B OOKS.
M. GUIZOT AND THE PAPACY.*
Tnz same year that has seen the most learned theologians of Italy disclaim the necessity of temporal power for Catholicism, is destined, by a strange contrast, to hear M. Guizot, Protestant and professed Liberal, declare that Christianity is in danger if Rome be incorpo- rated with Italy. Inconsistent as this reasoning may seem, it is not so in the main, and it is due to M. Guizot himself to let his grounds be clearly understood. When we first heard in England that the ex- minister of a constitutional King had invited the Calvinists of France to give all their " sympathy to the great Christian Church," and had called the liberation of Italy " a deplorable perturbation," there were many among us who feared lest the statesman was carried away by the vulgar spirit of faction. There are men in France whose noble abhorrence of despotism has betrayed them into an un- dignified opposition to the great impulses which the illegitimate go- vernment trades upon and the wise policy it pursues. They love liberty and truth much, but they hate Caesar more. They are Aus- trians, if the sovereign is Italian ; Ultramontane, if he is Liberal; Protectionist, if he wishes to unfetter trade. M. Guizot's book will, we think, relieve him from any suspicion of having changed his nature or his principles. It is not a party pamphlet, and if it deals with events of the day, it treats them throughout from a higher point of view. M. Guizot wishes success to the Pope, not that the Government of the Tuileries may be embarrassed or overthrown, but that society may retain its faith in God. The argument would be more natural in the mouth of a Carmelite or a Jesuit ; M. Guizot says, and we fully accept his statement, that he is still Protestant to the core. He has carried similar contradictions with him through a long course of public policy, and his faith is only the counterpart of his states- We make this parallel the more readily because M. Guizot himself has invited it, and his present work is pieced with an extract from a political manifesto in which, some years ago, he explained the prin- ciples of his life and the causes of its failure to his friends. Review- ing the past from the serene heights of oldage and learned retire- ment, he believes that an over-generous confidence in good was the real cause of the disorder that overwhelmed himself, his sovereign, and constitutional liberty. There are some, indeed, who think differently, who ascribe the outburst of February to "the faults of the King, who governed too much, and of his ministers, who governed ill." But the more M. Guizot thinks of it, the more he is astonished " that people stop thus at the surface of things and within the small circle of political actors, when it is so easy, in looking higher and further, to recognize the true causes of our misfortunes and our re- verses." The fact is, he proceeds to show, we are in a phase of civili- zation, when the conservative forces at most scarcely balance the revolutionary. Once divide the party of order, as it was split up in France into IJegitimists and Orleanists, and the ultimate triumph of an armed democracy is assured. M. Guizot and his friends were misled by the generous enthusiasm of idealists. They attempted "to found a monarchy, a free monarchy," in the midst of a society that had only received the imperfect education of books, and the dangerous training of revolutions. Their failure is one of the saddest pages in history ; but M. Guizot thinks himself the wiser for his experience. He was too exclusively the statesman of the middle classes; he now warns his order that they must ally themselves with the historical families of France. He has also carried away a prin- ciple from the battle of ideas ; he now sees that "resistance is, whatever may be said, the first mission of Government." Common minds would imagine that these were the views of a man who had lost his faith in liberty, but M. Guizot assures us that common minds would be wrong. In the mistakes and reverses of society "there is enough to humble our pride but not to crush our ',hopes." Only "let us hasten to leave the tracks into which the spirit of revolution has hurried us ; they would always lead us to the same abyss." It is easy to see how this line of reasoning may be transferred to the domain of conscience. Looking to religion, M. Guizot sees the same great strife between order and anarchy, faith and doubt. " Whilst Catholicism is threatened in its outward establishment, all Christi- anity is exposed in its foundations, and its essence to yet graver attacks and profouhder perils." An article in the Revue des Deux Moisdes on "Essays and Reviews" is quoted to show the expectation of sceptics that religion will die if it be disengaged from dogma, and that man if he rend the veil and see God face to face, will find that the object of his worship "is nothing but man himself, the con- science and reason of humanity personified." The necessity of a belief in the supernatural is then established by a singular argu- ment. Having proved that God exists, because we pray' to Him, M. Guizot goes on to observe that He must have existed in order to create man. Philosophers who talk of spontaneous generation forget that it would only have produced an infant, "inert, unintelligent, powerless, . . . shivering and wailing, without a mother to hear and nourish him." It is natural, we suppose, that a knowledge of Mr. Darwin's primary ciliated cell should not yet have reached the old Minister of Education, but surely the works of Lamarque and Agassiz might have taught M. Guizot that there were at least two theories of creation, which are not strictly biblical, and which are not based on faith in the supernatural, though they do not necessarily contradict it, and which the argument about babies does not touch. Equally feeble is the chapter on "The two Gods." We believe, as firmly as M. Guizot, that the • E spun et in Societi Chreliennee en 1861. Par hi. GuIssoL London: D. Nutt. God we worship "is not the personification of the forces of nature, nor of human faculties, nor of the heroes of humanity ;" but we deny that any sharp line can be drawn between rival conceptions of Deity, as between good and evil in their practical embodiments. If the question be. one of existence, there is clearly only one God, not any duality of rival powers ; if it is one of human belief, will any man even pretend to say how far Socrates was an idolater, or how far the
i best among us is a Christian ? We dwell upon these misconceptions, for they show i how completely M. Guizot is a child in abstract i
thought. Yet it is on these foundations that he wishes to build up the fabric of European polity. "Catholic or Protestant, a common danger is this day menacing the Christian Churches ; the common foundations of their faith are attacked ; they have all the same in- terest and the same duty—to defend them, for they would perish equally in the ruin of the edifice under which they all live." But in order to be strong, to be able to think freely and speak unreservedly, the Catholic Church must be independent and free. It is scarcely necessary to conclude the argument which every reader must already have anticipated. The atrocious paradox of M. Odilon Barra, that "the two powers must be confounded in the Roman States in order that they may be separated in the rest of the world ;" in other words, that five million men must be misgoverned, and a nation of twenty-five millions crippled in order that the French and German clergy may be a little more independent of the police —is repeated and endorsed. A chapter against universal suffrage, another in favour of a federation instead of a monarchy, a few declarations on the sanctity of treaties, and constant invectives against the revolution and Mazzini, pretty much make up the re- mainder of the book. It is instructive to know that M. Guizot would have advised the Pope to conciliate his subjects by giving them large municipal privileges, which would have precluded the desire for national unity. There is no reason to suppose that any counsels with a leaven of common sense would have been accepted during the last fifty years at the Vatican; but it is difficult, in the presence of this book, to regret that the revolution of '48 has removed a mis- chievous and narrow-minded man from the sphere of political action.
It is jiot a pleasant task to arraign the conduct of an old man who
has done good service to letters, who has been a friend to England, and who has in some sort redeemed his faults in power by the dignity of his exile. But M. Guizot has challenged attack, and mistakes the reserve of men who pity his misfortunes for the fellowship of opinion. Let him clearly understand that English Liberals regard him as the man whose pedantic and fatal mediocrity has adjourned constitutional freedom in France indefinitely. It has been for thirty years the scandal and shame of our institutions on the Continent, that the king and the minister who had studied them most completely, had carried sway no other idea than that that government was a dodge, a balance of interests on the Exchange, of votes in the depart- meats or in the Chambers; a system of which corruption was the instrument and trade the final end ; which garrisoned Ancona, courted Austria, and supported the Pope ; which maintained and increased the secret police, and surrounded Paris with fortresses which failed it in the first hour of need. This is government such as Walpole's worst days never saw in England. We allow M. Guizot the merit of keeping peace, though there is reason to doubt if his morality would have shrunk from a safe annexa- tion. We grant that the press was comparatively „free, and its liberty may be set off against the deep corruption of French literature, whose beginning is almost synchronous with the Orleans dynasty. But a nation has other wants than journals and trade. What idea, except a Parliamentary majority, did M. Guizot re- present ? He had not the greatness of character which enabled Chatham to reconcile a faction still furious from its defeat to the throne of its conquerors. He had not the broad sympathies which might have supplied the place of intelligence in enabling him to grapple with the social problems of his time, and he himself has registered his own condemnation when he tells us that the revolution of '30 was purely political, and that of '48 almost purely social. Belonging to a country which is eminently sympathetic with the wants of other nationalities, M. Guizot tried to embody a compromise between the Holy Alliance and English oligarchy. He himself tells us that while the Italians were groaning for liberty, he was thinking of treaties, of the status quo, and of possible federations. We are far from denying that he had some success in his own peculiar line. He contrived to irritate and mortify the late Czar on a question of etiquette, and he carried his point in the Spanish marriages at the price of the English alliance, and we should think of his own self- respect. He tells us that the remembrance of constitutional liberty is still vivid in France. We believe its memories are most attractive in proportion as they are most distant, and as men can study Eng- land and Italy instead of MM.: Guizot and Tillers. We are not inclined to extenuate the faults of Imperialism, but the last three years have done more for freedom in Europe than the forty that pre• ceded them.
Still more unreservedly would we reject M. Guizot's advocacy of
religion. We, also, can venerate the Catholicism of St. Bernard and Pascal, but we shrink from that strange spectre of the old Church that sits robed in purple and dabbled with blood amid the ruins of Rome. We also deplore that the soldiers of Christ should be divided under different ensigns, when the foe is trenching the walls of their citadel, but we cannot wish to gather them under any watchword but truth. M. Guizot feels for the falling hierarchy, and we for the oppressed people and the dishonoured religion. If a feeble respect for old conventions, a morbid sentiment for mere misfortune, could so far mislead the Protestant world as to think that the trappings of the Pope, and the liveries of the cardinals, are greater realities in God's order than truth and justice, peace and good-will among men, then indeed we should tremble for the very altars of our faith. Does M. Gnizot seriously believe that a triple alliance of Canterbury, Geneva, and Rome to exclude the Italian flag from the Vatican will calm the doubts of the rationalist, restore faith to the unbeliever, or flash light upon the blind multitude who are now groping darkly after a God ? We accept, for the purpose of arcrao ment, his dread that a shock to established systems may shake belief in the creed which they have embodied ; and, being called upon to choose between religion maintained by a lie, or religion beggared and outcast, we deliberately prefer the latter. The friendship of Con- stantine was more fatal to the faith than Pilate's enmity. We sus- pect the new evangelist who tells us that the Church of Christ is founded upon the rock of an Italian principality. For ourselves, we trust firmly in the cross of wood that once saved mankind, and prefer that it be not inlaid with gold, or propped with bayonets. If we have read the lessons of political and religious freedom rightly, God's world can take care of itself, and God's truth can outlive church establishments.
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