4

Growth of Speculative Interest in Religion.

There are two facts connected with this great Catholic revival, as it is vauntingly styled, which have further to be noted. Its influence has not confined itself to the masses of the people in the Catholic countries of Europe; it has given a bias and a tone, which are every day becoming more manifest, to the studies and writings of the scholars of these countries-pre-eminently of France. The indifference and materialism of the Encyclopædists have quite vanished from the highest French literature. With the exception of the well-known work of Michelet, entitled "Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille," and the cold glittering essays of the young and brilliant Taine, we could not point to any writings of living authors, which perpetuate the style of Voltaire and Diderot; and even these exceptions are greatly modified by the higher spirit of the age. Though pantheism imbues the speculations of the most renowned writers, yet all of them manifest the reverence and earnestness of a religious sentiment. Some few years ago, religious subjects were tabooed in the Revue de deux Mondes, the editor's refusal (as M. de Pressensé informs us) to the introduction of such subjects being couched in the words, "Il n'y a pas d'actualité" in them. Now, scarce a number appears without a brilliant monograph on some

de Morale et de Critique, par Emile Saisset. Paris, 1859." M. Renan himself thus expresses the same truth. After saying, "Whatever restrictions we may make as to the seriousness and depth of the religious revival of which we are all witnesses, it cannot be denied that there is hidden in it an event of real moral import," he continues :-"What leads men back to the Church is the eternal instinct which leads man to a religious faith, an instinct so imperious that, in order not to remain in doubt, men accept that faith which they find ready made for them. The eighteenth century, whose mission it was to clear the field of human thought from a heap of obstructions which the course of ages had accumulated, carried into that work of demolition the ardour which is always put into a work of duty. But the next generation, which, returning to the inner life, has discovered in it the need of believing and of being in a communion of faith with others, has not comprehended the joy of that destructive ardour, and rather than remain in a system of negation which has become intolerable, it has attempted to restore the very same doctrines which their fathers had destroyed."

Difference between Romanist and Protestant Thinkers. 5

distinct religious theme. Studies connected with the religions of mankind, and especially with Christianity, seem to have a fascination for the leading thoughtful writers of France. The names of Guigniaut, Quinet, De Remusat, Maury, Nicolas, Colani, Emile Saisset, Laboulaye, Montegut, Rigault, Jules Simon, Vacherot, and Renan, will immediately suggest to those acquainted with French literature the space and prominence that religious speculations have recently held in that literature, and the distinction of the men who have engaged in them. But the religious sentiment which confessedly animates the writings of such of these distinguished scholars as are Catholics is profoundly Catholic. The difference between a Protestant and a Catholic thinker who have been respectively trained in Protestant and Catholic communities, is not to be estimated by the mere divergence or antagonism of their opinions. It is a generic difference of religious feeling. The associations that have subtly woven themselves around the fibres of their moral nature; the form of religious truth that has occupied and coloured their imagination; the thoughts that have touched and thrilled the sensibilities of their heart; all these are radically different, and their combined influence goes to produce, even in men who have cast off the dogmatic faith in which they were nurtured, modes of religious sentiment which contrast vividly with each other, and which reveal their immense disparity in every conception they form of religious truth, and the discussion of every problem in religious history. A man whose Protestant training brought his mind into immediate contact with the moral discipline and the spiritual truth of the Bible, and whose worship was directed to the Father through the Son, can never assimilate himself with a man whose first and strongest religious sympathies were wound upon an image of the Holy Virgin, or of the Saint Cour, and whose young imagination was fed by the mystic romances of the Lives of the Saints." The difference between the clear breeze of

6

Historical Criticism.

heaven and the warm incense of the oratory, is not greater than the difference between the religious sentiment that may linger in the soul of these men even after the expiration of their faith. We venture to affirm that no Protestant could have written M. Renan's "Vie de Jésus." But we must study to appreciate the influence of the Catholic training of M. Renan, in order to estimate and criticise his work.

Another tendency in our age is manifested in the growth and pretensions of historical criticism, or, as it sometimes styles itself, high criticism. Now, we cannot better express the sweep and arrogance of this new science than by quoting an introductory passage from M. Renan's article on "The Critical Historians of Jesus:"

66 Study," he says, "the march of criticism since the Restoration, you will see it, always following the line of its inflexible progress, replace, one after another, the superstitions of an imperfect knowledge by the truer images of the past. A certain regret appears to attend every step that is made along this fatal way; but, in truth, there is no one of those gods who have been dethroned by criticism who does not also receive from criticism more legitimate titles to adoration. It is at first the false Aristotle of the Arab and of the commentators of the Middle Age, who falls under the blows of the Hellenists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and gives place to the authentic and original Aristotle; then it is Plato, who, exalted for a while by the peripateticism of the Schools, preached at Florence as the gospel, finds his true titles to glory in descending from the rank of a revealer to that of a philosopher. Then it is Homer, the idol of ancient philology, who now seems to have descended from the pedestal on which he stood three thousand years, and assumes his proper beauty in becoming the impersonal expression of the genius of Greece. Then it is primitive history, hitherto accepted with a gross realism, which becomes so much better understood as it is more severely discussed. A courageous march from the letter to the spirit; a difficult interpretation, which substitutes for the legend a reality a thousand times more beautiful, such is the law of modern criticism.

"It was inevitable that criticism, in this ardent research into the origins of mankind, should encounter that collection of works, products more or less pure of the Hebrew genius, which, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, form, according to the point of view one takes, either the most honourable of sacred books or the

Two Predominating Systems of Philosophy.

7

most curious of literatures. To arrest the human spirit on that slope was impossible. However, as orthodoxy was still the law of the exterior life, and even of the most of consciences, it was believers who first essayed biblical criticism. Vain illusion, which proves at least the good faith of those who undertook that work, and the fatality which drags the human spirit, once set on the ways of rationalism, to a rupture with tradition, which at first it avoids."-Etude d'Histoire Religieuse, pp. 135-137.

This march of critical science in history is a phenomenon of high significance. The laws of cautious, inductive investigation which have effected such marvellous discoveries in physical science, have been applied with equal enthusiasm and success to the domain of historical research. Vast treasures have been unearthed from their hiding-places in distant regions, and heaped together for the analysis of the scholar. New mental appliances for the study of human history have been discovered, and rapidly improved,—such as the comparative sciences of ethnology, philology, and mythology. And inductive science, with its rigorous probation, its contempt of prescriptive authority, and its slow tentative processes, has doubtless cleared away much of the legendary mist which hung over the ancient traditions of every land and people, and illumined for us in many places the actual scenes of the early life of man. There is now a science of history. science allures many of the noblest minds of our time, because of the intrinsic nobleness of the study, which is the study not of matter, but of man; and every European literature is continually enriched by master-works of historical criticism.

That

There are, moreover, two systems of philosophy which have exercised predominating influence on the intellectual movements of our age, and which combine to place the philosophy of history, based upon historical criticism, as the culminating science which crowns and completes the monument of human knowledge. These are-positive philosophy, and the ideal pantheism of Hegel. Without some knowledge of these two systems and their transcendent influence on modern thought, we cannot compre

8

Positive Philosophy.

hend so as to criticise and to combat the infidelity which unhappily reigns in modern science, and especially in historical science. Positive philosophy, according to the famous classification of science by its founder, Auguste Comte, gives the last and the highest place to Sociology, a science which we understand better under the title "Philosophy of History." *

As we might have expected in a disciple of St Simon, Comte himself-M. Littré informs ust-was wholly engrossed with the social applications of his philosophy. The first work he wrote has this preliminary notice:

Comte shews that sciences have originated in development from each other, and consequently in a series of necessary successions, so that if we consider the ensemble of what is called nature, we perceive

there three distinct groups. The first is the mathematico-physical group, - that is to say, properties or physical forces, with their numerical conditions, both geometrical and mechanical. The second is the chemical group, with their mutual intermolecular actions. The third is the vital group, with their vital properties. These sciences cannot be arranged otherwise; for the vital group supposes the two former, since vital properties always include and are added to the chemical and mechanical properties of matter. In like manner the chemical group supposes the physical, but the physical group supposes nothing. Such is the order which philosophy receives at the hands of nature, and which it reproduces in what M. Comte has called the hierarchy of sciences, and which may be thus arranged

Mathematics......

Study of Numbers.
Geometry.

Mechanics.

Passing from what is abstract and general, the notions of space and number, to the simplest forms of the concrete,-viz., unorganised bodies, ---and again by the same law to what is more complicated, he ends at last in what he deems the most difficult, involved, and comprehensive science, the science of Sociology,-the study of mankind in their social relations and development. This classification of the sciences is admirable, and has been accepted by many who do not adopt the philosophy of Comte. But it has not been sufficiently seen that the whole scope and bearing of this philosophy is to magnify and enhance the critical study of human history.

+ Auguste Comte et sa Philosophie Positive. Par E. Littré.