The Woes Of France Have Sprung From The Fact That A Jezebel De Medici
Succeeded In Exterminating From The Nation That Portion Of The People
Corresponding To The Puritans Of Scotland, England, And Germany.
The
series of persecutions which culminated in the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, and ended with the dragonades under Louis XIV., drained
France of her lifeblood.
Other nations have profited by the treasures
then cast out of her, and she has remained poor for want of them. Some
of the best blood in America is of the old Huguenot stock. Huguenots
carried arts and manufactures into England. An expelled French refugee
became the theological leader of Puritanism in England, Scotland, and
America; and wherever John Calvin's system of theology has gone, civil
liberty has gone with it; so that we might almost say of France, as
the apostle said of Israel, "If the fall of them be the riches of the
world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how
much more their fulness!"
When the English and Americans sneer at the instability, turbulence,
and convulsions of the French nation for the last century, let us ask
ourselves what our history would have been had the "Gunpowder Plot"
succeeded, and the whole element of the reformation been exterminated.
It is true, vitality and reactive energy might have survived such a
process; but that vitality would have shown itself just as it has in
France - in struggles and convulsions. The frequent revolutions of
France are not a thing to be sneered at; they are not evidences of
fickleness, but of constancy; they are, in fact, a prolonged struggle
for liberty, in which there occur periods of defeat, but in which,
after every interval of repose, the strife is renewed. Their great
difficulty has been, that the destruction of the reformed church in
France took out of the country entirely that element of religious
rationalism which is at once conservative and progressive.
There are three forces which operate in society: that of blind faith,
of reverent religious freedom, and of irreverent scepticism. Now,
since the human mind is so made that it must have religion, when this
middle element of reasonable religious freedom is withdrawn, society
vibrates, like a pendulum, between scepticism and superstition; the
extreme of superstition reacting to scepticism, and then the
barrenness of scepticism reacting again into superstition. When the
persecutions in France had succeeded in extinguishing this middle
element, then commenced a series of oscillations between religious
despotism and atheistic license, which have continued ever since. The
suppression of all reasonable religious inquiry, and the consequent
corruption of the church, produced the school of Voltaire and his
followers. The excesses of that school have made devout Catholics
afraid of the very beginning of religious rationalism; and these
causes act against each other to this day.
The revolution in England, under Cromwell, succeeded, because it had
an open Bible and liberty of conscience for its foundation, and united
both the elements of faith and of reason. The French revolution had,
as Lamartine says, Plutarch's Lives for its Bible, and the great
unchaining of human passion had no element of religious control. Plad
France, in the time of her revolution, had leaders like Admiral
Coligny, her revolution might have prospered as did England's under
Cromwell. But these revolutions, needlessly terrible as they have
been, still have accomplished something; without them France might
have died away into what Spain is. As it is, progress has been made,
though at a fearful sacrifice. No country has been swept cleaner of
aristocratic institutions, and the old bastiles and prisons of a past
tyranny. The aspiration for democratic freedom has been so thoroughly
sown in France, that it never will be rooted up again. How to get it,
and how to _keep_ it when it is got, they do not yet clearly see;
but they will never rest till they learn. There is a liberty of
thought and of speech in France which the tongue-tied state of the
press cannot indicate. Could France receive the Bible - could it be
put into the hands of all the common people - _that_ might help
her. And France is receiving the Bible. Spite of all efforts to the
contrary, the curiosity of the popular mind has been awakened; the
yearnings of the popular heart are turning towards it; and therein lie
my best hopes for France.
One thing more I would say. Since I have been here, I have made the
French and continental mode of keeping Sunday a matter of calm,
dispassionate inquiry and observation. I have tried to divest myself
of the prejudices - if you so please to call them - of my New England
education - to look at the matter sympathetically, in the French or
continental point of view, and see whether I have any occasion to
revise the opinions in which I had been educated. I fully appreciate
all the agreeableness, the joyousness, and vivacity of a day of
recreation and social freedom, spent in visiting picture galleries and
public grounds, in social _reunions_ and rural excursions. I am
far from judging harshly of the piety of those who have been educated
in these views and practices. But, viewing the subject merely in
relation to things of this life, I am met by one very striking fact:
there is not a single nation, possessed of a popular form of
government, which has not our Puritan theory of the Sabbath.
Protestant Switzerland, England, Scotland, and America cover the whole
ground of popular freedom; and in all these this idea of the Sabbath
prevails with a distinctness about equal to the degree of liberty. Nor
do I think this result an accidental one. If we notice that the
Lutheran branch of the reformation did not have this element, and the
Calvinistic branch, which spread over England and America, did have
it, and compare the influence of these two in sustaining popular
rights, we shall be struck with the obvious inference.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 113 of 119
Words from 114048 to 115047
of 120793
