BOOKS.
EDMOND SCHERER.*
THIS biography is of extreme interest, and we have to thank M. Greard for the delicately painted portrait of a man whose spiritual experience is not unlike that which many of us have undergone. To track Scherer from his boyhood to his old age,
and note the subtle changes of his sincere, coldly passionate, earnest soul ; to follow the slow process of his disillusions ; to appreciate the labour by which he sought to find compensation for his loss in a closer grasp of vanishing truth, was no easy task. Though without the personal charm and affectionate frankness of Newman's Apologia, Scherer's struggle towards absolute truth has somewhat similar interest, as it is a record of bow the religious problems of the day affected as pure and as ardent a nature as that of the great Cardinal's, though we do not compare with Newman's the genius or power of the man whose final convictions were so different. Scherer's circum- stances do not interest us as does the "Oxford Movement." His conclusions tend to the depression rather than the exalta- tion of humanity; but his inner life has exceptional value as a mirror in which we see how the great Calvinist traditions on the Continent fare under the German criticism which has staggered so many in England ; and if Scherer succumbed, the interest is all the more poignant for the reluctant souls who have found, as he did, no firm ground to stand on when the " Impregnable Rock " was shaken.
Edmond Scherer• was one of twin boys born in 1815, in Paris. His father was of Swiss parentage, settled for more than a century in France. His mother (Miss Hubbard) was English, and her mother Dutch ; and some characteristics of both nations were not less strongly marked in him than were his French care for form and overmastering logic. Though he was a devourer of most incongruous books, he did not thrive at his Paris school; and when he was sixteen, his parents determined to change completely the influences around him. They sent him to Monmouth, where he was under the care of a clergyman belonging to the Evangelical school, a conscientious and austere master, ready to second the boy in his zeal for Blackstone and Burke, as well as in his Biblical studies. New horizons from the Calvinistic point of view opened before him. Duty and ideal life were revealed to him with the suddenness which inspired the entry in his note-book : " 25th December, Christmas, conversion." Thirty years later, in an admirable study on Essays and Reviews, entitled La Crise de la Pro- testantisme, Scherer regretfully describes the food on which his fervent youth was fed, and the doctrines which seemed a sufficient scaffolding on which his spirit might attain to its final cause :—
" The human soul desires the infinite, and when a man turns from earth to heaven asking that his thirst for eternity should be quenched, he was answered by formulas or sterile syllogisms. To look with love towards the past, was to incur suspicion of heresy: to seek support from ritual and joy in worship, was superstition : to yield to instincts of adoration, repentance, sacrifice, was to be ,believing : all that was vague and intangible, and all that was in religion, was neglected or disparaged. There must be ,templation, no ideal, and no poetry. Sermons must rise instead of altars, proselytism become -.mooning the only spiritual sustenance."
`'-,crard, de l'Acad4mie Franclise. Paris : The prolonged effort to meet the demands of his own conscience, and to keep the foundering boat of Calvinism from going down in the eddies of modern thought, has in his case the elements of tragedy, so much of his soul had he ventured in the conflict, so deeply had his faith been rooted. He was exceptionally gifted with intellect and moral virtue, with ardent enthusiasm and imaginative sensibility under his cold and reserved manner, and he wagered all on the harshest and narrowest of the Christian creeds. Wagered. and lost, for in spite of courage and labour, . and fine criticism, and an unsullied reputation, who can compare the elder Scherer with the younger as they are painted in this biography ? We can, indeed, understand how Scherer the critic could have been intensely dogmatic; but it is not so easy to conceive him rapt in mystic consciousness of the im- mediate presence of Christ, as he notes in his diary on more than one occasion. He was but eighteen when he wrote his first paper in the Semeur, marked by the proselyting zeal which was born of his conviction that "religions truths are the only certain ones." To be a minister of the Word was his steady purpose, and to prepare worthily he went at twenty-one to study at Strasburg under Reuss. There he acquired habits of intellectual sincerity which served him all his life. The amount of work he set himself was enormous, and as we read of five theological lectures a day, we feel oppressed by the forecast of what should result. M. Greard does not give us the exact date of Scherer's marriage to his charming and true helpmate, but it was during this period of enthusiastic attempt to scale the sacred heights of theological truth. Meantime he had become the most hopeful champion of the school of the Oratoire, a Revivalist schism within the Genevan com- munity which in some degree corresponded with the Scotch Free Church. The leaders of it determined to equip Scherer with every weapon, and after his consecration he was invited to preach his first sermon at a small German town where a Revivalist group bad been formed. We can imagine him, in the description of one of his hearers, " gentle and serious, his large eyes wet now and then with tears, his pale cheeks slightly coloured by the profound sense that he stood there in God's behalf and for his glory." Yet Scherer was never eloquent. He haughtily excused himself in later years for silence in the Chamber because he could not habitually allow enough for the inconsequence and weakness of other men. In his youth, he could not admit that persuasion was necessary to gain admission for the infallible doctrines of Geneva, the Rome of Protestantism. Yet Geneva itself was rent in twain. The treaties of 1815 had added seventeen Catholic communes to Calvin's Republic, which wrought in it change as an alkali might destroy an acid. From being the domain of MM. de la Compagnie, as the pasteurs were called, it became a Radical democracy. Finding the established Socinianism of no popular force, the Conservative Party, at first for political reasons, abetted the religious revival which just then spread as a wave over Europe, and was first preached at Geneva by Haldane and Drummond. At the same time, the pasteurs, alarmed for their " old bottles," were forced to forbid discussion of certain doctrines of primary importance, and to formulate their own, A schism followed, led by the more ardent preachers. Vinet at Lausanne, a man of singular personal influence as of ability, had created a school of ardent individualists, and Gammen at Geneva, maintained as a first article of faith, and, indeed, a necessary adjunct to Christian individualism, the plenary in- spiration of Scripture. " On the question of inspiration," said• Scherer, "depends the existence of Christianity ;" "plenary inspiration is the assured fortress of the Christian." The mystical partnership with Christ, the supreme authority of conscience illuminated by the Divine Master, taught by Vinet,. required, as Scherer saw, Biblical infallibility; indeed, in any- case there was danger that the sacred text idolised in theory- should be " evaporated " by the " Enfants de Dien," or mystics of Lausanne, who neglected the history of Christian faith for the moral beauty of Christian life. The Oratoire of Geneva welcomed the learning and scholarship of Scherer;: they had not sufficiently calculated on his logic. It is not possible to analyse the reasons for his change from exulting confidence, but in all its phases and logical sequence it is of touching interest. Excommunication soon followed his assertion of the new German teaching in all the clearness of French definition. It was as a flash of lightning in the- French Protestant world, and it set fire to much ; but he- remained quietly at Geneva after the crisis of 1850, lecturing and writing, yet with feebler and feebler hold of all dogma. His intellect, fettered by his attachment to the Christ whom he had attempted to re-enthrone among Genevan traditions, recoiled from the strain with energy equivalent to his twenty years of Calvinist zeal: " I can no more accept a dogma in opposition to the idea I have formed of divine concep- tions, than I can accept a precept which offends my feeling of right." And Calvinism had no basis in history to strengthen him at this turning-point, while his views of Catholic faith and tradition were obscured by hereditary prejudice, and he confounded it, in his passionate rejec- tion of all authority, with the Calvinistic idol. At this crisis of his life he reminds us of Pascal, whose writings he had profoundly studied, as did all Vinet's followers. Possibly Newman's Essay on Development might have helped him at this moment of crystallisation, by showing him the vitality of the Church as an organism capable of evolution coincident with the demands of human conscience; as it was, he suffered during the years that followed his ex- communication, " the profoundest revolution which can affect life,—that which is accomplished when we lose our grasp of the Absolute, and with the Absolute, the fixed forms, the inner sanctuary and the oracles of Truth." It does not seem sure that any new drift of the time wrought this revolution in Scherer, and certainly no change in his austere ideals of life. Rather was it a logical and honest recoil from untenable posi- tions which he had defended with his very heart's blood. Some still living friends remember with affectionate admiration his ten years of labour and controversy at Geneva after his aban- donment of the Oratoire, and Amiel's Journal has reminded us of the Thursday walks with Scherer to the azure heights of Salevc. The last dogma he gave up, one he had held strongly, was the existence of sin, a fact which in a manner marks his lofty standard; but during those years his literary and even his spiritual sympathies widened. In truth, he was acquiring that breadth which results from indifference. The shock of his change constrained him to sad renunciation of the indi- vidual liberty of which he had an exaggerated conception. Even it "is the inevitable illusion which belongs to conscious- ness of self," he wrote. He detested probability, and accepted no compromises with himself ; yet the pain of his loss must have been bitter when he wrote : " There is in human things a downward slope never to be re-ascended, and so I see myself carried on by the convictions of my intelligence towards a future which inspires neither confidence nor interest." In his production of Amiel's Journal Intime, the gloom is visible. The protean nature of his friend identifying itself with the flux and reflux of things, was more or less Hegelian, and in Hegel's philosophy Scherer found his best relief. The publication of his Melanges d'Histoire Religieuse, of which the essay on Hegel, which appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, is the most important, marks the last apparent transformation of his mind ; and the year of its publication, 1861, he left Geneva for the wider arena of Paris, as a man of letters, no longer a preacher of religion. Sainte-Beuve, who loved to sound the first note of welcome, gave Scherer's essays a very friendly causerie. No one outside the Protestant world knew much of the new writer, but Sainte-Beuve at once placed him between Renan and Taine, though the great critic found Germanisms and " small theological icicles " in his style. " Good-bye, baskets ; the vintage is gathered," Scherer said, as he addressed himself to his work in the Temps, with which he was associated from its foundation, and for which he wrote three thousand five hundred articles in the eighteen years that remained to him of studious life at Versailles, when be pos- sessed two houses, one for his books, and one for his family home, no longer, indeed, brightened by the presence of his wife, or of his favourite and most promising son, who had died within short space of one another. At Sainte-Beuve's death, Scherer, who had always been among his most admiring friends, took his place as chief authority in literature; but there was a fundamental difference in their methods. The intellectual asceticism of Scherer, the strongly marked out- lines of his figures, were different from the finer modelling of Sainte-Beuve. Scherer's exquisite purity hardly endured the dissection of immoral lives. In his volume on Diderot, he passes with averted face the scoria' of that volcano. His portrait of Madame Roland is a fine example of his art, and it is typical of his taste that be dwells so little on her weaker points, while he throws much of his own nobleness around her. Throughout the immense labour of sifting what relative truths were left to him, there are more sighs than smiles. He had put away from himself the "dreadfulness of eternal things," but with them the happy support of authority, and he betrays frequently his sense of outlawry by bitter words for humanity. " Is not her form that of an ape," he exclaimed, while he foretold her future as one of " increased comfort in an increasing vul- garity." He was revolted by the new writers, and clung to the " Raphaelesque Racine," to romance, and to poetry when it expressed the poet's personality, not the mere skill of his rhymes and rhythms. We willingly believe him when he said he would readily abandon the fruits of what he thought his intellectual conquest, " for one of those sweet flowers of piety and poetry which still perfume the path of the humble." Duty, and to " fight with chimeras," remained for Scherer's work in life. " Questions as obscure as menacing erect themselves before us," be wrote, "and we have for their solution an increasing discouragement and a waning hope." He could recommend to lesser men "amusement as a com- fortable deceit by which we avoid a permanent tote-a-tote with realities that are too heavy for us." Of modern guides, Darwin was perhaps his favourite; he hated the "mechanical adherents of foregone conclusions and horrible certitude ; " and yet his scorn was leavened with regret.
We have left ourselves no space to dwell on Scherer's patriotic constancy in 1870-71; his quiet work in the Chamber and the Senate, in the group of Moderate Republicans. Half-English as Scherer was, Thiers recognised his Parliamentary instinct ; but he soon left home interests to more talkative men, and gave himself to foreign politics. He wrote for the Boston Review, and from 1873 to 1878 for the Daily News, in such good English that he remained unsuspected. But his .Etudes sur la Litterature Contemporaine will probably be recognised as his best achievement. To us, the earlier essays on religion and philosophy have greater interest, illustrating as they do the spiritual career of an admirable intelligence and spotless conscience, under the tyranny of narrow but unauthoritative dogma, and the even greater tyranny of philosophical deter- minism. Faithfulness is a noble title to honour, and Scherer was faithful not only in the details of life, but also to his convictions, in friendship and at home, as when he renounced the higher life he longed for. Perhaps, indeed, he was moat faithful in his denial of faith ; perhaps he was never more truthful than when he lost his grasp of what he had mistakenly idolised as Truth.
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