BOOKS.
PRRE LACORDAIRE'S CONFERENCES.*
THERE is no eloquence in the Western world like that of the greater French orators. Of course, we must expect European eloquence to be rhetorical, which the still more moving eloquence of the East is not. Of this last, England had one or two fine specimens in flashes of the speeches of Kossuth, whose soliloquy in .the midst of passion, when forms of the past seemed to pass before his visionary eye and he forgot entirely the presence in which he stood, was infinitely more impressive than any direct appeal to the sympathies of men that we ever knew. But of eloquence of that rhetorical order which is partly conscious of the effect it is pro- ducing and visibly enjoys it, there is nothing in the English lan- guage to compare with the eloquence of the great French orators. Where in English sermons, for instance, can we match these ora- tions of Lacordaire ? Possibly we might more than match them in Dr. Newman's Discourses addressed to Mixed Congregations, the earliest volume published after his conversion, when his wonderful imagination was warmed by the first glow of his new life in a Church such as had for years been with him a dream and an ideal,—a dream which he had severely denied himself till his intellectual convic- tion was more fully ripened. But with this exception compare the sermons of our greatest English Protestant or Catholic preachers of this century with these Notre Dame 'Conferences' of Lacordaire, and we shall be surprised at the wonderful difference in intensity, in glow of thought and language, in the condensation of inward feeling, and in the art with which these elements are distributed over the whole of a long address. 1Ve doubt if this book will exercise any great spell over the intellect of one who reads it simply for the sake of its argument. There is too much of picturesque generalization, too little vivid presentation of the concrete difficulties which have actually haunted the minds of the most eager investigators of the truth of the Christian faith. At the end of almost every lee tare you say,—' Very noble, and, it may be also, very true, and yet that was not exactly what I needed to have explained to me.' Still, though Lacordaire rarely touches the very centre of modern difficulty and doubt, what he does do, as no other orator of our age has ever done, is to restore the general grandeur of effect to the whole work of Christ,— a grandeur which we are apt to lose in the discussion of this particular difficulty and, that, in the fair appreciation of the true condition of the historical evidence, in the fair appreciation of the bearing of the new scientific ideas which are the special inheritance of our generation on the Christian concep- tion of life, and so forth. In studying these latter points, which is, no doubt, the special duty of the present age, and especially of every Protestant Church in the present age, we are pretty certain to lose sight of the marvellous position of Christ in history,—of the centu- ries of preparation for him, of the paradoxical humility and audacity both of his disclaimers and claims, —in disavowing and forbidding so much which seemed easily within his reach, in commanding and pro- mising so much which seemed utterly beyond it,—aud of the won- derful justification accorded by history both to his disclaimer of im- mediate and visible power, and of his claim of ultimate and spiritual power through ages of growth and change. It is this general aspect of the life and history of Christ which Father Lacordaire retouched with such wonderful brilliance and fervour. These 'Conferences' have not solved a single difficulty which disturbed the present writer before reading them ; but they light up the whole story of Christianity with a new intensity, and though the art is often too conscious for English taste, there is so unmistakable a sincerity about the speaker's enthusiasm, —you see so clearly that it is the fire of the orator's own inner life which burns in these addresses, even where the rhetoric is most conspicuous and confessed, that you pardon the art which is so plainly the instrument of a natural genius, though of a natural genius with a strong insight into the secrets of what we call drect,—that is, into the secret of enhancing the weight of human speech by a dexterous use not only of what ought to convince men, but of what will do so, whether it ought or not, and, moreover, of what will carry them away for the moment, though, ultimately, it does not tend to strengthen even the least legitimate of the springs of their conviction.
Take, for instance, almost the opening passage of these lectures. The great Dominican begins by asking what is the primary cause of the phenomenon we call Christianity? "Is it the work of many, or of one alone ? " And he answers that it is the work of one man.
• Jesus Christ : Conferences delirerid at Notre Dame in Paris by the Rem Pere Laeordaire, of the Order of Friar-Preachers. Translated from the French with the author's permission by a Tertiary of the same Order. London: Chapman and Hall. "God has so willed it that the foundation of this great work should be something resembling ourselves, and that man so weak, so vain, should, like Atlas, bear earth and heaven upon his shoulders. Who is this man? What name does he bear on the tongues and in the memorials of the human race? I have no need to tell you his name ;—his name speaks and resounds of itself. Every man knows it from love or hatred, and in naming Jesus Christ, I am but the remote echo of all ayes awl all minds." How artistic and yet how simple an exordium ! It makes the eloquent French abbe who, full of his subject, was about to attempt to win over the keenest intel- lects of time most sceptical of modern critics to the faith, seem the all but accidental reflector of a sound of which the centuries were full. It makes his theme great with its true greatness from the very out- set, and prevents the most contemptuous of his hearers from under- rating the problem for which sceptic and believer alike must find his own solution.
Or, again, take this fine passage in the lecture on "'rho Inner Life of Jesus Christ,"—a passage with less of the orator and more of the real inward spirit of devotion in it than most of the most eloquent passages of Lacordaire
"In fine, the most ordinary skill seems to be unknown to him ; Ito makes of his death—of the time when he should have received therefrom so terrible a check to his divinity, and when he would no longer bo pre- sent to sustain his followers—ho makes, I say, of his death a snare for the faith of his disciples. in promising them to rise from the dead, and in leaving the confirmation of his whole life to that test, which, if ho were not God, could result only in a base fraud, or a flagrant contradic- tion This very forbearing to employ any human moans proves to the highest evidence his inflexible resolution, and the omnipotent energy of his will. Nevertheless, nothing cm he accomplished without means, without instruments. What means then—what instruments did Jesus Christ employ? Ah ! gentlemen, what means? Do you not see what means? It was himself, his inner force, the converse which ho held with himself, the sure possession of his essence. Men tremble because they see themselves. Jesus Christ did not tremble because he saw himself. Ho knew that his very word was Me may, the truth, and the life, he gave it to all who came, as the husbandman sows corn."
But there is more of the orator aud less of time real strength of inward life in Lacordaire when he touches on the philosophical sides of modern scepticism. Yet even there how fine the rhetoric is even where it is hardly argument ! Here, for instance, is his answer to the scientific objection to miracles, that "order, even when it comes from God, is not an arbitrary thing able to destroy or change itself at will ; order necessarily excludes disorder, and no greater disorder can be conceived in nature than that sovereign action which would possess the faculty of destroying its laws and its constitution. Miracles are impossible under these two heads ; impossible as disorder ; impossible because a partial violation of nature would be its total destruction." To this Lacordaire replies, —rhetorically as regards the special argument, but with a great effect, doubtless, on his audience :— " That is to say, gentlemen, that it is impossible for God to manifest himself by the single act which publicly and instantaneously announces His presence, by the act of sovereignty. Whilst the lowest in the scale of being has the right to appear in the bosom of nature by the exercise of its proper force ; whilst the grain of sand, called into the crucible of the chemist, answers to his interrogations by characteristic signs which range it in the registers of science, to God alone it should be denied to manifest his force in the personal measure that distinguishes him and makes him a separate being ! Not only should God not have manifested himself, but it must be for over impossible for him to manifest himself, in virtue even of the order of which ho is the creator. To act, is to live ; to appear, is to lire; to communicate, is to live ; but God can no longer act, appear, communicate himself ; that is denied to him. Banished to the profound depths of his silent and obscure eternity, if we interrogate Lim, if we supplicate him, if we cry to him, he can only say to us—supposing, however, that he is able to answer us : 'What would you have? I have mado laws! Ask of the sun and the stars, ask of the sea and the sand upon its shores; as for me, my condition is fixed, I sin nothing but repose, and the contemplative servant of the works of my hands!"
The objection to that eloquent reply is that it is based on a faith in a personal God such as those who urge the objection could not feel. Those who urge this objection simply identify God with the universal order, and concede Him no personal life within that order to express, —so that as an argument Lacordaire's re- joinder utterly fails. Still in so vigorously painting the pantheistic conception of God, Lacordaire probably produced more effect by repelling minds not yet deeply imbued with that conception, than any legitimate argument would have produced on minds that were.
Lacordaire was hardly perhaps a great thinker, but the rare felicity and delicacy with which he can at times describe the pre- cise shade of a great thinker's intellectual power is far from common in orators of so high an order of persuasive force. In the following passage, for instance, he is (rather mistakenly, we think) answering the objection that Christ availed himself of the con- ceptions sown by Plato,—as though every great philosopher in PropOrtioP to his greatness could have helped discovering the eternal truths of God, or preparing the world for their more perfect reve- lation. Lacordaire, however, is jealous lest our Lord should be thought to have availed himself of the teaching of Plato, and points out that Plato was a dualist in his philosophy of creation, and a necessitarian in his philosophy of volition, i. e., profoundly mistaken on two of the greatest branches of spiritual philosophy.
And then he goes on to paint what Plato was in a few lines of the most delicate skill :—
" Dualism and fatalism, such is that Plato so much admired—whom I have lauded myself, whom I shall still praise, a man admirable indeed, who, being plunged like all the others in the faint and almost extinguished light of antiquity, caught here and there glimpses of the shadow of truth and made plaintive cries to it, as if ho had beheld it ; but being unable to seize it, had thrown again over his desires and his regrets that royal vestment which has become the charm of his thoughts, the beauty of his discourse, and tho majesty of his renown. No sago ever equalled him in the invocation of truth ; none, foresaw its future more clearly; none over tinged the twilight of error with a halo more gorgeous or better formed to solace the soul for wedding but a dream."
" He caught here and there glimpses of the shadow of truth, and made plaintive cries to it, as if he had beheld it,"—" No sage ever equalled him in the invocation of truth,"—what wonderful insight and beauty of criticism there is in these sentences,—sentences almost accidentally imbedded in an eloquent lecture on modern rationalism.
These subordinate touches in Lacordaire are numerous, and they inlay his lectures with a beauty far above that of ordinary eloquence, however powerful. For our own parts, we prefer them to passages of much more popular and probably much more effective appeal,— like that really fine but too gorgeous one, at the end of the third lecture, in which he comments on the audacity of Christianity in making its home in Rome, and describes his own first pilgrimage to the Eternal City.
The whole volume—which is, in spite of a few obvious mis- takes, extremely well translated — is well worth study, not because it will remove many of the difficulties of thoughtful students of our own day, but because it restores to us an insight into the true scale and grandeur of the great religious problem, which the study of details is too apt to obscure. No one can help thinking more vividly of the meaning and formation of Christ in history for reading Lacordaire. He gives us back the striking out- lines and the rich colouring of a great series of historical and spiritual events, after the former had been hidden or foreshortened by the too near study of points of special difficulty, and the latter blanched by too much analysis and reflection.
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