CHURCH AND STATE IN FRANCE.
Its THE EDITOR or TEE "Seserrror.".1 SIR,—If I am unwilling to let pass unchallenged the statement in the "News of the Week" in the Spectator of February 16th that the French correspondent of the Times " convincingly refutes " a remark of mine respecting M. Briand's views, it is because in this, as in a previous instance, the Times corre- spondent refuted what I never said. I never described M. Briand's programme as one of sheer intolerance towards Christianity. On the contrary, in my first article I spoke of it as "to a large extent conciliatory," and it has since become more so. My remark in the Times of February 7th, which the Times correspondent appears, by exaggerating it, to refute, was that I had gone too far in emphasising in my articles M. Briand's comparative moderation, when I dissociated him from the atheistic speech of M. Viviani of November 9th,—a speech which shocked most Englishmen. The Times corre- spondent, far from "convincingly refuting" this position, gave in the course of his quotation from M. Briand's speech these words : "My friend and colleague M. Viviani in a splendid speech traced his ideal, which is mine also." My own limited remark—that H. Briand had associated himself with M. Viviani's speech—will be, I think, in the opinion of any candid reader, justified by this passage.
Nit the Times writer goes on to maintain that the " ideal " referred to by M. Briand is solely that of social and demo- cratic progress, and that M. Briand therefore did not refer to the atheistic passage. Yet the drift of my articles was to show that with the French Anti-Clerical there is no such hard-and-fast line of distinction. The liberation of the human mind from superstition—which means with him all religious belief—is an essential part of the Anti-Clerical ideal of social and democratic progress. And it was so represented in M. Viviani's speech. To say, then, that the ideal eulogised by M. Briand, being social and democratic, cannot be irreligious, is to assume just what the speech in question contradicts. M. Briand no doubt disclaimed intolerance in the words quoted in your columns, but he did not repudiate the place assigned in H. Viviani'e speech to the liberation of French citizens from the trammels of religious belief as part of the social and democratic ideal to be aimed at.
But, indeed, the evidence on this point is not merely negative. M. Briand only a few months ago did expressly speak of this side of his programme in words which must materially qualify our interpretation of his language on the neutrality of the State in matters religious. Addressing the Ligue de l'Enseignement at Angers last August, be said :
" We have come here to affirm our democratic faith, our secularist (taigas) faith,—to say that we want a country, a Republic, liberated from all the falsehoods, from all the tyrannies, of the creeds." The teachers of the future are, he said, to fashion "the. true man, the citizens of the veritable democracy, the man whose brain is not obstructed by the preoccupations of mystery and dogma." "As for this man," he went on to say, " the Godhead is in himself; and if this God has been hitherto AO often powerless and tottering and bent down under the burdens of life, it is because
falsehood and ignorance have too long bound down his efforts. It is for us to liberate him."
This aspiration, reported in Le Radical of August 6th, must not be forgotten by those who sincerely wish to see things as they are, and want to place M. Briand accurately. If Positivism and Naturalism are included in the term "religion," such words are not hostile to religion. But they can hardly be regarded as indicating a neutral rather than a hostile programme on the part of the Government with respeot to Christianity, and even to Theism. Therefore, I cannot, with the Spectator, regard M. Briand as consistently rejecting on behalf of the State "an attitude of hostility to the Church or religion." The general conclusion, I think, meat be that IL Briand's ideal for France is what English- men would call irreligious, but that he is too good a statesman to desire its realisation by measures of marked intolerance or acute persecution.—I am, Sir, &c., WILFRID WARD.
[Readers of Mr. Ward's letter should note the following re- marks made by the Times Paris correspondent in Friday's issue:
"I may, perhaps, be permitted to reply to a gratuitous insinua- tion contained in Mr. Wilfrid Ward's last letter to the Times which appeared on the 14th inst. It implies that because M. Briand expressed admiration for M. Viviani's speech as a whole without specially stating that he did not endorse the objection- able passage in it which has been so much commented upon in England, he must necessarily have approved of it. This inter- pretation on the part of Mr. Wilfrid Ward is entirely opposed to that of M. Briand himself, as was clearly set forth in my despatch of February 12, and, indeed, as it appears from M. Briand's speech of Tuesday. The principles he professes are different from Mr. Wilfrid Ward's account of them. If M. Briand's opponents in France hold the high opinion of his 'sincerity and loyalty' expressed in the Echo its Paris, it ill becomes foreigners, who are less familiar with the facts, to cast doubt thereon."
Spectator.]
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