satis
faction in celebrating it, with a view to the
conclusion, more or less explicitly stated, that
that morality constitutes the whole Gospel.
This is,, however, not less than absolutely to
mistake the bond which unites in man thought
with sentiment, and belief with action. Man is
grander and less easy to satisfy than superficial
moralists pretend ; the law of his life is for
him, in the profound instinct of his soul, neces
sarily connected with the secret of his destiny ;

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 301
and it is only the Christian dogma that gives
to Christian ethics the Royal authority of
which they stand in need to govern and to
regenerate humanity.

HI. JESUS AND HIS MIRACLES.
I have called myself one of those who admit
the supernatural, and I have stated my reasons.
I might stop there and enter into no special re
flection as to the Gospel miracles. The possi
bility of miracles once accorded in principle,
nothing remains but to weigh the value of the
testimony in their support. In the second se
ries of these Meditations, where I treat of the
authenticity of the localities specified in the
Holy Scriptures, I shall occupy myself with
this examination. It is not, however, my wish
to elude, upon the subjects that lie at the bot
tom of this question, any of the difficulties that
it presents ; for here we find the point of attack
sought by the adversaries of the Christian faith.

302 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
The image of Christ as it results from the
Gospel would be besides singularly unfaithful
did we not range in it his miracles by the side
of his precepts.
I avow once more my belief in God, in God
the Creator, the Sovereign Master of the Uni
verse, who orders it and governs it by that
independent and constant action of his provi
dence and power styled the laws of nature.
To those who regard nature as having existed
from all eternity of itself, and governed by laws
immutable and proceeding from fete, I have
nothing to say of Jesus or his miracles; the
question at issue between them and me is more
important than that which respects miracles;
it involves the very question of Pantheism or
Christianity, of Fatalism or Liberty, affecting
both God and man. Upon these subjects I
have already expressed my general opinion and
its grounds. I propose to enter further upon it
in the third series of these Meditations, when I
come to speak of the different systems which

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 303
are npw in conflict throughout Christendom.
But at this moment I address myself to Deists
and to1 men of wavering minds, and to these
alone. One thing is beyond all doubt: the perfect
sincerity of the apostles and of the primitive
Christians as to their faith in the miracles of
Jesus. Sincerity still more striking that it is
united to every sort of hesitation in the mind
and weakness in the conduct, and that it only
triumphs gradually and slowly when Jesus has
quitted his disciples and has left them alone
charged with his work. While he was with
them, St. Peter has failed, St. Thomas has
doubted ; after several miracles have been per
formed by Jesus, his disciples are astonished,
put questions to him, yet still doubt of him and
of his power. Upon several occasions Jesus ad
dresses them as men " of little faith," and at the
moment when he is arrested they abandon
him, they fly from him. No impassioned en
thusiasm, no exaggeration in their trustfulness

304 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
and their devotedness ; even with them Jesus
sees himself confronted by all the vacillations
and pusillanimity of humanity ; he persuades
them, he wins them, he preserves them only by
great exertion, and by dint, so to say, of divine
power and divine virtue. They only really be
lieve in him after having witnessed the ac
complishment of his sacrifice and his last mira
cle, when they had seen his Crucifixion and his
Resurrection. Only then they believed; but
from that moment their faith became absolute,
superior to all perils and all trials ; full of the
Holy Spirit, and associated in a certain measure
to their divine Master, they pursue his work
with unshaken confidence and firmness, without
pretending to any merit, without any impulse
of personal pride. Before "the gate of the
Temple which is called Beautiful," St. Peter has
healed a lame man and made him to walk.
" And as the lame man which was healed held
Peter and John, all the people ran together
unto them in the porch that is called Solomon's,

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 305
greatly wondering. And when Peter saw it, he
answered unto the people, Ye men of Israel,
why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so
earnestly on us, as though by our own power
or holiness we had made this man to walk?
. . . Ye killed the Prince of life, whom God
hath raised from the dead; whereof we are
witnesses. And his name through faith in his
name hath made this man strong, whom ye see
and know : yea, the faith which is by him hath
given him this perfect soundness in the presence
of you all." * It was not the people only that
felt astonishment, but " the rulers and elders ;
the scribes, the high priest, and all those who
were of the kindred of the high priest, were
gathered together at Jerusalem, and set in their
midst " Peter and John, and after a deliberation
full of anxiety, they " commanded them not to
speak at all, nor teach in the name of Jesus.
But Peter and John answered and said unto
them, Whether it be right in the sight of God
* Acts iii, 1-16.
20

306 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
to hearken unto you more than unto God,
judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things
we have seen and heard." *
What sincerity and what firmness ever
showed themselves more strikingly than those
that grew out of the faith of St. Paul ? From
such faith he had been originally further re
moved than the other apostles ; he had done
far more than merely err like Peter or doubt
like Thomas ; he had hotly persecuted the first
followers of Christ. In his turn penetrated
and subdued on the road to Damascus by the
voice of Jesus, he devotes himself to him life
and soul; he recounts himself his miraculous
conversion,*!* an<I as little doubt can be enter
tained of the authenticity of his Epistles as of
the sincerity that dictated them.
The history of all religions abound in mira
cles ; but in all religions, except the Christian,
the miracles recounted by their historians are
* Acts iv, 5, 6, 18-20.
t 1 Cor. xv, 8 ; 2 Cor. xi, 32, 33 ; xii, 1-5 ; Gal. i, 1-4.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 307
evidently either contrivances of the founder to
induce persuasion, or they spring from the play
of the human imagination, ever disposed to
delight in the marvelous, ever particularly
prone to give way in the sphere of religion to
its fantastic suggestions^ In the Gospel mira
cles, on the contrary, we have nothing of the
kind ; no artifice in their Author ; none of the
marvelous machinery of poetry, nor any hasty
credulity in the historians. The miraculous
agency of Christ is essentially simple, practical,
and moral: he does not go in search of mira
cles, neither does he make any vain display of
them : they are wrought when a pressing emer
gency or a natural occasion calls for them ; and
when they are demanded in faith and in trust,
he then works them without ostentation and in
right of his divine mission; while at the very
moment he makes the doubt and the coldness
with which he is received the subject of com
plaint : " Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto
thee, Bethsaida ! for if the mighty works,

308 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
which were done in you, had been done in
Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented
long ago in sackcloth and ashes."* Jesus has
full confidence in himself, in the miracles that
he effects, in the doctrine that he inculcates.
He feels no astonishment, but merely sorrow,
that his work, the work of light and of salva
tion, pursued by him in accordance with the
will of God his Father, should not obtain a
more rapid, a more general success.
As for us, remote spectators, the astonish
ment must be not the slowness or limited
nature of that success, but its rapidity and its
extent. All religions that have taken place in
the world's history have been established by
moral and by material agency; all appealed
from their very commencement as much to
force as to persuasion, as much to the arm as to
the tongue. Christianity alone lived and grew
during three centuries by its own single native
virtue, without any other appeal than that
* Matt, xi, 21.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 309
made to Truth, without any other aid than
that of Faith. During those three centuries
the dogmas, the precepts, and the miracles of
its Author constituted its only weapons, and
weapons which have prevailed against all other
arms. Those dogmas, those precepts, and
those miracles effected the conquest of man's
mind and of human society in spite of the
resistance of Greek philosophy, Roman power,
and all the poetical or mystical mythologies of
antiquity marshaled against them. The vic
tory has not, it is true, put an end to all strug
gle of man's intelligence : neither has the light
from Christ dissipated all darkness, nor satis
fied all minds ; the explanation and comment
aries of man have obscured the doctrines of
Christ ; human prejudices have mistaken his
precepts ; and legends have been grafted upon
his miracles. But the fact does not the less
exist, that the dogmas, the precepts, and the
miracles of Christ, without any aid from human
sources, sufficed to found and insure the

310 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
triumph of the Christian religion : this is a
fact primitive and supreme. And from this
single result shines forth the divine character
of the Christian religion, for its triumph with
out the miraculous agency of God would be of
all miracles the most impossible to receive.

IV. JESUS, THE JEWS, AND THE GENTILES.
" Think not that I am come to destroy the
law, or the prophets : I am not come to de
stroy, but to fulfill." *
" Do not think that I will accuse you to the
Father: there is one that accuseth you, even
Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed
Moses, ye would have believed me ; for he
wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writ
ings, how shall ye believe my words ?" f This
was the language that Jesus used to the Jews.
It was in the name of their history and of their
faith, in the name of the God of Abraham and
* Matt, v, 17. t John v, 45-47.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 311
of Jacob, that he called them to him, present
ing himself to them in the double capacity of
conservative and reformer, and appealing to
the ancient law against those who, while ob
serving it outwardly, really changed its char
acter. " Then came to Jesus scribes and Phari
sees, which were of Jerusalem, saying, Why do
thy disciples transgress the tradition of the
elders ? for they wash not their hands when
they eat bread. But he answered and said
unto them, Why do ye also transgress the
commandment of God by your tradition ? For
God commanded, saying, Honor thy father and
mother : and, He that curseth father or
mother, let him die the death. But ye say,
Whosoever shall say to his father or his
mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou might-
est be profited by me ; and honor not his
father or his mother, he shall be free. Thus
ye have made the commandment of God of
none effect by your tradition ! * . . . Woe unto
* Matt, xv, 1-6.

312 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! for ye
pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and
have omitted the weightier matters of the law,
judgment, mercy, and faith : these ought ye
to have done, and not to leave the other
undone.'' *
Jesus was incessantly warning, making ap
peals to the Jews ; and when he saw that they
pertinaciously disavowed and rejected him, he
cried, in an impulse of patriotic, affectionate
sadness, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which
killest the prophets, and stonest them that are
sent unto thee; how often would I have gath
ered thy children together, as a hen doth gath
er her brood under her wings, and ye would
not!"f I know nothing more imposing than the
apparition of a grand idea, a divine rising and
mounting rapidly upon the human horizon.
Such is the spectacle afforded to us in its short
duration by the history of Jesus Christ. In
* Matt, xxiii, 23. tMatt. xxiii, 37; Luke xiii, 34.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 313
his first instructions to his apostles, he said to
them, " Go not to the Gentiles and enter not
into any city of the Samaritans ; but go ye
rather to the lost sheep of the people of Israel."
Thus he carefully avoided offending the senti
ments of the day, and only enjoined upon his
apostles what they might do with success at
the very beginning of their mission. But soon
the light increases that issues from the words
and the actions of Jesus ; as I advance in the
books of the Gospel I there read : " And when
Jesus was. entered into Capernaum, there came
unto him a centurion, beseeching him, and say
ing, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the
palsy, grievously tormented. And Jesus saith
unto him, I will come and heal him. The cen
turion answered and said, Lord, I am not
worthy that thou shouldest come under my
roof: but speak the word only, and my servant
shall be healed. For I am a man under author
ity, having soldiers under me : and I say to this
man, Go, and he goeth ; and to another, Come,

314 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this,
and he doeth it. -When Jesus heard it, he mar
veled, and said to them that followed, Verily I
say unto you, I have not found so great faith,
no, not in Israel. And I say unto you, That
many shall come from the east and west, and
shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and
Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven."*
Thus a great stride has been made ; it is no
longer for the sheep of the house of Israel that
Jesus has come ; from the east and from the
west will men come to him, and he will receive
them all. To continue the Gospel narrative :
departing from the borders of the lake of Gen-
nesareth, Jesus "departed into the coasts of
Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a woman of
Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried
unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord,
thou son of David; my daughter is grievously.
vexed with a devil. But he answered her not
a word. And his disciples came and besought
* Matt, viii, 5-11.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 315
him, saying, Send her away ; for she crieth
after us. But he answered and said, I am not
sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of
Israel. Then came she and worshiped him,
saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and
said, It is not meet to take the children's bread,
and to cast it to dogs. And she said, Truth,
Lord ; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall
from their master's table. Then Jesus answered
and said unto her, O woman, great is thy faith :
be it unto thee even as thou wilt." *
Another day, near the city Sychar and the
well of Jacob, Jesus conversed with a woman of
Samaria, who had come there to draw water:
" The woman saith unto him, Sir, I perceive
that thou art a prophet. Our fathers wor
shiped in this mountain; and ye say, that in
Jerusalem is the place where men ought to
worship. Jesus saith- unto her, Woman, be
lieve me, the hour cometh, when ye shall
neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem,
* Matt, xv, 21-28.

316 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
worship the Father. . . . But the hour cometh,
and now is, when the true worshipers shall wor
ship the Father in spirit and in truth : for the
Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a
Spirit : and they that worship him must worship
him in spirit and in truth." *
Thus disappears gradually, in the name' of
the God of the Jews himself, the exclusive priv
ilege of the Jews to the divine revelation and
to divine grace. And thus, too, the restricted
religion of Israel gives place to the grand
catholicity of the religion of Christ. The ben
efit of the true faith and of salvation is no
longer limited to one people, whether great or
small, ancient or modern; but is imparted to
all the races of mankind. " Go ye therefore,
and teach all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost." f " And he said unto them, Go
ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to
every creature." %
* John iv, 5-24. t Matt, xxviii, 19. \ Mark xvi, 15.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 317
These were the last words which Christ
addressed to his apostles, and the apostles exe
cute faithfully the instructions of their divine
Master ; they go forth in effect, preaching in all
places and to all nations his history, his doc
trine, his precepts, and his parables. St. Paul
is the special apostle of the Gentiles. From
Jesus, says this apostle, " We have received
grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith
among all nations, for his name." "Is he the
God of the Jews only ? is he not also of the
Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also." "For
there is no difference between the Jew and the
Greek : for the same Lord over all is rich unto
all that call upon him."*
In spite of his prejudices as a Jew, and of
the differences that took place in the infancy of
the Church, St. Peter adheres to St. Paul ; the
apostles and the elders -assembled at Jerusalem
adhere to St. Peter and St. Paul. The God of
Abraham and of Jacob is not now merely the
* Romans i, 5 ; iii, 29 ; x, 12.

318 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
One God, he is the God of the whole human
race ; to all men alike he prescribes the same
faith, the same law, and promises the same
salvation. Another question, more temporal in its na
ture, still a great, a delicate one, is raised in the
presence of Jesus Christ. He withdraws from
the Jews their exclusive privilege to the knowl
edge and the grace of the true God ; but what
does he think of that which touches their exist
ence as a nation, and as a great one ? Does He
direct them to rebel and to struggle against
their earthly governor and sovereign ? " Then
went the Pharisees, and took counsel how they
might entangle him in his talk. . And they sent
out unto him their disciples with the Herodi-
ans, saying, Master, we know that thou art true,
and teachest the way of God in truth, neither
carest thou for any man : for thou regardest
not the person of men. Tell us therefore,
What thinkest thou ? Is it lawful to give trib
ute unto Cesar, or not ? But Jesus perceived

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 319
their wickedness, and said, Why tempt ye me,
ye hypocrites ? Shew me the tribute money.
And they brought unto him a penny. And he
saith unto them, Whose is this image and
superscription ? They say unto him, Cesar's.
Then saith he unto them, Render therefore
unto Cesar the things which are Cesar's ; and
unto God the things that are God's. When
they had heard these words, they marveled,
and left him, and went their way." *
In this reply of Christ there was much more
matter for admiration than the Pharisees sup
posed ; it was in effect much more than an
adroit evasion of the snare that had been ex
tended for him ; it defined in principle the dis
tinction of man's life as it regards religion, and
man's life as it concerns society ; the bounds, in
4
fact, of Church and of State. Cesar has no
right to intervene, with his laws and material
force, between the soul of man and his God ;
and on his side, the faithful worshiper of God
* Matt, xxii, 15-22 ; Mark xii, 12-17 ; Luke xx, 19-25.

320 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
is bound to fulfill toward Cesar the duties
which the necessity of the maintenance of civil
order imposes. The independence of religious
faith, and at the same time its subjection to the
laws of society, are alike the sense of Christ's
reply to the Pharisees, and the divine source of
the greatest progress ever made by human so
ciety since it began to feel the troubles and
agitations of this earth.
I take again these two grand principles,
these two great acts of Jesus : the abolition of
every privilege in the relations of God and
man, and the distinction of man's religious and
his civil life. I confront with these two prin
ciples all the history, and every state of society
previous to the advent of Jesus Christ, and I
am unable to discover in those essentially
Christian principles any kindred, any human
origin. Everywhere before Christ, religions
were national local religions; they were re
ligions which established between nations,
classes, individuals, enormous differences and

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 321
inequalities. Everywhere, also, before Christ,
man's civil life and his religious life were con
founded, and mutually oppressed each other;
that religion or those religions were institu
tions incorporated in the state, which the state
regulated or repressed as its interest dictated.
But in this catholicity of religious faith, in this
independence of religious communities, I am
constrained to recognize new and sublime prin
ciples, and to see in them flashes from the light
of heaven. It needed many centuries before
mental vision was capable of receiving that
light; and no one shall pronounce how many
centuries will be needed before it will pervade
and penetrate the entire world. But whatever
difficulties and shortcomings may be reserved
in the womb of the future for the two great
truths to which I have just referred, it is clear
that God caused them first to beam forth from
the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
21

822 :.j. '*' tIe^e christian religion.

V. JESUS AND WOMEN.
At the very source of all religions, as well as
in their subsequent history, women find a place
to fill and a part to perform. At one time
they constitute the material and furnish the
ornament of licentious systems of mythology.
At another, on the contrary, they are, for
the heroes of those religions, objects either
of pious horror or of observances at once
rigorous and austere: women are considered
by them as creatures full of evil and of
peril; and they are accordingly thrust
from their lives as men thrust from them
what is a temptation and an impurity.
Voluptuous pictures and adventures on the
one hand, and zealous impulses of rigid ascet
icism on the other, constitute the two ex
tremes to which religions nr their ages of
youth and of vigor are alternately prone.
Sometimes — and it is more fortunate for wo-

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 323
» it-
men when it is the case — they aiK^Tp^jJiJjed in
the narrative of these religions sucTP'-ag -ffiey
really are in human, life, charmers and at the
same time charmed, seducers and seduced, idols
and slaves ; at first votaries of the enthusiasm,
the victims of the errors and the passions which
they at once inspire and feel. Whether
Asiatic or European, rude or refined, such are
the striking features with which all systems of
religion, excepting Christianity, have character
ized the women whom they have introduced in
their narratives.
Neither of these characteristics, nor anything
analogous, is met with in the Gospel and in the
relations of Jesus witn women. They seem
irresistibly attracted toward him, with hearts
moved, imaginations struck by his manner of
life, his precepts, his miracles, his language.
He inspires them with feelings of tender respect
and confiding admiration. The Canaanitish
woman comes and addresses to him a timid
prayer for the healing of her daughter. The

324 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
woman of Samaria listens to him with eager
ness, though she does not know him: Mary
seats herself at his feet, absorbed in reflections
suggested by his words ; and Martha proffers
to him the frank complaint that her sister
assists her not, but leaves her unaided in the
performance of her domestic duties. The sin
ner draws near to him in tears, pouring upon
his feet a rare perfume, and wiping them with
her hair. The adulteress, hurried into his
presence by those who wished to stone her, in
accordance with the precepts of the Mosaic
Law, remains motionless in his presence, even
after her accusers have withdrawn, waiting in
silence what he is about to say. Jesus receives
the homage, and listens to the prayers of all
these women with the gentle gravity and im
partial sympathy of a being superior and
strange to earthly passion. Pure and inflex
ible interpreter of the Divine law, he knows
and understands man's nature, and judges it
with that equitable severity which nothing

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 325
escapes, the excuse as little as the fault. Faith,
sincerity, humanity, sorrow, repentance, touch
him without biasing the charity and the jus
tice of his conclusions ; and he expresses blame
or announces pardon with the same calm serenity
of authority, certain that his eye has read the
depths of the heart to which his words will
penetrate. In his relations with the women
who approach him, there is, in short, not the
slightest trace of man ; nowhere does the God
head manifest itself more winningly and with
greater purity.
And when there is no longer any question of
these particular relations and conversations,
when Jesus has no longer before him women
suppliants and sinners, who are invoking his
power or imploring " his clemency ; when it is
with the position and the destiny of women in
general that he is occupying himself, he affirms
and defends their claims and their dignity with
a sympathy at once penetrating and severe.
He knows that the happiness of mankind, as

326 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
well as the moral position of women, depends
essentially upon the married state; he makes
of the sanctity of marriage a fundamental law
of Christian religion and society; he pursues
adultery even into the recesses of the human
heart, the human thought ; he forbids divorce ;
he says of men, "Have ye not read, that he
which made them at the beginning made them
male and female? . . . For this cause shall a
man leave father and mother, and shall cleave
to his wife : and they twain shall be one flesh.
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
What therefore God hath joined together,
let not man put asunder. They say unto him,
Why did Moses then command to give a writ
ing of divorcement, and to put her away ? He
saith unto them, Moses because of the hardness
of your hearts suffered you to put away your
wives: but from the beginning it was not so.
And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away
his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall
marry another, committeth adultery: and

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 32?
whoso rnarrieth her which is put away doth
commit adultery." *
Signal and striking testimony to the pro
gressive action of God upon the human race !
Jesus Christ restores to the divine law of mar
riage the purity and the authority that Moses
had not enjoined to the Hebrews "because of
the hardness of their hearts."

VI. JESUS CHRIST AND CHILDREN.
The sentiments expressed by Jesus Christ
toward children, and the language that he uses
toward them, as these appear in the Gospel
narrative, must strike even the most careless
reader. Let me refer to the passages them
selves :
" And they brought young children to him,
that he should touch them : and his disciples
* Matt, xix, 4-9 ; v, 27, 28 ; Mark x, 2-12 ; Romans vii, 2, 8 ;
1 Cor. vi, 16-18 ; vii, 1-11.

328 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
rebuked those that brought them. But when
Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said
unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto
me, and. forbid them not: for of such is the
kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Who
soever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a
little child, he shall not enter therein. And he
took them up in his arms, put his hands upon
them, and blessed them." *
Another day, " came the disciples unto Jesus,
saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of
heaven ? And Jesus called a little child unto
him, and set him in the midst of them, and
said, Verily I say unto you; Except ye be con
verted, and become as little children, ye shall
not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Who
soever therefore shall humble himself as this
little child, the same is greatest in "the king
dom of heaven, "f
Again another day, Jesus, deploring the cold-
* Mark x, 13-16 ; Matt, xix, 13-15; Luke xviii, 15-17.
t Matt, xviii, 1-4; Mark ix, 33-37.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 329
ness that his preaching and his miracles fre
quently encountered, and that even in his
closest vicinity; exclaimed, here no longer ad
dressing his disciples, but God himself, " I thank
thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, be
cause thou hast hid these things from the wise
and prudent, and hast revealed them unto
babes." *
What is the full meaning of these words ?
They are not simply the expression of that im
pulse of gentle benevolence excited in all hearts
at the sight of children, and their innocent con
fidence in all who come near them. Jesus
Christ no doubt experienced the influence of
this feeling, for he was strange to none of man's
noble emotions; but his thoughts passed far
beyond the children whose approach he per
mitted, and they merely furnished him with
the living occasion to address to men them
selves his solemn warnings.
The child, I have already mentioned in these
*Matt. xi,25.

330 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
Meditations,* is, for us, the image of innocence,
the type of the creature fallible, yet who has
not yet sinned, who knows not yet either error
of understanding, or the seduction of passion, or
the blinding influence of pride, or the troubles
of doubt, or the extreme folly of sin, or the
anguish of repentance ; who follows in the first
impulses of infancy only the spontaneous in
stincts of tender confidence in the parent to
whom he is indebted for security and for love,
for the first joys and the earliest blessings.
Jesus does not pretend to bring men back to
that fair condition, to restore to them their
primitive innocence; but he comes to ransom
them from sin ; he brings them the hope of
pardon and salvation. Confidence in God, a
confidence sincere, unpretending, and loving,
is that' disposition which opens the soul of
man ta the divine blessing. This is also the
disposition that the child evinces toward its
parents; he calls upon them, and he hopes
* Meditation II, Christian Dogmas, p. 48.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 331
in them. Hence those words of Jesus : " Suf
fer little children to come unto me, and forbid
them not, for of such is the kingdom of
heaven." The way of innocence is a far bet
ter way than that of science to lead man up
to God.
Science is a splendid thing ; it is also a noble
privilege of man that God, in creating him an
intelligent and a free agent, has given him a
capacity to desire and to pursue through study
the truths of science, and even to attain them
in a certain measure, and in a certain sphere.
But when science attempts to exceed that
measure and to quit that sphere ; when it
ignores and scorns the instincts — natural, uni
versal, and permanent instincts of the human
soul ; when it essays to set up everywhere its
own torch in the place of that primitive light
that lights mankind ; then, and from that cause
alone, science fills itself with error ; and this is
the very case which called forth those words of
Jesus : " I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven

332 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
and of earth, that thou hast hidden those
things from the wise and prudent, and • hast
revealed them, unto babes." *

VII. JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF.
I have sought to gather from the Gospels
the scattered facts that constitute the life of
Jesus. I have searched for them in his acts,
his precepts, his words : in his different rela
tions in life. I have added nothing, exag
gerated nothing ; on the contrary, the life of
Jesus is infinitely grander and more sublime
than I have made it ; his words are infinitely
more profound and admirable than I have
described them. And I have said nothing of
the seal affixed to his work and his mission by

* Matt, xi, 25. The words hizo aofuv Kal avverCm are hetter
rendered, "from the learned and the prudent," than "wise and
intelligent;" "sages et intelligents," as in the French version
by Osterwald.

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 333
his Passion ; nor have I shown Jesus at Geth
semane and upon the Cross.
According to the Bible, God is without par
allel — ever the same. Jesus is also so accord
ing to the Gospel. The most perfect, the most
constant unity reigns in him : in his life as in
his soul ; in his language as in his acts. His
action is progressive, and proportionate to the
circumstances which call it forth, and in the
midst of which he lives ; but his progress
never entails any change of character or pur
pose. As he appears at the age of twelve, in
the Temple, already full of the sentiment of his
divine nature, in his reply to his mother who
was searching for him with disquietude,
" Knowest thou not that I must be about my
Father's business ?" the same he remains and
manifests himself in the whole course of his
active mission — in Galilee and at Jerusalem,
with his apostles and with the people, among
the Pharisees and the Publicans, whether they
be men, or women, or children who approach

334 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
him ; alike before Caiaphas and Pilate, and
under the eyes of the crowd pressing around
to listen to him. Everywhere, and in every
circumstance, the same spirit animates him ;
he diffuses the same light, proclaims the same
law. Perfect and immutable, always at once
Son of God and Son of Man, he pursues and
consummates amid all the trials and all the
sorrows of human existence his divine work for
the salvation of mankind.
What need to add more ? How speak in
detail of Jesus himself when one believes in
him, when one sees in him God made man,
acting as God alone can act, and suffering all
that man can suffer to ransom mankind from
sin, and save it by bringing it back to God?
How sound closely the mysteries of such a per
son and such a purpose ? What passed in that
divine soul during that human existence ?
Who shall explain those cries of agony of
Jesus in the bosom of the most absolute faith
in God his father and in himself, and those

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 335
moments of horror at the approach of the
sacrifice without the slightest hesitation in the
sacrifice, without the smallest doubt as to its
efficaciousness ? This sublime fact, this inti
mate and continual intermixture of the divine
and human finds no competent, no adequate
expression in human speech, and the more we
consider it the more difficult we find it to
speak of it.
Those who have no faith in Jesus, who admit
not the supernatural character of his person, of
his life, and of his work, do not feel this diffi
culty. Having beforehand done away with
God and with miracles, the history of Jesus is
for them nothing more than an ordinary his
tory, which they narrate and explain like any
other biography of man. But such historians
fall into a far different difficulty, and wreck
themselves on a far different rock. The super
natural being and power of Jesus may be dis
puted, but the perfection, the sublimity of his
actions and of his precepts, of his life and of

336 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
his moral law, are incontestable. And in
effect, not only are they not contested, but
they are admired and celebrated enthusiastic
ally, and complacently, too ; it would seem as
if it were desired to restore to Jesus as man,
and man alone, the superiority of which men
deprive him in refusing to see in him the God
head. But then, what incoherence, what con
tradictions, what falsehood, what moral impos
sibility in his history, such as they make it ;
what a series of suppositions, irreconcilable
with fact, nevertheless admitted ! The man
they make so perfect, so sublime, becomes by
turns a dreamer or a charlatan ; at once dupe
and deceiver : dupe of his own mystical enthu
siasm in believing in his own miracles ; de
ceiver in tampering with evidence in order to
accredit himself. The history of Jesus Christ
is thus but a tissue of fables and falsehood.
And nevertheless the hero of this history
remains perfect, sublime, imcomparable ; the
greatest genius, the noblest heart that the

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 337
world ever saw ; the type of virtue and moral
beauty, the supreme and rightful chief of
mankind. And his disciples, in their turn
justly admirable, have braved everything, suf
fered everything, in order to abide faithful to
him, and to accomplish his work. And, in
effect, the work has been accomplished : the
pagan world has become Christian, and the
whole world has nothing better to do than to
follow the example.
What a contradictory and insolvable prob
lem they present to us instead of the one they
are so anxious to suppress !
History reposes upon two foundations — posi
tive written evidence as to facts and persons,
and presumptive evidence resulting from the
connection of facts and the action of persons.
These two foundations are entirely losti/sight
of in the history of Jesus such as it;' is re
counted, or rather constructed, in these days ;
it is, on the one hand, in evident and shock
ing contradiction with the testimony of the
22 ">,

338 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
men who saw Jesus, or of the men who lived
nearly in the time of those who had seen
him ; on the other side, with the natural laws
presiding over the actions of men and the
course of events. This does not deserve the
name of historical criticism ; it is a philo
sophical system and a romantic narrative sub
stituted for the substantial proof and the cir
cumstantial evidence ; it is a Jesus false and
impossible, made by the hand of man pretend
ing to dethrone the real living Jesus — the Son
of God.
The choice lies between the system and the
mystery ; between the romance of man and
the purpose of God. Even in revealing him
self God still interposes vails, but these vails
are no falsehoods. The Gospel history of
Jesus shows us God acting in ways which
are not his ways of every day. This special
action of God characterizes also many other
facts in the history of the universe ; among
others, the great fact of the actual creation,

EIGHTH MEDITATION. 339
where man, at his appearance upon earth,
received the first divine revelation. The su
pernatural does not merely date from Jesus
Christ ; and if a man from this motive rejects
the history of Jesus, he will have to deny
also a • fer different thing. To escape this
fatal necessity, men of learning have recently
striven to curtail indefinitely the proportion
of the supernatural in the history of Jesus,
and to explain, by natural means, most of
the acts and circumstances of his life. A
puerile attempt, which has altogether failed
in the details, still leaving untouched the
substance of the problem. No better suc
cess will attend the new attempt that has
in these days been made, and which con
sists in placing the Ideal in the place of the
Supernatural, and in elevating religious senti
ment upon the ruins of the Christian faith.
This is .doing either too much or too little.
The human soul is not satisfied with these
leavings, nor human pride with such refusals.

340 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
When one is so hardy as to pretend, in the
name of the science of man in this finite world,
to determine the limits of the power of God,
one must be still more hardy and — dethrone
God himself.

NOTE.

I said (p. 175) that I would indicate some
instance of grammatical faults to be met with
in the Scriptures, to which the character of
.divine inspiration cannot be assigned. Upon
the subject of the books of the Old Testament
I have consulted my learned confrere, M.
Munk ; his reply is in the precise words which
follow :
" The biblical authors," he writes to me, " whose
style is most incorrect, are Ezekiel and Jeremiah.
These authors, and particularly the first, err frequent
ly against grammar and orthography ; they are not
merely influenced by the Aramean dialect, but they
disclose grammatical faults capable of being traced
to no source in any of the Semitic dialects. This re
mark has also been made by Hebrew grammarians of
the middle ' ages, and Isaac Abrabanel, (toward the
close of the 15th century,) in the preface to his com-

342 THE CHRISTIAN religion.
mentary upon Ezekiel, does not hesitate to declare
that this prophet was but superficially acquainted
with Hebrew grammar and orthography. Neverthe
less, neither Jeremiah nor Ezekiel, of whom both
are distinguished by a certain originality of style,
unlike that of any of the other Hebrew writers, is
wanting in elegance, energy, and boldness in images,
and they display in the highest degree their pro
ficiency in the art of composition. The following
are some instances of the grave faults against gram
mar to be met with in their writings :
EXAMPLES OF INCORRECT EXPRESSIONS IN EZEKIEL.
Dn*"intiffl)3 ntem (mischta'hawithem,) " and they wor
shiped " (viii, 16,) a barbarism for d*-inwn>a
(mischief hawim.)
"¦31* lams! (we-nesckaar ani,) " and I remained "
(xi, 8,) for isttsai (wa-eschaer) or '¦maom (we-
nischevrti.) (There are here faults both of or
thography and grammar.)
nffls (ischoth,) " women " (xxiii, 44,) for ibj (nesche.)
"•mils nssizj (schi^a,) " his seven burnt offerings " (xl,
26,) for sou (scheba\) In the number seven the
masculine is used instead of the feminine.
T-niaas (bi-bendthayikh,) " in that thou buildest "
(xvi, 31,) instead of "*|rrttsa (bi-benothekh.)
iftioa (be-schmbmi,) " when I returned " (xlvi, 7,)
instead of "Gibs (be-schoubi.)

r NOTE. 343
irualp ansa (gabehd,) " his height was exalted "
(xxxi, 5,) instead of i-iraa (gabehd.) The last
letter is aleph, for Ad
The Chaldean plural is used in several words, for in
stance: twi ('hittin,) "wheat" (iv, 9,) for tPtin
(^hitiim ;) y>»n. (ha-iyyin,) " the isles," or " the
isles in the sea " (xxvi, 18,) instead of b"-»n (ha-
iyyim,) an error in both orthography and gram
mar.
EXAMPLES OF INCORRECT EXPRESSIONS IN JEREMIAH.
n-nr-na (obida,) " I will destroy " (xlvi, 8,) for irrGsa
(aabida.)
t\"ca (nibbetha,) " hast thou prophesied " (xxvi, 9,) in
stead of nans (nibbetha.) The syllable be has a
yod instead of an aleph.
lasci (athanou) "we come " (iii, 22,) instead of na^tist
(athvnou.)
"*n» (att,) " thee " in the feminine (terminating with
yod mute,) for ns (att,) a Syriasm very frequent
in Jeremiah, who often forms the second person
of the perfect fem. in itr (t followed by yod)
instead of fr (t.)
Nii (Id written with waw quiescent,) " not " very often
for s-3 (Id without the waw.)
dm (hoglath,) " shall Be carried away captive " (xiii,
19,) instead of nnian (hogletha.) The latter
Chaldaism we* meet also in the Pentateuch (Le?

344 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
viticus xxv, 22;) niMi (we'asath,) "her fruits
(shall) come in," for times'- (we'asetah,) and ibid.
xxvi, 34 ; rimm <we-hirzath,) " she shall enjoy,"
for nnsnm (we-hircethd.)
With respect to the New Testament, I have
required a similar notice from my son William,
who has made the Greek language in general,
and its deviations in the writings of the Gos
pel, the object of particular and careful study.
I insert, also, the note which he has drawn up
upon the subject :
" On first approaching the text of the New Testa
ment, after having learned the Greek language and
grammar in the classical writers, we are struck by
numerous irregularities of expression : among these,
however, we must carefully distinguish those which
constitute merely particular and singular modes of
expression from those which are real faults. The
former are susceptible of explanation and justifica
tion by different examples and different arguments ;
the latter are not capable of being reconciled with
the elementary and necessary laws of language.
Thus we may justify such or guch a strange form of
conjugation or of declension, which would be ac
counted a barbarism by a schoolboy, but which was
nevertheless in actual use in some one or other of the

NOTE. 345
local dialect's written and spoken by the Greeks.
Again, however it may have been the rule in Greek
to set the verb in the singular when used with a neu
ter substantive in the plural, the rule has not been
invariably observed even by the purest classical writ
ers, and we may justify, by exceptions collected here
and there in their compositions, several passages of
the New Testament which, at first sight, might ap
pear amenable to a charge of solecism. Thus, in
short, after our attention having, at first sight, been
arrested and our minds disconcerted by other pas
sages in which the sacred writer has confounded the
sense of two words which resemble each other, as
fiaprvpofiai, which signifies summon a witness, and
which St. Peter employs instead of iiaprvpeu, which
means give testimony* as dSwdretv, which signifies
to be incapable, and which St. Matthew and St.
Mark employ in the sense of being impossible,^ — as
ueaovpavr/fia, which signifies the meridian or zenith
of a star, and which, on three occasions in the New
Testament, is used in the sense of in the middle of
the air — or, even when we meet words, not merely
strange to the ear, but formed without attention to
the rules and in contradiction to analogy, as midog
for ireidavog *f — we may again, without any departure
from logical rules, by judicious or subtle distinctions,
escape from the difficulties which the passages sug-
* 1 Pet. i, 11. t Matt.„xvii, 20 ; Lnke i, 37. } 1 Cor. ii, 4.

346 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
gest, and have a perfect right to do so. But after
having made allowances for the irregularities suscep
tible of explanation in the language of the New Test
ament, there still remain some which are real faults.
The same word cannot be written by the same hand,
at an interval of but three pages, both masculine and
feminine, as the word Ipig, rainbow, in the Apoca
lypse.* "When the substantive is feminine, the ad
jective cannot be masculine, as rr)v Xryvbv . . tov
fieyav.\ "When the substantive is in the accusative,
the adjective cannot be in the nominative. In such
an employment of words we are able to trace in the
sacred writings the hand of man, marks of human
imperfection and error ; and we must not forget that
these faalts become more numerous and grosser the
greater the antiquity of the MS. in which we find
them, and the purer the Jewish origin of the writer.
Thus the Greek of the Apocalypse is singularly in
correct, at the same time that the imaginative turn of
the expression is remarkably Hebraic.;): In the text,
styled the received text, and which was fixed in the
16th century, many of these faults have disappeared,
because it has borrowed from MSS. of then recent
date. But now that biblical philosophy has mounted
higher, we can discern how the copyists, one after the
* Compare iv, 3, and x, 1. t Apoc. xiv, 19.
JApoc. i, 16; iii, 12; iv, 7; ix, 13, 14; xiv, 12; xvi, 18;
xx, 2, ete.

NOTE. 347
other, actuated by pious scruples, or thinking only
to correct some error of their predecessors, have lit
tle by little effaced what appeared to them too great
a departure from rules to have been written by an
evangelist or an apostle. At the present day, these
admitted irregularities are an element indispensable
to every serious discussion respecting the nature and
extent of the divine inspiration to be met with in the
sacred volume.

NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

The following note by an American scholar, who
is, like Guizot, a Christian layman and a collegiate
professor, Dr. Tayler Lewis, of Union College,
Schenectady, N. T., will furnish a counter view upon
the subject our author discusses :
I think that M. Guizot has somewhat marred his excel
lent book by the above note. It is not easy to see pre
cisely what force or meaning he intended it should have.
Although not distinguished as a biblical scholar, he must
be aware that the question of the text (involving both cor
rectness of transcription and original correctness of lan
guage) and the question of inspiration are very different
things, demanding very different methods of argument.
They have a conection with each other, but are in most
respects quite distinct. It seems, therefore, an absurdity
— pace tanti viri — when he talks of " grammatical faults
in the Scriptures to which the character of inspiration
cannot be assigned." What is all human speech but one
great imperfection, one great "grammatical fault," we
may say, if judged by a standard high enough! What
is a perfect-language, and what is the perfect grammar
of that language? It is hard answering this question
now; there was no answer at all to it in the days of
Ezekiel, when such a thing as Hebrew grammar or a

NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 349
science of grammar, in any sense, was utterly unknown.
We may say, too, that there was no critical standard,
such as might have arisen had there been a great many
books written in the Hebrew language, forming an ex
tensive literature from which there might have been
compiled a series of critical and grammatical canons.
Ezekiel alone forms a large part of the old Hebrew liter
ature ; and if we find in him words or forms that do not
occur in Isaiah, or in the books of Samuel, he is no more
to be judged by their standard than they are by his.
Such unusual words, or forms, become, sometimes, of
critical importance in determining (very imperfectly) thei
date of a book. Certain peculiarities of language seem
to point to a later period than others ; but this is matter
of great uncertainty, especially in so scanty a literature
as that of the Hebrew. Thus, for example, it is still an
unsettled question whether certain Syraisms or Chalda-
isms are a mark of a very late, or of a very ancient
period in Hebrew writing. They occur in the Penta
teuch, in Job, in the Historical books, in the Proverbs,
as well as in Ecclesiastes and the later prophets. On the
other hand, hardly any other book seems so pure Hebrew
as that of Nehemiah, which is among the latest of them
all. It is hke some later Greek books, which are more
correct than the ancient ones, because the writers, living
in the decline of the language, took more pains to make
their style conform to some supposed critical standard.
What makes M. Guizot's remark the more strange is
the fact, that, among the all-sided foes of the Bible, an
objection to it has been made on grounds that are of the
directly opposite kind. The wonderful agreement, almost

350 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
sameness, in the Hebrew language, grammar, and style,
from Genesis to Malachi, has raised a skeptical query in
some minds. This is not the case, say they, in any
modern language. Take two books, one purporting to
be written in the days of William the Conqueror, the
other in the time of Elizabeth, yet differing as little in
their English as the Hebrew of Malachi from that of
Moses — we should be very much inclined to regard one
or the other of them as spurious. The objection would
be well taken as against our rapidly-changing occidental
tongues ; but we know, on the best historical evidence,
how different, in this respect, are the Oriental, and, espe
cially, the Shemitic languages. The Arabic into which
our missionaries at Beyrout are now making their admi
rable translation of the Bible, is substantially that of the
Koran, written more than twelve hundred years ago.
The real wonder, therefore, is that Ezekiel should differ
so little from David and Isaiah, and not that there should
be occasionally found in him some varying grammatical
forms, or some few instances of a peculiar orthography.
Why did not Prof. Munk, when he was about it, give
M. Guizot a great many more of these? The Jewish
Masora, and even the marginal Ketib and Keri (the
written and the read) as found in most Hebrew Bibles,
would have given him almost any amount of such varieties
in spelling. Critics, hostile to the Scriptures, have run
them up to thousands ; and yet it has been most truly re
marked that ninety-nine per cent, of these wonderful vari
ous readings amount to just about as much as the difference
between spelling honour or honor, with or without the u.
The remarks made apply with equal force to what is

NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 351
said by M. Guizot, Jun., in respect to the New Testa
ment Greek. There is no standard of grammar about it.
There was none, in that day, even for Thucydides.
Judged by some of the later critical authorities, this most
Attic historian wrote very bad Greek. There are in him
anakaloutha, and that, too, of a most peculiar kind, such
as are found in no other Greek writer; there are, in
other words, sentences unparsable by any consistent sys
tem of Syntax. He abounds, in short, in bad grammar,
as we would unquestionably call it, if we judged him by
any other standard than his own. So Addison and Swift
write bad English, according to some of our pedantic
English Grammar-makers, who, instead of leaving our
language free to develop itself idiomatically like the
Greek, have put it into a strait-jacket, and made it so
that-a man cannot now write with comfort or freedom,
through fear, at every moment, of breaking some of
their rules.
M. Guizot does, indeed, cite a case or two of inde
fensible grammatical error; but these are corruptions
of the text made, doubtless, by copyists, who knew
hardly anything of the Greek language. " Such faults,"
says M. Guizot, Jun., " become more numerous and
grosser the greater the antiquity of the manuscript."
He would infer that they would be found " more numer
ous and grosser" still until we come up to the original
writers. This, however, is a very unwarranted inference.
The most ancient of our present manuscripts do not
come in sight of that earliest time. They were made in
the darkest period of Greek literature, when the copyist
had, to guide him, neither the vernacular or ear familiar-

352 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
ity of the early writer, nor the accurate learning of the
modern critjc. It was just the time for manuscripts to
become depraved, and all the evidence, external and
internal, goes to show it. Such manuscripts are very
valuable ; but we should be thankful that we have other
means, from the ancient versions and numerous Patristic
citations, for ascertaining the Greek text.
I have examined carefully the Hebrew and Greek
references given by M. Guizot, (a number of which, by .
the way, are wrongly cited,) and could give my views in
each case, but am afraid that it will take me beyond
desirable limits. Let me, however, briefly advert to a
very few. His first example is from Ezekiel viii, 16.
The word DtTTinriffla, there, is a Syriasm, the pronoun
added as an inflexion of the participle and giving it the
force of a verb. Ezekiel may have acquired this form
somewhere in his intercourse with the Chaldeans, and so
it became a part of his language, which God employed
as the medium of revelation when he employed the man
himself, with all his peculiarities of speech and tempera
ment, for that high purpose. It is quite common in the
Syriac, and may be regarded as an elegance in that dia
lect ; as, in fact, an improvement on the Hebrew, if not
in itself more ancient.
Most of the cases that immediately follow are mere
differences of orthography or of grammatical form, to
which Ezekiel and Jeremiah had as good a right as
Isaiah had to the peculiarities he exhibits, and which are
found nowhere else.
In the third case cited, Ezekiel xxiii, 44, Professor
Munk finds a barbarism in the use of film, (isshoth,) for

NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 353
women, instead of the common plural 'Sitca, (na-shim.)
It might be replied that isshoth, though occurring only
here, is the regular plural of the common singular nos,
which is the regular feminine of the common masculine
"Dis, (ish,) man, as though we should use in English
man-ess* as the feminine of man, instead of the common
irregular forms woman and women. But the prophet
knew better than to do this unless there was some good
reason for it. His use of the common word tf*tin
(na-shim) everywhere else, and in near connection with
this very place, should have taught Professor Munk that
the employment of mor* (isshoth) could not have come
either from barbarism or from ignorance of grammar.
The study of the context reveals a capital reason for this
regular form, strange simply by reason of its regularity.
The women here spoken of (Aholah and Aholibah) were
very "bad women ; they were women that went after the
men, mannish women ; -and so the prophet, not having
the fear of grammar before his eyes, adapts his language
to them without ceremony. The common term is too
respectable, and so he makes an unusual form, using a
feminine plural termination coming directly from ish,
(man.) Before this (verse 2) he had called them nashim,
but now his indignation demands the stranger and
stronger term with something of paronomasia to make it
impressive. He styles them ntSin mias, (isshoth hazim-
ma,) "these vile man-women" these "lewd viragos"
* This very word maness, or manesse, may be found in the Geneva
Bible (margin) Gen. ii, 23. Attention to the context there will show that
there was felt, by the old translator, the same necessity for a peculiar
expression, to suit a peculiar idea, that led the prophet here to employ
his anomalous word. 23

354 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
just as the Latin word virago is formed from vir in a
similar manner and with a similar idea. Such is the
spirit of the passage and such the translation it demands.
It is a bad case for Professor Munk. This particular
example is dwelt upon to show how easy it is to stumble
in the letter, and how unjust we may be in charging these
old writers with ignorance and bad grammar. This form
isshoth occurs but once- in the Bible. Had there been
an extensive Hebrew literature after Ezekiel, it might
have come into use in similar exigencies of the context,
and then, if the argument of. the critic is of any weight,
it might have been deemed worthy of inspiration.
In regard to advvarsiv, Matthew xvii, 20; the critic is
right wrong. The word means to be impossible, and
nothing else. The word p,eaovgdvrifia, although denoting,
as M. Guizot, Jun., says, the meridian or zenith, is cor
rectly used (Apocalypse viii, 13, xvi, 6,. xix, 17) for the
mid air. It is like the Homeric expression ovgavodt nob,
(Iliad III, 3.)
Revelation xiv, 1 9, which is cited as " a gross gram
matical error," has, in some manuscripts, ttjv Xnvov ttjv
\ieyd\r\v in the feminine. But this is probably a cor
rection arising from grammatical fastidiousness. The
older authorities are quite uniform in givin o- either
tov fieyav in the masculine, as M. Guizot has it, or the
neuter, to [teya, which is seemingly more irregular still..
This last, which is the reading of the Alexandrian, is
probably the true one. There can be no pretense that
the writer did not know the gender of Xnvoq, for he had
put the feminine article to it in this very sentence where
the change so abruptly occurs. Besides, it is used cor-

NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 355;
rectly in every other place, as in verse- twenty following,,
and in Revelation xix, 15. The same criticism may be-
made here as on Ezekiel xxiii, 44 ; the anomaly was not
without design. The figure of " the winepress," fearful
as it is, falls short. The writer drops it by changing
the gender, and simply says t& fieya, "that great" — illud
magnum, as De Dieu translates it in the neuter — " that
great and fearful thing." This is very strange Greek, to.
be sure ; but then it is a very strange image, and a stilt
stranger thought. A writer in Hebrew freely makes-
such cases by an anomaly in gender, or in some other
way. It is not so clear that this, when carried into the-
New Testament Greek, is evidence of ignorance. A.
Hebraism may be a positive excellence. >
The question which these critics start involves trie-
very possibility of a written revelation using, as it mustv
imperfect human language. " Fear not, thou worm.
Jacob ; I hold thee by the hand ; I will help thee, saithi
the Lord thy redeemer." Does the Infinite Mind really
talk iu this style? But there is another question still'
further back. Can he talk to man at all? Can the
Infinite reveal himself in any way to us poor finite-
creatures ? Then he must come where we are ; he must
come down to us, since we cannot rise to him ; he must
assume, in such revelation, the forms of the finite and'
imperfect, even as Christ took our human nature with;
all its poverty, all its sinless faults and frailties, without
at all impairing the glory of the divine. If God speaks
to us, it must be in our own language, our own rhetoric,
our own grammar, poor and defective as they all are.
Passing by our poor philosophy aud our poor science, he?

356 THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.
comes still closer to us in our most common and familiar
forms of speech. In the first place, he takes human lan
guage, which at the best is necessarily imperfect; and
then that, by a sure law of our nature, connects itself
with human conceptions, human imagery, the flowing
and changing human knowledge, all of which, though im
perfect and to a degree erroneous, do nevertheless, with
all their imperfections, enter into the very roots of words.
How else shall he reach us? Had there been a book
printed on the sky, then indeed difficulties about the
text might have been avoided ; but the others would still
remain, and without the advantages of a revelation com
ing to us through a truly human medium. Had men
been employed as mere mechanical amanuenses, (their
own thoughts and conceptions taking no part in the
process,) irt would not have been in fact a revelation to
men through men. It would not have been the Divine
in the human. But is not the divinity itself impaired in
such a process ? Not at all, to a right thinking.
Through Ezekiel's poor Hebrew, through his bad gram
mar — if the critics will have it so — shines the glory of
God, all the more on account of the difficulties overcome
in thus reaching at last the far-off, finite soul. The more
one studies them, the more he sees reason to rejoice in
the language and manner, as well as in the thought of
the Scriptures, and to thank God that they have been
written just as they are.

THE END.

¦AY "*

"'-l^r "

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