The Religious Revolution of the Nineteenth Century.

Edgar Quinet—who for 60 years brooded over France, and for 50 years actually was her mentor—is an uncompromising foe to the Roman Church. His six-and-twenty volumes are all inspired with one idea. What Scipio said of Carthage, Quinet fulminates against Rome—Censeo Roman esse delendam. Civil liberty and Romanism are absolutely irreconcilable. He has all along preached this doctrine to his countrymen. "I would that the nations should come out in crowds from the old Church by the thousand doors which the modern religious spirit has opened up in the walls of Christendom." Quinet warns the nations, and predicts the issue of the battle—"Come out of the old Church, come out while there is yet time, before she has walled up the gate." Trade and manufactures cannot save Europe, while the public conscience is paralysed under the Papacy. According to Quinet, "the nineteenth century is enchained, stupified, drunk with materialism," and without "the pure spirit of Christianity and of Philosophy, it is sure to become an object of laughter to posterity." The French Revolution failed page 59 solely because it ignored all religion, and so forced "the entire world to coalesce against it." He advises his countrymen to "make use of every element opposed to Catholicism" with a view to its final overthrow. Quinet deprecates the damnable error that all religions are the same. Rome is the enemy of all religions, and her superstition is incompatible with modern liberty; therefore she must be summarily destroyed. She excludes modern civilization. She is "incompatible with modern liberty. This religion has institutions, organs, instruments of bondage, which the others do not possess, such, for example, as the Papacy and celibacy of the clergy, from the latter of which has been born a new form of caste thoroughly irreconcilable with the organization of our new society. There are other religions quite compatible with modern liberty, since they have given birth to it and are the means of preserving it. There are finally those that border on philosophic liberty, religions whose originators have been philosophers." The principle of Quinet is this—no political revolution is secure which has not, as in England, been preceded by a religious one. Italy is a case in point. The spiritual always overcomes the temporal. A radical religious reformation must precede a political revolution. Force, not education, must destroy a false religion. The State forcibly closed the pagan temples when Christianity attained the power to do so. Mere education can never destroy a baneful religion. You must tear off the mask. For, argues Quinet, "Give me the mask. With the mask alone I will make myself master of the individual man. The real education of a people is its religion; beside it all other teaching is as nothing." Knox knew this and he ruthlessly erased Romanism out of Scotland. Quinet asserts that "there has been no time or place in which the Catholic Church has been allowed to remain with unfettered hands by the cradle of liberty but what in a short time liberty has been found stifled in its swaddling clothes."

All the great reformers acted upon this principle of destruction, for, as Quinet justly says, "He who, possessing authority, undertakes to root up a worn-out and harmful superstition, ought, before all things, to remove the superstition itself from the eyes of the people, and to render its practice absolutely and materially impossible, destroying at the same time every hope of its revival." Thus acted the first Christian emperors, the Hebrew reformers, the medieval missionaries, and the Protestant reformers. "In its struggle with paganism, Catholic authority has itself given the world the most complete and radical method for annihilating an ancient religion." Before this "System of law, paganism vanished of itself; wherever these laws could not extend, paganism remained, and remains yet without alteration, as any one may see in the great religions of Oriental Asia." The revenues of the pagan temples were assigned to the soldiery, page 60 with the view of perfect destruction, "and often, in order utterly to pollute the temples, they were turned into places of prostitution." Interest, cupidity, and last, "were combined with the sovereign will of authority to despoil and ruin the pagan temples." Theodosius the Great decreed thus:—"Let all the temples, sanctuaries, if they still remain entire, be destroyed by order of the magistrates, and purified by the cross; if any one contravenes this law, let him be punished with death." The same process of annihilation. Quinet would adopt in reference to the Roman Catholic religion, its worship, its sacrifices, its folly, its superstition. "Worn-out religions resemble those old trees that are nothing but bark." Cut them down at once. John Knox imitated the old church from which he seceded, in his iconoclastic dealings with popery and its temples. Libanius asked quarter for the stones of the temples, but his prayers were useless. "The most magnificent works of the hand of man, the most celebrated edifices in Greece, Italy Africa or Asia, are pulled down directly they are found in the way of the ecclesiastical hand. The hammer and the pick-axe resound throughout the empire. The legions are sent against the stones. If the political authority is for a moment idle, the councils demand that the work of destruction should be completed. That of Carthage denounces the edifices, the statues, the very trees. Out of the ruins of the temples arise churches." Quinet urges the French, and the nations of Europe at large, to apply this most Christian line of procedure to the Roman Catholic Church. Unless this is done, "we shall see the nineteenth century falling into a kind of dotage," under the baneful influences of the enemy of humanity, religion, and liberty. The enemies of liberty are wiser than her friends—"they all, by an infallible instinct, rally round the Roman Church as around their citadel." To France, and the Government of France in particular, Quinet says—"Take care! Antony will ruin you, you and yours, if you do not ruin Antony." Like his great master—who was the genius of Dutch Protestantism incarnate,—Edgar Quinet writes with "a veracity that knows no mercy, and gives no quarter. There is no double-dealing in him. If you like being deluded, you should avoid him. What he promises he performs. No one can read him to the end and believe any longer in Catholic dogma." Quinet, like Marnix—whose works, "well nigh buried under three centuries of persecution, neglect, and ingratitude," he has brought to light and digested—has laboured to demonstrate that Catholicism is a new Paganism. Wherefore, reasons this great French scholar, "that which the friend of William the Taciturn did with regard to its dogma, our age has done with regard to its politics; and for my part, I claim the honour of never having ceased a single day for forty years to show the page 61 radical and absolute incompatibility of the Roman Catholic religion with modern civilisation, with the enfranchisement of the nationalities, and with civil and political liberty." Until this institution be demolished—as a final form of paganism and "abandoned to the whistling and laughter of the winds; exposed in all its nakedness; a mythology restored and suddenly overturned; the scattered remains of another Diana of the Ephesians," there can be no liberty—civil or religious—in France. To Quinet's clear eye "two points are incontestable concerning this religion of the middle ages—falsehood in spiritual things, tyranny in temporal things." Therefore, Romanism must be finally destroyed, and then we shall see "the conscience of modern humanity courageously seeking, examining, and tracing out for itself a return to God and liberty through the gospel." The French Revolution was a huge failure. It began at the wrong end. It was atheistic in idea, and so miscarried. "The eyes of the most blind have been opened by the sight of a great people, who, after sixty years of efforts and sacrifices, in which so many gigantic works have been undertaken, and so many magnanimous combats fought out, still remain on the old foundations of the middle ages, condemned in consequence never to be able to found within itself, I do not say the perfect institutions, but even a single atom of durable liberty." Spoken as a philosopher. Quinet's portrait lies before me. It has the thoughtfulness of a Chalmers, but the severely intellectual austerity of a real philosopher. The physiognomy is well fitted to inspire reverential awe. The brow is lotty, and the lips firmly compressed. Decision is traced in the aspect of the face. This great writer has literally moulded the form of French thought. He died in 1875. "A complete edition of his works has been for some time past in course of publication in France as a national testimonial; the committee united for the purpose representing not only Paris, but fifty-eight departments of France. The twenty-sixth and last volume" appeared in 1881. France has decided to erect a statue in perpetual remembrance of this really great man. By public subscription, a sum of 20,000 francs was quickly realised. "Nearly every town in France with a population of more than 5000 responded" to the Committee's appeal. Germany highly values the genius of Quinet. Goethe introduced his first philosophical work to the notice of his countrymen, just as he had recommended our own Carlyle. Heine "declared that in his day there were not three poets in the world who possessed so much imagination, richness of ideas, and originality as Edgar Quinet." After reading his works, we cannot altogether endorse this very extravagant notion. Nevertheless, Quinet was a truly great man. His two leading ideas of philosophy were—"the principle of liberty, and the importance of the individual." No wonder he was the foe of page 62 the Papacy. He was a philosophical reformer. He was no sciolist, novice, tyro, or smatterer. As a whole-souled, full square man, he declared, in his "French Revolution," that its comparative failure was owing to those who made it not understanding the principal condition of its success. In not seeing that any political revolution, to be permanent, must be preceded by a religious one, they had acted just as a man who should think to clear his garden of weeds by cutting them all down with a scythe. The religion of a nation is the root of all its life, and of every one of its institutions; and if you fail to change that, your political efforts, however sweeping, will have to be repeated. And has not this been the fate of Prance? The Revolution ran its course, and in a very few years the old crop began to appear again, the old institutions, old methods of ruling. The mower put in the revolutionary scythe, and the revived medievalism of the Restoration was cut down in the neatest manner. The scythe was hardly dry before the young shoots began to spring again, and eighteen years after the process had to be repeated with even more thoroughness. But all to no effect, for a crop richer and ranker than ever began to arise." The English "revolution was more radical" than the French, and hence its beneficial consequences. To expect liberty under the shadow of Romanism is as reasonable as to expect grapes from thorns or figs from thistles. "The Jesuits conceived and carried out the counter-reformation; their successors have now conceived and are preparing the way for the counter-revolution." The moral welfare of the nation imperatively demands the legal suppression of Romanism. Quinet, Michelet, &c., fought for the substance of liberty against Montalembert, &c., who prated about the shadow and abstract notion of liberty. The law of self-protection calls for the destruction of the foe of liberty. The Ethiopian cannot change his skin, nor the leopard his spots. Romanism claims "absolute dominion over the consciences of men." By this arrogant attitude it "clearly places itself outside the right of Religious Liberty; and it is against this Institution the modern State has to fight or to fall." The present temper of the French nation is highly favourable to Quinet's idea. "Facts upon facts could be heaped up to prove the existence of an hostility to the Church which may fairly be called National." According to the published testimony of the Abbe Baugaud, Vicar general of the diocese of Orleans, "Out of the 87 dioceses into which France is divided, only 27 have a sufficient number of priests; 21 want from 15 to 30; and thirty from 90 to more than 100." The pamphlet draws its inspiration and information from the bishops, and its author received the thanks of Cardinal Nina, the Papal Secretary of State. In 1877, 2,568 parishes wanted priests.