26 SEPTEMBER 1874, Page 10

M. GUIZOT AND THE FAILURE OF FRENCH PROTESTANTISM.

TT would be interesting to hear what M. Thiers, M. Renan, 1 and M. Taine thought of M. Guizot's fervent Protestantism. His great political rival had the best of grounds for knowing that M. Guizot was a man of the first mark as a debater and a Minister. M. Renan and M. Taine would express hearty admi- ration for the philosophical genius displayed in the lectures on the civilisation of Europe and France. All the greater must have been their astonishment that a man so gifted and so cultivated should be an ardent believer in the Protestant theo- logy of the sixteenth century, and should become a leader of the Protestant Consistory. They might have wondered less if Guizot had been a Catholic, if he had paid philoso- phical compliments to his creed in the Revue des Dear Attondes, and if he had vaguely branded the enemies of the Church 28 a gang of Republican ruffians ; for they would have inferred that he was only playing a part, and that he was at heart as sceptical as themselves. French Catholicism will draw many unbelievers to its side, so long as it shall remain one of the ways to political and social power. But Protestantism is more disliked and distrusted in France than Dissent is in English society, and any eminent man who professes its dogma and leads its councils gives an undeniable proof that he is sincere. Nor, indeed, could anybody doubt the sincerity of Guizot. His .enemies might say that he was a fanatic, but not that he was a hypocrite. His fanaticism was the more puzzling to his country- men, because there was nothing like it among the rest of their foremost minds.

The real leaders of French 'thought either formally adhere to the Catholic Church and smile at her teaching, or they hold scornfully aloof from all Churches whatever. Guizot was the only real exception. One-half of his nature seemed to belong to the nineteenth century, and the other half to the sixteenth. Nothing could be more philosophical than the temper in which he handles the roots of European civilisation. Not only are his lec- tures models of dignified impartiality, but they everywhere show a masterly comprehension of those general causes which shape institutions and beliefs, and which seem to work with such a fatalistic power that the theological spirit is prone to explain them away. Guizot, however, displayed the temper of a Calvin when face to face with those heretics who sought to soften the hard edges of the Huguenot creed. Nay, although he censured Calvin for allowing Servetus to be burned, we suspect that Guizot himself would not have lifted a hand to save Servetus, if he had stood in Calvin's place. His was just the kind of temper out of which stormy days and repellent fanaticism make martyrs and persecutors. He was a Reformer of the sixteenth century, born out of due time; and all the culture of a scientific age could not crush his theological instincts.

Guizot gloried in his Protestantism. " ,Te finis Protestant," he said, in a tone which denoted that he was proud of his theologi- cal loneliness. And yet he had no delusions as to the future of his Church. France," he said, "will not become Protestant Protestantism," he added, "will not perish in France." He seemed to think that the two creeds would continue in divide between them the devout part of the French people, Catholicism drawing to itself those who feared inquiry or who pined for rest, while Protestantism would attract those more robust souls to whom freedom was a necessity ; but both, he anticipated, would join hands to fight infidelity and impiety, their common foe. Hence, he would never engage ix polemical warfare against Catholicism, and he grieved some of his best friends by de- nouncing the destruction of the Pope's temporal power. He was perhaps the only Frenchman of first-rate ability who believed that the two Churches could sign a truce ; that each could live peace- fully in its own conquered territory; and that they would divide the future between them. Catholic controversialists disdainfully refused even to discuss a proposition which their instincts told them to be a piece of theological moonshine ; and the chiefs of the Huguenots might have risen from the grave to de- nounce such an alliance with the Antichrist that was drunk with the blood of the Saints. "Was it," they might have asked, "for so mild a gain as good-fellowship with our idolatrous and sanguinary foe that our people were slaughtered on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, and that half-a-million of them left their country for ever, or went to the living -death of the galleys, or were butchered in dragonnades ? If so, then indeed has the Protestantism of France been a failure." Yes, it has been a failure, and the causes of that failure form -one of the saddest chapters in the history of Christianity. The Protestants of France still, it is true, form a large body, .and they are profoundly respectable. They hold a good share of the national wealth, and they bear a high repute for intelligence and moral wealth. Those Frenchmen, and especially those French- women, who happen to be Protestants, are presumably better than the mass of their neighbours. The old Huguenot beauty of family life is not entirely lost. The culture of the average Protestant ministry is also high when compared with that of the average Catholic priesthood. Some of the most respected members of the National Assembly are Protestants. But none the less does French Protestantism seem to have no future. It displays none of that aggressive power which is the surest sign of life, and little collec- tive activity. It makes few pretensions, and it appears almost content to be let alone. It scarcely dares to answer the attacks of the Catholic controversialists with claims as haughty as their own, and nothing could be more unlike the old fierce pride of the Huguenots than the meekness of their descendants.

The usual explanation of this failure is that Protestantism does not suit the genius of the French people ; bat that theory is as shallow as it is common-place. Protestantism did suit the genius of the French people at the time of the Re- formation. Before the Reformation, France was the chief seed- field of heresies in which lay the germs of Protestant theo- logy. Calvin was a typical Frenchman, and no book is more French than his "Institutes." His theology commended itself to the French people by the simplicity and the remorseless rigour of its logic. And before it had been composed, less pre- cise and more mystic declarations of the Gospel had been spread broad-cast among the people and the nobility-. The new doc- trines made way in France faster than they did in England. In the time of Catherine de Medici, the Huguenots had almost an equality of power with their rivals. The Massacre of St. Bar- tholomew was a confession that the Court party felt treachery to be safer than open war. And the Huguenots were then incompar- ably the finest part of the French people. They included the best of the nobles, the scholars, the men of letters, crowds of those burghers who were the backbone of industry, and of those artisans who afterwards carried the arts of France to other lands. The earnestness, the morality, and the culture of the nation were on their side. There are few more beautiful episodes in religious story than the pictures of Huguenot homes. They were free from that for- bidding austerity which marred the moral fairness of our own Puri- tan households. It is an interesting and suggestive fact, that the Protestants were the first of the French people to give choral song and congregational melody their fitting place in the public worship of their country. They composed psalms which are still sung ; and the hostile population of Paris were often charmed by the strains of melody that came from the meeting-places of sectaries against whom the pulpit and the confessional thundered sanguinary anathemas that have not escaped the record of history. Nor can it be said that the Huguenota were not faithful even unto death ; for they bore such persecutions as we can parallel only in the slaughter of the Albigenses and Alva's oppression of the Dutch. The mas- sacre of St. Bartholomew, it is true, was a deed of vengeance which they could not escape; but their choice was free after the Revoca- tion of the Edict which they owed to a great King, and they then made sacrifices for their faith that seem almost incredible in these days of softer moral fibre. We English often speak as if we could have defied persecution. But we were never tried like the Huguenots. All the agonies of our Protestantism seem but trivial annoyances when set beside the vengeance which Louis XIV. took on the heretics. All that we have suffered for our Protestantism seems scarcely worthy of a record when compared with the pathetic and awful anguish of the Huguenots. The infatuation of bigotry took away the very life- blood of French manhood, and left the country a moral desert. The Catholic Church of France was at last victorious, after a struggle of a century and a half ; but she bought her triumph at a deadly cost to herself, as well as to her country. Henceforth she had no need to put forth anything like her ancient energies. Henceforth she could take her ease. "She felt herself," as Robert Hall said, "at liberty to become as ignorant, as secular, as irreligious as she pleased ; and amid the silence and darkness she had created around her, she drew the curtains and retired to rest." The Catholic Church of France has never recovered from the deadly blow which was inflicted on her rival. And still less has the nation recovered from that destruction of all that was best in its manhood. When the Revolution let loose the blind fury of pent-up passion, the supreme need was an intelligent, conservative, religious middle-class, to act as a breakwater against that flood. Then, indeed, might the most sceptical of statesmen and the most fervent of Catholic devotees have turned a wistful eye to those great sectaries who had attested the richness of their manhood by sacri- ficing home, and comfort, and life for the sake of an austere faith. But it was too late for reparation. Persecution can kill Churches, if only it be pitiless and prolonged enough ; and the piety of Louis XIV. left nothing to be desired on the side of cool and persistent fury. Many of the Huguenots, it is true, escaped, and either hid their faith under a superficial conformity to the will of the King, or continued to meet for worship amid the solitudes of their country. Those Churches of the Desert, as they are called, have left beautiful and heroic records. Perhaps they still dreamed of a day when the Gospel should triumph. And they might have again recovered their lost ground when the blast of persecution had passed by, if it had not been for a potentate greater than the great King, and that was Voltaire. That moral desert which the Church called peace was the best of all seed-fields for him, and the deadly satire of his criticism killed the piety of France even more successfully than the Court had smitten her Protestantism. He, and such as he, alone profited by the destruction of Huguenot society. When Protestantism was again free to speak, the man- hood of the nation was unfit to understand its Gospel, and it has ever since been addressed to deaf ears. The secular spirit has given itself into the keeping of Voltairianism, and it now wonders why men who can reject the miracles of Catholicity should not be consistent enough to reject the remaining miracles of Christianity. Shocked by the scoffing impiety of such criticism, the more devout and mystic souls fear to trust themselves in a Church which does not altogether disdain the weapons of rationalism, and they rush to the protection of Rome. And the Protestant Church has shown that the dread is not ill-founded. Disdain for the super- stitions of Rome has made many of the Reformed theologians destructive critics ; contact with scepticism has begotten a wish to abridge the region of the supernatural ; and hence, in spite of the sturdy resistance made by Guizot and the orthodox party, there has been a strenuous attempt in the Consistory to secure toleration for teaching which denies the Divinity of Christ. Louis Veuillot and his party jeeringly say that Protestantism is thus fulfilling the law of its being by becoming splinters of Rationalism ; and Guizot often warned his fellows that although those fragments might produce a philosophy, they could never form a religion.

On the other hand, as our correspondent "J. M. L." said last week, most of the men in France hate the Catholic Church with a fury which is scarcely comprehensible even to those Englishmen who are smitten with the fever of "No Popery." The un- educated artisans regard her with a ferocity which, in a time of disturbance, ever leads them to the brink of violence ; while the cultivated classes, when they do not find it convenient to put on the robes of devotees, treat the priesthood with mingled anger and disdain. It is the rich, trading middle-class that gives the Church her new strength. At the same time, the supreme need of France, for temporal as well as for eternal reasons, is a religious faith which she can really respect and believe. Even if a great religious reformation were to add to her troubles for a time, it would ultimately give society a rest and a seriousness which it has not known for centuries. But that is one of those aspira- tions which are satires on what we see. There is no sign of a great religious transformation on all the dark horizon of France. In vain do we look alike to Catholicism and Protestantism for a creed that can soften the bard, atheistic secularism of her life ; and meanwhile, the earnestness which other peoples throw into religion France flings into politics. She debates the practical problems of daily life with a theological fury ; the rival parties pursue each other with exterminating passion ; and thus is she tossed from revolution to revolution.