Christianity

Christianity is the religion of which Jesus Christ is not only the founder but also the object, since it is by him and in him that man recovers his union with God by an effective reconciliation. We have thus determined in a general manner its true character, and marked the difference that exists, as we shall prove, between it and all the religions which preceded it. But first we must justify our definition. The only way to get a sure grasp of the leading thought of a doctrine and a religion is to trace it to its origin, and to seize it at its source, before the stream has had its current troubled with the foreign elements that mingle with it. Now about primitive Christianity we possess a number of documents which are at least authentic, whatever the authority we attribute to them from a doctrinal point of view. Confining ourselves to those documents alone, whose authenticity is not disallowed by the most negative criticism, we have in the epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, the Galatians, the Romans, and the Thessalonians, a testimony to primitive Christianity which falls between the year 55 and the year 64 after Jesus Christ. It emanates from an apostle who had been in direct contact with the earliest associates of Christ, with those who had both seen and heard him. The first three gospels, in which an historical basis is generally recognised in what concerns the actions as well as the discourses of Jesus, point back to the same date. We are thus led back to the very origins of Christianity. Moreover we recognise in the church of the earliest period made known to us, whether in the Acts of the Apostles or in writings as authentic as the letters of James and those of Peter, the living impress upon simple and honest hearts of the direct remembrance of Christ, like the track marking his passage across the earth. Here our concern is not more to determine the true character, the essence of Christianity, than to find out in those documents the real meaning of the religion of the gospel as it presents itself to us. It is undeniable that if it claims to carry to the world a revealed doctrine, revealing completely the true nature of God as well as that of man, and the normal relations of union between them, it attaches that doctrine to a personality considered not only as the organ of the revelation, but as its object. We have thus the right to assert that Christianity is Jesus Christ, without fearing to detract anything from the attributes of God, for Jesus Christ is his ambassador, his son, the sole mediator between God and man—in one word, the Redeemer, the Saviour, as his name implies. He has never ceased to require faith in himself as the means of again finding God by him. Fragmentary quotations on this point are vain. The whole gospel demands this faith in his person, and St Paul sums it up in the words addressed to the gaoler at Philippi: 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved' (Acts, xvi. 31).

Christianity is herein distinguished from all other religions. The revelation which it brings to the world is something other than a supernatural communication of a transcendent doctrine about God, and about our origin and purpose in the world. It consists essentially in a great work accomplished by a single person—a work which is the supreme manifestation of the holy love of God. The mere exhibition of this divine work casts a bright light upon God as well as upon man, and results in a doctrine which implies a complete metaphysic, a complete anthropology, and an entire system of ethics, as well as far-reaching views on the history of the human race in its terrestrial development and in its future destiny. For had it been otherwise, Christianity must have contented itself with communicating to us the outward fact without explaining it—without making us grasp it by its inward side in its profound significance; which would have been to alter its nature completely. It none the less remains true that for Christianity doctrine is only a secondary and complementary element—the interpretation of the fact of the great work, which is its first object. This is why it addresses itself before everything to the heart and to the conscience, although at the same time it opens up to the intellect the vastest possible horizons. As soon as we deviate from this divine realism, we make Christianity fall into an intellectualism which chills it while perverting it; and we substitute for it the parching formulas of a scholasticism which at all times and in all churches has caused it to leave its banks and diverge into new and widely different channels.

Let us further consider that divine work accomplished by Christ for the salvation of the world, which constitutes the essence of Christianity, without lingering to discuss its proofs, which belong to the province of apologetics. This word salvation, if we take it in all its fullness, comes before us as its principal and even sole subject. 'The son of man,' says Jesus, 'is come to seek and to save that which was lost' (Luke, xix. 10). This one word contains within itself the whole gospel, and alone explains to us why it has been specially called good news. This is its true significance, if we leave aside entirely its theological development. Humanity is not in its normal condition; it is lost by its own fault—through having broken by voluntary revolt the bond which at the beginning united it to God as made in his own image, and which was intended ever to become closer through the voluntary obedience it was invited to offer in the mysterious probation of its free-will. Incapable of rising again of itself, it must needs be sought out by compassionate love like a wandering and lost sheep, for the sake of being lifted up and brought back to God. This is what the Son of Man has done in agreement with the offended Father, who has had compassion upon him. Although by a saving act of his own good pleasure God has pardoned the sinner, he has not abrogated the laws of moral order. These laws demand no vengeance unworthy of God, but merely a reparation—a retraction of sin involved in an essentially moral expiation. Such an expiation can consist only in a perfect obedience, complete even to the length of accepting in a voluntary sacrifice the consequences of the original revolt. This is what the Son of Man, who was also the Son of God, has willed and has accomplished. He has died for the sins of the world, and risen again for its justification; and the cross on which he has accomplished this reparative work rises before us for ever as the symbol of a reconciliation, which each man in his turn must appropriate to himself by an act of faith uniting him to the sacred sufferer.

Christianity is thus pre-eminently the religion of redemption and of the redeemer. It has introduced into the world the grand reparative influence of a victorious love, inaugurating in Jesus himself an unceasing struggle; for that reparative influence must struggle constantly against the powers of evil, which are not magically suppressed. But this reparative work cannot consist alone in the salvation of individual souls; to be worthy of God it must strive to restore all that the original fall has blighted or destroyed—to make the fallen creature realise all his lofty destiny—that is to say, to reconstitute in man all the greatness kept in store for him, and to give him up without reserve to God, making the regenerating spirit penetrate into every sphere of his activity as into all his faculties. Hence the wide mission of Christianity to purify and raise everything that is human in the most diverse spheres of society, from the institutions which regulate the relations of men to each other to the highest culture of the intellect. This restoration of man after the divine type is the continuation and application of the redemptive work of Christ, which, after having had for its first intent to form in the Church a society of believing souls, pardoned and saved, called to work directly for the salvation of all that is lost, next radiates outwards into all the departments of human activity. It is in this enlarged sense that we must understand the kingdom of God which the Saviour came to found upon our sinful world, and of which the progress goes on only at the price of an incessant struggle, which will continue to the end of time. But this general advance of the kingdom of God in its widely human extension is always proportionate to its internal development within his Church, which keeps and cherishes the central hearth of the divine life, whence emanate all light and heat.

We know in a general manner what the vast influence of Christianity has been in the world for eighteen centuries. We may say that the cross of Calvary has divided history; we find its luminous track marked everywhere. It has renewed society in the very depths of universal decline without ever neglecting its first task, which is to lead the souls of sinners to Christ. Spiritual conquests count upon no more than this. But these victorious struggles have not been pursued without many dangers, no little resistance and as much dark uncertainty, which have sometimes had the effect of altering Christianity for a time, at least in its historical realisations, for its high ideal has never ceased to soar with serene radiance in the eternal gospel. It may be put under a bushel, but it has never been possible to extinguish it or to change its form. It is this inherent recuperative power that admits of the renewal and elevation again of Christianity, however much it may have been debased. To illustrate the difficulties and the opposition which Christianity encountered upon its way, we must first carry ourselves back to the condition of the world at the time of its first appearance, and understand the spiritual influence of the great religions it found at that time before it. There is no better means of establishing its originality and recognising all the gains it has brought to humanity, than to bring into the light its true relation to the religions of the past. These religions fall into two types of very different nature and very unequal value: Judaism, and its antagonist, Paganism, comprising a considerable number of particular religions presenting one common character in spite of well-marked differences.

The assertion is often made in our day that Christianity was at first a mere development of Judaism, and that it was by combining with elements borrowed from the religions and the philosophies of the ancient pagan world that it assumed its final form. But this explanation will not stand an impartial examination of the actual facts. Undoubtedly there exists a real relation between the new religion and those which preceded it. For how could it be otherwise, since on its own showing it came to accomplish that which had been asked for, expected, and longed for by the human soul under every sky, as well as positively promised on the soil of Judæa by direct revelations. If Christianity were only a religious doctrine, its originality might be disputed by adducing the basis of belief which it has in common with the anterior religions, although here too it manifests a splendid superiority. But as has been shown, it is more than a body of doctrine—it is an immense work of reparation effected by its founder. In that respect it cannot be compared in anything with what has preceded it, and there will always be between it and the noblest intuitions of the philosophy of a Socrates or a Plato, or the sublimest oracles of an Isaiah or a Jeremiah, that insuperable distance which divides a hope and a desire from its effective realisation. If we consider somewhat more closely its relations to the religions which preceded it, stripping it in this manner of that which constitutes its essential originality, we find at once that that relation assumes a quite peculiar character when the religion of the Old Testament is concerned. Here there is direct preparation under the form of a series of positive revelations. It was necessary in the first place that the cradle of the Messiah should be deposited upon consecrated soil—consecrated indeed, although darkened under the veil of idolatry; next, that there should be found there a chosen people to represent man in the expectation of, and the desire for, a true Messiah. For in order that the Saviour might accomplish his work of reparation in the name of the human race, it was necessary that he should be waited for by a chosen people, such as could be formed only in a nation separated from the pagan world, and subjected to a particular moral and spiritual education under special divinely sanctioned institutions. Greatest of these was the law of Sinai, intended to awaken in the heart sorrow and hatred for sin. Prophecy completed the work of preparation by announcing to hearts pierced through by the sword of the law the coming of him who was to restore all things again, whose work was prefigured by the priesthood of the sons of Aaron and the sacrifices offered to God most holy. These special institutions were proper only to the period of preparation which was called the Old Covenant. Everything they contained that was exclusive and peculiar must disappear when the period of accomplishment had succeeded it.

The Old Covenant itself was aware of its transitory character, for above all its institutions there soared a promise of enlargement which God gave to the father of the chosen race on the day when he bade him leave his country and his kindred: 'In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed' (Gen. xii. 3); and prophecy was but one long and splendid enrichment of the promise: 'I will also give thee,' he says, a Messiah 'for a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth' (Isa. xlix. 6). As soon as the reconciliation has been consummated between man and God by the sacrifice of Calvary, the wall of separation between Israel and other nations is broken down; the barriers between a powerless priesthood and the simple faithful who participate in the priesthood of Christ fall down; and sacrifices which make no expiation disappear before the only sufficient offering. You are kings and priests, says the apostle Peter to the early Christians (1 Peter, ii. 9). The religion of humanity, which is the religion of the soul, supersedes the exclusive religion of the circumcised people—the religion of the letter which killeth; and this splendid enfranchisement is but the consequence of the redemptive work of Christ which faith assimilates. All this glorious liberty is included in the words: 'The just shall live by faith' (Rom. i. 17).

It was the mission of Paul, the former Pharisee, the grand freedman of Christ, to set free the new religion from the bonds of Jewish legalism; called as he was by a divine revelation to draw all the consequences from the teaching of the Master. He formulated the charter of this freedom in two sentences, stamped with a kind of divine genius: the first, 'The law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith' (Gal. iii. 24). Both its lofty mission and its powerlessness are here recognised together. The second is: 'Before Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew . . . but Christ is all, and in all' (Col. iii. 11). Thus the religion of humanity rises on the ruins of the national religion. We see the New Covenant striking its roots deep into the soil of that Judeæ whence cometh salvation (John, iv. 22), but growing like a great tree capable of lodging in its branches all the birds of heaven; and all its liberal and blessed expansion but brings us back to the work of the Redeemer, as St Paul asserts in the words: 'Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free' (Gal. v. 1).

If we pass from Judaism to the religions of the ancient pagan world, at least to those developed in countries where they came into direct contact with Christianity, we find that they also had their preparation. In the first place, there is not one human soul which has not had engraved upon it the divine law, as St Paul recognises: the Gentiles, says he, 'show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another' (Rom. ii. 15). In the next place, God has not ceased to speak to them by the grand spectacle of the world itself, and of the heavens in which his invisible perfections may be seen as with the bodily eye (Rom. i. 20). Finally, if he has not granted them direct revelations, his spirit has constantly breathed upon them as it breathed upon the confused waters of chaos from which was to emerge a world. After all they belonged, as St Paul says again, to the offspring of God (Acts, xvii. 29), and there was not a single man among them who had not in him a ray of that light of the word 'which lighteth every man that cometh into the world' (John, i. 9). The need of a renewing work meets us again everywhere in the very heart of Paganism. There is no nation which has been without its priests and its sacrifices, and which has not sought that atonement for which the human conscience has always longed. But that did not hinder the pagan world from continuing to be sunk in idolatry, for it fell under the dominion of a Nature which it deified. Hence its dreadful errors equalled only by its dreadful corruption. Yet it never ceased to seek for God, groping blindly in the dark (Acts, xvii. 27). The moral conscience which had never been stifled reacted incessantly against the deadening influence of the nature-religions; it called for a God greater than those which Paganism had fashioned for it; it had its sublime aspirations which never ceased to re-echo through the pagan night one long penitential psalm, which, sung in the plains of Chaldæa, sometimes became a true supplication to the future Saviour. 'I turn from every side,' says the son of Vedic India to his god, 'desiring to know my sin. Absolve us from the sins of our fathers, and from those which we have committed in our own bodies' (Rig Veda, vii. 86).

The preparation of the pagan nations consisted in their being made to experience their inability to find salvation in their idolatrous religions. We may consider that preparation as finished, when out of the ruins of their old idols they raised that altar to the unknown God which St Paul recognised as the symbol of aspirations all the more ardent the more they had been deceived, and the more general the decline in the world around. The converted pagans found that peace for which they longed at the feet of Christ. They gave up without difficulty their own peculiar rites—that priesthood and those sacrifices which had availed but to express and stimulate their desire for salvation without satisfying it. For them, too, the exclusive and national character which clothed religion before the revelation of God's universal fatherhood needed to be expanded. For the religion of humanity to supersede the various religions of the soil, it was necessary not only for the Jew to renounce his exclusive theocracy, but also for the son of Paganism to recognise that the kingdom of Christ, not being of this world (John, xviii. 36), ought not to be incorporated with the state as a thing that belonged to a particular people. We see that Paganism, some admirable ideas alone excepted, brought nothing to Christianity but aspirations frustrated and yearnings unsatisfied. From the doctrinal point of view, even its noblest philosophies had been falsified by the influence of the nature-religions. Platonism itself with all its idealism ended in oriental dualism, for unable to triumph over evil, it identified it finally with matter under a fatalism whence man could escape only by an asceticism of which the Buddhist annihilation is the logical consequence. It is this which for ever distinguishes the Christian metaphysic from all the Greco-oriental speculations comprised in the system of the Alexandrian Philo. To prevent any confusion between Christianity and Hellenism it is sufficient to read these words in the prologue to the fourth gospel: 'The Word became flesh.' Presented thus according to its primitive type, the religion of Christ appears before us in its true character and its incontestable originality; and herein rests its power. Were we to see in it only a synthesis of all the anterior religions, we should have in Christ only a kind of composite idol enshrined in the last of the pagodas; and we could not connect it with that primitive Christianity which alone is true, and which remains for all time in the faithful image it has left us of itself in the sacred volume which makes it live anew in its first and authentic manifestation. Thanks to that book we can always trace it back to its source, and mark the point of departure between what it is in itself, and the superfluous accretions which have changed it.

For it was impossible that Christianity should make no deviations once it had begun to float upon the stream of history. These were rendered imperative by its being imposed by authority upon successive generations like a dead letter—the most serious of all changes to which it could possibly have been subjected, for it is before everything the religion of the spirit and of liberty. The purpose of history after its own modification through the influence of Christianity was precisely to make it penetrate to modern humanity in a free assimilation, but that assimilation involved the possibility of all its stumblings, its failures, and its obscurities; without, however, the true Christian spirit ever ceasing to struggle against error to bring back the Church to its original type. Let us not forget that the effects of Christianity radiate outwards far beyond the immediately religious sphere; through an influence direct and indirect by turns it strives to re-establish human society upon the type of justice and love—a result which certainly forms it into a part of the kingdom of God. Mere social progress not infrequently advances religious progress, as it binds fewer burdens on the individual conscience, and appears for that reason the more easy. We cannot give more than a rapid sketch of the deviations as well as the victorious struggles of Christianity from its beginning to our own day. To explain its deviations it is sufficient for us to recall its leading thought, which is also its great power—emancipation, for these invariably tend to the alienation of the freedom in which the gospel has made us free. Christ has freed man from all the burdens under which he was bowed down, and first of all from that of sin, by his redeeming work alone. Whenever man turns aside from this, whenever he ceases to believe in a salvation which is the free gift of God, apprehended by faith, he girds on again his ancient chains, he seeks for mediators in a new priesthood, returns from the New Covenant to the Old, and restores anew the theocracy; in one word, he becomes again a Jew. This is the whole history of the formation of Catholicism, the real cause of all the slavery which it has caused anew to weigh upon the freedmen of Christ.

On the other hand, the return to Paganism takes effect whenever for the gospel of the redemption we substitute a purely philosophical speculation. The digression to the left is no better than that to the right; it is even worse, for it ends in a parching rationalism which cannot long rest on the slope downward to pantheistic naturalism. We shall limit ourselves to characterising the principal periods of the history of Christianity, in each of which we find the battle arrayed between its most faithful representatives and the promoters of tendencies whether towards Judaism or Paganism.

Already in the apostolic age the struggle had begun, for we know that it needed the apostolate of Paul to bring down the Church from its high chamber, to cast aside the swaddling clothes of its cradle, and come gradually to the point of renouncing Judaic exclusiveness. What a combat the great apostle of the Gentiles had to wage against the survivors of the synagogue who wished at any cost to hinder the grand liberation of souls, and at the close of his life against the first representatives of pagan speculation, the Gnostic heretics of Colosse and Ephesus! Beyond doubt he was victorious, and when his noble head fell under the axe of Nero's executioner, it might have been said of him that though dead he would speak until the end of time, ever uttering anew his great cry for liberty, for the freedom of the Church from all its bonds through justifying faith.

The first period of the history of Christianity after the death of the last apostles extends from the 2d century to Constantine. It is an heroic age. The mission of Christ extends over all the empire, and fashions a whole people with their own consent. Persecution rages without intermission, but the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the gospel. The struggle goes on also in the world of thought. The Gnostic heresies mark the reaction of the pagan spirit; they are refuted by a powerful polemic. The apologetic writings of Justin Martyr, of Irenæus, of Clement of Alexandria, and of Origen, breathe the most living and the largest faith. The most important social reforms, as the elevation of woman, the respect due to the man in the slave, are realised at the family hearth. But the gravity of the struggles against heresy, and the questions of discipline arising out of persecution itself for the restoration of such Christians as had wavered, tended to strengthen ecclesiastical authority in an exaggerated degree to the detriment of the primitive liberty. That tendency was aided by a certain weakening of the dogma of justification by faith, despite the struggles of Origen and Tertullian against the innovators.

The second period extends from Constantine to the establishment of the papacy. Christianity became the religion of the state when the Cæsar of Byzantium granted it his burdensome protection, but it still retained within it its generous sap. In spite of the authority of St Augustine faith in the free grace of God became more and more obscured. The discussions raised by Arianism more and more gave the foremost place to a Christian theodicy which resulted in a subtle divine metaphysic elaborated by the great councils of Nice, of Constantinople, and Chalcedon. These councils constituted a completed novel central authority within the Church. At the same time the old hierarchy was re-established to govern flocks cast by their birth itself into the fold of the Church, and the crook of the shepherd became the symbol of a despotic authority. The Bishop of Rome acquired a primacy that ever grew greater, until when the floods of barbarian invasion had submerged the old Roman government, the papacy became incontestably the chief centralising power. It had a high regard for social progress, and the Christian mission continued its conquests; but unhappily after its union with the empire the Church began to employ forcible constraint against its enemies both without and within. Spite of many a noble protest Catholicism took the place of the primitive Christianity, and suppressed all its liberties. It was as if the dethroned Jewish theocracy had thus revenged itself for its down- fall; yet the enslaved Church continued to preserve the treasures of piety. Monasticism became the right arm of the papacy, and rendered it the most precious service in the education of races still rude and indeed hardly escaped from barbarism. With Gregory VII. the great transformation was completed, and the new theocratic organisation appeared in all its glory. No one can deny that under the given conditions it rendered precious services. It was still Christianity, however disguised, to which Europe owed its alleviation from the barbarism that weighed upon it. To it alone the weak and the oppressed owed it that they were not crushed.

It is impossible to do more than characterise briefly some of the most prominent features of the middle ages and the Reformation. In the middle ages we mark the immoderate expansion of the religious and social omnipotence of Christianity, manifesting itself in the Crusades and the momentary subordination of the state to the Church after memorable struggles; and in consequence of that very temporal primacy of the Church we see it diverge more and more from its primitive type. It has quite decidedly become a new theocracy, and as has ever been the case the progressive diminution of its liberties coincides with the complete subversion of the grand doctrine of justification by faith. Salvation by works replaces salvation by grace, the supposed merits of glorified saints are purchased for the benefit of sinners, and finally indulgences from the consequences of sin are sold for a price in money. Yet Christianity even thus disguised and diminished still shows itself beneficent for the consolation of human misery. It produces a magnificent art. The Gothic cathedral is the symbol of its greatness and also of its formidable power. Scholasticism produces its famous theological Summas which are as it were the cathedrals of thought. The monastic orders founded in great numbers contribute at once to the relief of the wretched and to the enslavement of the faithful. Yet it was in some of these convents that there was developed that profound and touching mysticism which sought to find God beyond the sacerdotal hierarchy. From the 14th century onwards an ardent aspiration towards reform stirred the Church. It was the ferment preparing the great approaching renovation that was to shine forth after the great schism, which weakened the papacy by breaking it into factions. This need of reform was expressed officially in the councils of Pisa and Basel. The Reformation had already its forerunners in John Huss and Wyclif, while it was, as it were, realised beforehand in the valleys of Piedmont.

With Luther it burst forth with irresistible power. If its banner was victorious over great part of Europe it was because it bore the grand device of all Christian liberty: 'The just shall live by faith.' The liberty of the people of God was actually reconquered in principle; it founded itself as at the first days of Christianity on the certainty of salvation granted by grace and seized by faith. This doctrine of liberation dismisses all human mediators to find again the universal priesthood in the sacrificial priesthood of the Redeemer. To all tradition it opposes the sovereign authority of Christ, whom Luther calls the king of the Bible, which alone permits us to know him. Next ensued a gigantic struggle, on the one hand, between the Reformation and the ancient Catholic Church, whose usurpations linked with a mercenary conception of salvation were consecrated by the Council of Trent; and on the other hand, between Christianity and a pagan culture eager to resuscitate the naturism of the ancient world without its religious aspirations. This double struggle has reached in our day its culminating height. It is complicated whether in Catholicism or in the churches of the Reformation by an intestine struggle which brings to an issue upon narrowed ground the two opposing elements. Thus Catholicism even after the Council of Trent saw arise within itself a movement for reform, which, rendered illustrious by the Abbé de St Cyran and Pascal, tried to elevate the doctrine of grace and to limit the papal power. That noble effort was compelled to succumb before persecution, after having done honour to the church of France. Gallicanism contrived to lay some restriction upon the papal powers, but was speedily defeated like Jansenism, from which it had separated in the 17th century while retaining the stamp of its influence.

In the bosom of Protestantism there broke out early a struggle between a conservatism which would retain as much as possible of Catholicism and a Christian liberalism whose aim it was to bring back the Church to the apostolic type. That struggle has led to the creation of different churches practising in both hemispheres with more or less fidelity the constituent principles of the Reformation, or, more correctly, continuing them and disengaging them from things inconsistent therewith. In the domain of thought the battle has been fought between the partisans of a strict dogmatism and those who would admit of theological progress without breaking in anything with the eternal gospel. We must also recognise that within the heart of historical Protestantism we have seen produced, rather more than a century since, on some questions, philosophical tendencies which are Christian only in name, and which in their extreme manifestations would introduce into the fortress the enemy that besets the walls—we mean a culture decidedly anti-Christian. The siege is being carried on to-day more vigorously than it ever was before. The struggle between Christianity and tendencies contrary to it has never been more serious. Anti-Christianity under all its forms has taken a considerable development, and seems to resuscitate in our modern so-called Christian world the old Paganism, while eliminating from it the better elements, its aspirations and foreshadowings of the religion of the redemption; for this neo-Paganism in its most logical manifestations ends in an absolute naturalism which will only admit of matter and force in the evolution of all life. On the other hand, what we call the Judaising tendency so ready to appear in the Church on the morrow of the apostolic age, has reached in these last days the final stage of its course. The ecclesiastical policy which has brought about in succession the syllabus of Pius IX., the Encyclical Quanta Cura (1864), the proclamation of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (1854), and that of the papal Infallibility at the Vatican council of 1870, have assured the triumph of the theocratic system, while condemning everything in the bosom of contemporary Catholicism like liberty in the Church or in the heart. Nothing is further from our thought than to place Catholicism per se outside the pale of Christianity. We recognise in it the treasures of piety. Its charity has never expended itself over social misery more bounteously than now. Christ is loved and adored within its fold by a multitude of pious souls who find him in spite of defective forms of worship and the long chain of the sacerdotal hierarchy. We refer only to the peculiarly ecclesiastical and specific principle of Catholicism when we speak of its deplorable return to Jewish theocracy. This return is the more inexplicable as the institutions proper to the Old Covenant have no longer any reason for their existence since they have found their accomplishment in the gospel. It is impossible not to observe that there exists a real co-relation between the development of the anti-Christianity of this renewed theocracy which breaks with all modern progress from a social point of view by its attempt to enchain thought and the conscience to a sacerdotal power. Wherever Catholicism is the dominant religion it is taken as the true representative of Christianity itself. Hence is propagated the erroneous idea that there is an opposition between the religion of Christ and social progress, seeing that all the grand principles of justice, of law, and of brotherhood, come in reality from him who has raised man in every sense by reconciling him with God. Human brotherhood with all that it implies can come only from the divine fatherhood.

We are thus right in affirming that the victory of the Catholic theocracy has been the surest means of actually turning away recent generations from a Christianity ill understood and misrepresented, and that it has in this way facilitated the progress of anti-Christianity. Happily Christianity has had other representatives who have shown it in its true character. We must recognise that even in the bosom of Catholicism are to be found grand and lofty Christian men like Lacordaire, P. Grétry, Montalembert, and Döllinger, who have not admitted the divorce of the religion of Christ from political and social progress, of the gospel from liberty. They have opposed with energy the party of religious absolutism; their eloquent testimony endures in their books, and their thought remains like leaven within the Church which they have adorned, though they failed to persuade her. We may hope that this movement for true liberty will revive sooner or later in her, all the more that the fall of the temporal power will finally bring about important moral consequences.

Whatever there may be in such forecasts of the future, really evangelical Christianity has shown itself wherever the Reformation has been planted, as the initiator and propagator of true liberalism. It is easy to prove that it was to its influence, distorted indeed and indirect, that the French Revolution of 1789 owed everything that it contained of what was true and fertile for the future. Its first adherents had breathed the air of freedom in Anglo-Saxon countries. Besides, the French Protestants, by their resistance to the intolerable persecutions of which they had been the object, had preserved in their own persons the most important of all liberties—that of the conscience. It is more important to-day than ever, in face of the rising flood of democracy, that Christians, in order to dissipate the misunderstanding which in its opposition to the gospel and to liberty favours contemporary anti-Christianity, should delight to place themselves in the van of political and social progress, and should especially take to heart the elevation of the labouring classes. This is what true Christians are now doing more and more in every country. We gladly recognise that Catholics and Protestants are vying with one another in their zeal for this great social task, which is the foremost duty of our age. We may perhaps add that the gradual disappearance of state religions, with their authoritative constitutions defining the identities between the spiritual and the temporal, need not at all tend to the disadvantage of Christianity, since it will render for ever afterwards impossible all recourse to force for maintaining the authority of doctrine, thus putting final end to an intolerance which was the most flagrant contradiction of its most essential principle. We must not forget to make allowance for the modern cessation of compulsion in religion in our estimation of the actual manifestations of anti-Christianity, which in former times was compelled to save itself by concealment or in hypocrisy, although it was possible for it to exist in large proportions within a state, though all unseen. But now the time has come for that which was whispered low to be proclaimed upon the housetops. Yet positively the truth has everything to gain in that freedom, which, however irreverent it sometimes may be, is still due to a state of things through which the great opprobrium of a persecuting religion has been made to disappear—a result for which we can hardly congratulate ourselves too highly.

The secularisation of the state entails upon us great responsibilities, especially in what concerns the young, who are the more judiciously intrusted to the care of the Church, because everywhere they are called to form their faith without any help from the state. The vast and glorious development of the natural sciences has largely contributed to develop unbelief in the domain of speculation, under the influence of that pantheistic or materialistic philosophy which had preceded it. In the intoxication of all their scientific discoveries, men imagined that they could put God and the spirit out of the world, and recognise therein only the play of mechanical forces, the evolution of motion producing a series of existences comprising thought, conscience, and soul. The adversaries of Christianity have divided themselves more and more into two great schools: Agnostics, denying the possibility of obtaining the least knowledge of what is beyond our own consciousness, and dogmatic Materialists from whatever cause produced. We have a right to affirm that Christianity has striven victoriously against both the one and the other. First of all, it numbers in the domain of science more than one illustrious representative who has actually shown that we may enrich science while believing firmly in God. Next—and this is still more important—it has brought about the most salutary enlargement in intellects within the bosom of the most earnest Christianity. The most eminent among Christian thinkers have proclaimed the reciprocal independence of science and religion. They have recognised that the first is sovereign in its own sphere, that God has not revealed what man can discover, and that in consequence religion has not to link itself with such or such a conception of the past, as if it had therein a revealed system of science. By the happiest coincidence, illustrious savants with absolutely no connection with the churches, as Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, have refused the natural sciences the right to make excursions out of their own domain, and to settle questions like those of the origin of life or of man. They have thus declared a perfectly rational scientific agnosticism about what concerns that problem of origins, which is specially the problem of religion. It follows from this that there may exist other processes of discovery and of experiment than those of the natural sciences in that which transcends their province. It is for Christians so to employ these as to establish the reality of a spiritual and divine world, and such of its successive manifestations in religious history as come to centre themselves in Christ.

We may say that in this way a work of great importance to apologetics has been accomplished; it has happily reflected light upon the very conception of a doctrine which is ever the more widened the less it is allowed to be shut in within any formulas of the orthodoxies of the past, in order to grasp ever the more closely the living object of belief, which is Christ, and understand the better that eternal gospel, which as we have established, is essentially a fact and a person. That enlargement which we can verify in all churches freed from the yoke of outward authority, is not only favourable to the true progress of the Christian conception, but also to its preservation. One of the most significant characteristics of this progress in our age is that it makes more than ever of the human element in the gospel, without detracting in anything from its divinity. To the metaphysical abstractions which effaced the original character of this great past has succeeded a really historical comprehension which makes it live again before our eyes. Thus in our conception of the very personality of Christ, he has come nearer us without ceasing to be the Son of God who saves us and lifts us up again. The heart as well as the intellect finds its advantage in this evolution of Christian thought, which is a return to its original; and now, indeed, it is more necessary than ever that the fire of a holy enthusiasm and a fervent love for Christ should kindle up again in Christian souls, amid all the distractions of modern life, which has become so complex through the development of human activity in every sphere, artistic, industrial, commercial, or scientific.

It must not be forgotten that after all the chief struggle of Christianity is not against such or such a system, but against the power of evil, against sin which destroys us; and that it is above all a work of redemption, of restitution, and of salvation. It is this which distinguishes it from the two great religions which dispute with it the world. Buddhism is the religion of absolute nothingness, of Nirvana, placing salvation in death and in annihilation, and only retaining its millions of adherents by concessions ever more and more frequent to idolatrous fetichism. Mohammedanism is merely a materialisation of Judaism, making of its Allah a God at once terrible and indulgent, for he has only murderous rage for those who do not hasten on in the footsteps of his pretended prophet to the brutal conquest of the world, while at the same time he is full of indulgence to a life of sensuality, which after being largely satisfied on earth expects its final gratification in a sensual paradise. To reconquer the millions of men held within the grasp of these two great religions, and those who belong to fetichistic idolatry, which is a survival of prehistoric humanity, Christianity has spared no effort, and has never refused to pour out the blood of its martyrs. Therefore, everything brings us back to the necessity for a struggle without cessation, both near and far off, against the powers of evil which everywhere wage war against it.

If the dust of the battle sometimes casts a shadow over the true character of Christianity, it none the less remains vigorous and living as it was eighteen centuries ago. We recognise it, even under forms the least favourable, by the intensity of its religious life, by its love of God and of Christ inseparable from its love for man, who would perish without it. Its career of conquest, far from being diminished, has increased largely during the last century through the magnificent development of its missions abroad and at home. Its charity never ceases to multiply works of benevolence and of relief. The eye of faith discerns across the great and tremendous struggle which sums up the whole of human history, a combatant greater than the greatest and holiest of Christian soldiers—that divine hero of whom Luther says in his immortal hymn, that he fights for us and with us. It is for this reason that we say at the conclusion, as at the commencement: Christianity is Jesus Christ.

For a list of works on Christianity, Christian Dogma, and Church History, see the article CHURCH HISTORY and the bibliography appended.