CHAPTER II THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

1. The Problem

We come at last to Christianity. What is its principle or essence? This question must be answered or we cannot judge of it aright.

Now, during the eighteen centuries of its history, Christianity has taken so many and such various forms, it has received so many developments in every sense, it has become a thing so rich and luxuriant, that it is far from easy to discover beneath this thick growth of institutions, dogmas, ceremonies, and devotions the tap-root of the tree from which it all has sprung, and from which it still derives its nutriment. It would be next to useless to interrogate the Churches. They would each answer according to their official theologies and Confessions of Faith. This, they would say, is the essence of Christianity. The Catholics would say it is the institution and infallible authority of the Church, because everything rests on this first foundation, and because no one can be in Christian truth who is outside the Church. The Protestants would not be agreed: one would propose the dogma of Justification by Faith; another the authority of Scripture; a third the metaphysical divinity and the eternal pre-existence of Jesus Christ, under the pretext that they could not conceive the possibility of the subsistence of Christianity without these dogmas. In entering on this examination we enter on an interminable dispute.

The problem, happily, is simplified for the historian and the psychologist. In asking what is the principle of Christianity, what do we wish to know? Simply what it is that makes a Christian a Christian. We desire to ascertain what is the inward element, present in the soul, which compensates, at need, for the absence or defect of all the rest, and which, being wanting, cannot be supplied or compensated for by anything else. In short, we want to get at the religious experience which determines and marks out the consciousness of all Christians, which makes them members of one moral family, and which makes them to be recognised as such in spite of differences of times and place, of language and of culture, of rites and even of beliefs. To seize this common feature there is no need of polemics; all we need is a little history and psychology.

In history, Christianity offers itself to us as the term and crown of the religious evolution of humanity. In the consciousness of the Christian it is something more; it there reveals itself as the perfect religion. How must we understand this perfection? Is it the perfection of a complete system of supernatural knowledge, of a religious science which would have been strange to former generations, and which was shared by Christians alone? In no wise. If there are enlightened Christians, there are many who are very ignorant. And yet they are all Christians by one and the same principle, which is entirely independent of degrees of culture. No Christian will maintain that his knowledge is perfect. They all agree with St. Paul that at present it is very imperfect. We see divine things dimly. What, then, do they affirm who say with so much assurance that Christianity is the perfect religion? They affirm that, religion not being an idea but a relation to God, the perfect religion is the perfect realisation of their relation to God and of God's relation to them. And this is not, on their part, a theoretical speculation; it is the immediate and practical result of their inward experience. They feel that their religious need is entirely satisfied, that God has entered with them, and they with Him, into a relation so intimate and so happy that, in the matter of practical religion, not only can they imagine nothing, but that they can desire nothing above it or beyond. They simply set themselves to realise more fully and more effectually in themselves this supreme relation, this piety whose principle is immanent to themselves; they know that in it they have the germ of perfect spiritual development and eternal life. This is why they affirm without the slightest doubt that Christianity is the ideal and perfect religion, the definitive religion of humanity.

Such is the first affirmation of the Christian consciousness. Here is the second.

This perfect relation between God and my soul, this supreme religious good, this kind of piety which constitutes my joy and strength, which enlightens, renovates, sustains my whole inner life, does not date from myself, and I well know that it is not my own virtue that has created it. Nor can I refer the origin of it to my parents, although I may perhaps have received it through them or through my teachers; nor to my Church, although I still remain its catechumen; for parents, teachers, churches, will acknowledge, with myself, that they have only transmitted that which they themselves received. Remounting thus the living chain of Christian experiences, I reach a first experience, a creative and inaugural experience, which has made possible and engendered all the rest. That experience was realised in the consciousness of Jesus Christ. I affirm, then, not only that Christ was the author of Christianity, but that the first germ of it was formed in His inner life, and that in that life, first of all, that divine revelation was made which, repeating and multiplying itself, has enlightened and quickened all mankind. Christianity is therefore not only the ideal, but an historical religion, inseparably connected not only with the maxims of morality and with the doctrines of Jesus, but with His person itself, and with the permanent action of the new spirit which animated Him, and which lives from generation to generation in His disciples.

These are the two affirmations, equally immediate and equally essential, of every Christian consciousness. Now, the whole theological problem is how to reconcile the two. How can that which is ideal and perfect be realised in history? How can that which is historical be held to be ideal and eternal? Does it not seem as if these attributes were contradictory and exclusive of each other, and that Christianity could not become an ideal religion without severing all its links with a particular history, or that if it would remain an historical religion it must renounce all pretensions to absolute perfection? On the other hand, these two attributes, are they not equally necessary to it? How can it subsist if it obeys the formal and summary logic which summons us to choose between them? Will it be anything more than a speculative philosophy if cut off from its historic tradition? Will it continue to inspire me with confidence, will it place me in security, if it ceases to appear to me to be the perfect and definitive religion?

Theology, from the beginning, has had no other task; at all events, it has had no task more arduous or pressing than that of reconciling these two data. There have always been two tendencies amongst theologians corresponding to two families of minds: the Idealist tendency—that of Origen and his emulators, which puts the emphasis en ideas and constructs a religious metaphysic or gnosis, which of necessity rationalises dogma, and for which history is but a temporary envelope, a sort of external and sensible illustration; and the Realist tendency, represented by the genius of Tertullian, which, obeying an opposite instinct, materialises ideas, gives an anthropomorphic body to everything, even to God, deifies phenomena, and changes contingent history into an eternal metaphysic. From these two tendencies, perpetual and parallel, have issued the two solutions given by Rationalism and by Orthodoxy to the problem as to the essence of Christianity.

The first finds that essence in a few simple truths of reason or of consciousness, which are of all time and all lands, and which impose themselves on every man by their own natural evidence. Jesus of Nazareth was the preacher and the martyr of these truths; but it is clear that His personality is no more essential to Christianity than that of Plato is to his philosophy. Only, mind, in thus severing itself from Christ the Christian Religion ceases to be positive and becomes an abstract and dead doctrine; it loses its religious pith and power.

Orthodoxy, whether Catholic or Protestant, avoids this reef but strikes upon another. In making of Christ the Second Person of the Eternal Trinity, the Son of the Father, consubstantial and equal, it removes Him from history and transports Him into metaphysics. But thus to deify history is also in a fashion to destroy it. The dogma annuls the limited, contingent, and human character of the appearance of Jesus of Nazareth. His life loses all reality. We have no longer a man before our eyes, although the Church, theoretically, maintains the humanity of Christ alongside His divinity. This fatally absorbs everything. We have only a deity walking in the midst of His contemporaries, hidden beneath a human figure. The traditional Christology has been so incurably Docetic that it has been practically impossible, from this point of view, to write a serious Life of Jesus without falling into the heresy at once modern and semi-pagan of Kenosis, the theory according to which the pre-existent and eternal deity commits suicide by incarnating Himself in order gradually to be re-born and find Himself God again at the end of His human life. Can this strait be crossed? Is there a passage between Scylla and Charybdis? Not so long as you cling to the intellectualist conception which forms the error common to both Rationalism and Orthodoxy, and ensures their final failure. If the essence of Christianity lies in the revelation of natural truths or supernatural dogmas, the problem is insoluble. All Apologetics will inevitably dash themselves to pieces against the insurmountable contradiction that they will soon encounter. Strauss's argumentation, which the philosophers do not cease to repeat, and which the theologians pretend not to hear, springs into one's mind. So far from weakening it, the historical studies of the past half century have only added sharpness to its edge. "The idea does not pour all its riches into a single individual. The Absolute does not descend into history. It is against all analogy that the fulness of perfection should be met with at the outset of any evolution whatsoever; those who place it at the origin of Christianity are victims of the same illusion as the ancients, who placed the Golden Age at the beginning of human history."

Before going further it may be convenient to estimate the strength and weakness of this famous dilemma, and to inquire how we may escape from it. The traditional theology succumbs to it. But this only proves that that theology needs reforming. Let us place ourselves at a different point of view, and examine for a moment the idea of perfection which serves as the premise to Strauss's reasoning. When he speaks of the total or plenary perfection which cannot be found in the first link of an historical chain, he doubtless means a quantitative perfection—that is to say, a complete collection of virtues, merits, and faculties the numerical addition of which makes the notion entire. Now, from this point of view, Strauss's observation is incontestable. Neither the perfection of science comprising all scientific discoveries, nor the perfection of civilisation embracing all the progress and all the forms of human life, are ever found or could be found at the beginning or at any given moment in the course of history. One individual, however great, could not exhaust the life or labour of the species so as to render evolution useless. But have you noticed that this idea of perfection is contradictory, and therefore chimerical? Under the category of quantity or of extension there could be no real perfection either for the individual or for the species. No sooner is anything that can be counted or measured conceived than the mind instantly conceives something greater. There is no such thing as perfect number. Here therefore it is needful to make an essential distinction. We must distinguish between the quantity and the quality, or rather, the intensity, of being. Now, between the degrees of both these things there is not the slightest relation, nor consequently any common measure. And that which is true in the one becomes false in the other. Take a cubic metre of stone, multiply it by a thousand or a million, you will still have the same stone—that is to say, there is not more true reality in a million cubic metres of stone than there is in one. But let a bit of moss spring up in a fissure in that stone; in that bit of living moss there is more being, or, if you will, being of a higher quality than that of a whole mass of rocks. Still, do not forget that it needed a germ to produce it, and that this germ was a sort of positive perfection in relation to all inorganic matter, whose last end is life. This is why we may boldly say that evolution is not the cause of anything; that no development ever gives more than what is hidden in the new germ which engenders it; that a hundred thousand imbeciles do not make a man of genius, and that if man descended from a monkey all the monkeys in creation put together do not make up one human consciousness. From this synthetic point of view, it will no longer seem contradictory, but natural, and in full accordance with the analogies of history, that we should meet in the person of the Founder of Christianity that perfect relation to God, that perfection of piety which every Christian still experiences within himself, and which he declares he has drawn from communion with Him.

Lastly, let us fortify ourselves, and finish this brief statement of this somewhat novel view with Pascal's pregnant words. There are, he says, three orders of greatness. From all bodies put together you could not extract one thought, if there were not first a mind to conceive it. From all thoughts you could not draw a single movement of charity, if there were not there a heart to produce and feel it So far from needing to manifest themselves by the same attributes, these various kinds of greatness are absolutely independent of each other and even incommensurable. That which makes one shine forth would diminish or obscure the others. Alexander came with a pomp which dazzled the eyes and astonished the imaginations of mere carnal men. Archimedes had no need of the pomp of Alexander in order to impress the minds of men; his greatness, purely intellectual, was of an altogether different order. And, so, the Christ did not come with the éclat of Alexander or Archimedes. His greatness is of another order still. It is in fact so different that neither the glory of the conqueror nor the potency of genius would add anything to it, and that it had need, the better to shine forth to all, to appear in lowliness and humiliation. Therefore He was humble, patient, gentle, holy towards God, merciful towards man, terrible to all the hosts of darkness. Without sin, without external goods, without the productions of science, He was in His own order. Oh, with what pomp, with what transcendent magnificence, did He appear to the eyes of the heart that discerns true wisdom!

2. The Christian Principle

We must therefore come to the religious consciousness of Jesus Christ as to the fountainhead from which the Christian stream has flowed. It is certain that we shall find in it the principle and essence of Christianity itself, for it would be too paradoxical to maintain that the Master alone was excluded from the benefit of the religion that He has bequeathed to all His disciples. No; we may affirm in all security that the principle of Christianity was at first the very principle of the consciousness of Christ. To determine the one will be to define the other.

What we call the religious consciousness of a man is the feeling of the relation in which he stands, and wills to stand, to the universal principle on which he knows himself to depend, and with the universe in which he sees himself to be a part of one great whole. If then we would know exactly what was the essential element in the consciousness of Jesus, what was the distinctive characteristic of His piety, we must ask in what relation did He feel Himself to stand towards God and towards the universe. The answer will be neither difficult nor uncertain. If there are matters on which the true thought of the Master remains obscure, nothing shines out with more evidence and continuity through all His teaching and His life than the religious attitude of His soul towards God and man.

He felt Himself to be in a filial relation towards God, and He felt that God was in a paternal relation towards Him. The name of Father that He gives to God continually, exclusively, uniquely; the name of Son that He takes to Himself; the nature of His adoration; the form of His prayer; the motive of His devoted obedience even unto death; the way in which He works His cures, hails His first successes, accepts the apparent failure of His work, and explains the incredulity of His people,—all announce, manifest, and confirm that intimate relation, that communion and union of spirit, by which a father prolongs his life in the life of his child, and the child feels himself to live by the life of his father. This was clearly the essential element in His consciousness, the distinctive and original feature of His piety; it is also the principle and essence of Christianity.

That which we observe in the consciousness of Jesus we find in the experience of all Christians. They are Christians exactly in proportion as the filial piety of Jesus is reproduced in them. They are recognised by this unique but sufficient sign, by the confidence with which they call God their Father, abandoning themselves to His love for all that regards their present or future destiny, and living a life of self-renunciation and of devotion to the good of others. All whose inner life has been raised from the region of selfishness and pride to the higher realm of love and life in God,—who have found in that profound conversion, together with the pardon and oblivion of their past, the germ of a higher life,—of the perfect, and, by consequence, eternal life, are the true religious posterity of Christ; they reproduce His spirit, continue His work, and are as dependent upon Him and as like Him religiously as are the descendants of an ancestor whose blood and whose life have not ceased for an instant to flow in their veins.

This feeling, filial in regard to God, fraternal in regard to man, is that which makes a Christian, and consequently it is the common trait of all Christians. It should be added that this principle of Christianity admirably corresponds to the two fundamental affirmations of the Christian consciousness already established. The contradiction that appeared to us so menacing is thus resolved and reconciled. On the one hand, Christianity, by this filial union with God, is seen to be the ideal and perfect religion; on the other, it appears as a real fact in the consciousness of Jesus Christ, so that this religious reality comes to us with the imperative character of the ideal. Through prejudice men may neglect religion, but if they desire to have one they can neither desire nor imagine a relation at once closer and more moral, more sacred and more joyous, freer and more trustful, than that which was inaugurated in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ. What can they have in the shape of life superior to the life of perfect and reciprocal affection,—God giving Himself to man and realising in him His paternity, man giving himself to God without fear, and realising in Him his humanity? Is not religious evolution accomplished when these two terms, God and man, opposed to each other at the origin of conscious life on earth, interpenetrate each other till they reach the moral unity of love, in which God becomes interior to man and lives in him, in which man becomes interior to God and finds in God the full expansion of his being? Christianity is therefore the absolute and final religion of mankind.

At the same time, this filial piety in the person of Jesus and His followers is an observable phenomenon; so that the ideally perfect religion has manifested itself from the beginning as an historical and positive religion. It is not an abstract ideal, a theoretical doctrine, floating above humanity, but a principle and a tradition of new life, an inexhaustibly fruitful germ inserted in human life to raise it, not in idea but in fact, to a higher form. That which the first human consciousness was on earth, separating itself from its maternal animality, and bringing with it the kingdom of man, the initiative consciousness of Christ, issuing from the bosom of antique humanity, has been, and it has founded on our humble planet the kingdom of God, the kingdom, i.e., of free, pure spirit, of righteousness and love. We are no longer therefore in face of a rational doctrine or a speculative view, but of a positive force, of a power of life with which no one can break (I do not say in form and from without, but in fact and in the inner man) without at the same time breaking with the higher life of spirit as well as with all hope and joy, and health of soul.

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3. The Gospel of Jesus

The Christian principle appears in its simple and naked form, in the form of feeling and of inspiration, in the soul of Jesus. It is described, explained, expanded, in His Gospel. The Gospel in fact is merely the popular translation and the immediate application of the principle of the piety of Jesus in the social milieu in which He lived. Everything springs from His filial consciousness as a natural and wonderful efflorescence: His messianic vocation, His twofold ministry of preaching and healing, His deeds and His discourses, His ethics and His doctrine, the absolute gift of Himself in life and death. We must place ourselves at this luminous centre if we would see the rest dart forth like rays. In it is found the inner, living unity of His teaching and His destination. He promulgates no law or dogma; He founds no official institution. His intention is quite different: He wishes, before everything else, to awaken the moral life, to rouse the soul from its inertia, to break its chains, to lighten its burden, to make it active, free, and fruitful. He regards His work as finished when He has communicated His life, His piety, to a few poor consciousnesses that He found asleep and dead. Never man spake like this man, because never had man less concern about what we call "orthodoxy"—that is, about abstract and accurate formulas. He prefers the language of the people to the language of the schools; He makes use of images, parables, paradoxes, of current and traditional ideas, of every form of expression which, taken literally, is the most inadequate in the world, but which, on the other hand, is the most living and stimulating. Each of His sentences or parables is enclosed in a hard shell that has to be broken before you can get at the kernel. Jesus wished to force His hearers to interpret His words, because He called them to an inward, personal, autonomous activity, because He wished to put an end to the religion of the letter and of rites, and to found the religion of the spirit. Even now, he that does not give himself to this labour of interpretation and assimilation in reading the Gospel,—he who does not penetrate through the letter and the form to the inspiration and the inmost consciousness of the Master,—cannot understand or profit by His teaching. He who does not collaborate with Him while listening to Him, who does not pierce through His words to His soul, will come away empty. He only gives to those who have, or at least desire to have. He only leads the seeker to the truth. He only pardons those who repent, or comforts those who mourn, or fills the hungerers and the thirsters after righteousness.

Such is the character of His Gospel. We cannot here set forth its contents; we can only note the religious attitude of Jesus with regard to things and men, to Nature and Society.

At peace with God, Jesus found Himself at peace with the universe. The idea of Nature, that formidable screen erected between ourselves and God, destroying hope and quenching prayer, did not exist for Him. Nature—that was the Will of His Father. He submitted to it with confidence and joy, whereas we submit to it with desperate resignation. He did not feel Himself to be an orphan or an exile in the world; He conducted Himself in it with ease and in security, not as a slave, but as a son in the house which the Father filled with His presence. It is the Father that directs all things; He makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good; He watches over the sparrows; He clothes the lilies of the field; He gives life and food, the body and raiment; He notices the work we have to do, the trials we must bear. He never leaves us to ourselves. His spirit vivifies and fortifies our own. He is at the origin of our life and at the end. We are ever in the Father's hands.

The outlook of Jesus, it is true, is not our own. He shared the outlook of His race and time.... But His filial piety did not depend upon His knowledge of the universe. The amount of culture does not count in this order of feelings. Irreligion was not less easy or less frequent then than now, and if His outlook on the universe was narrower, it must not be imagined that it was less full of scandalous fatalities, of moral difficulties, of rude shocks to piety and faith. The world of the apocalypses, which was the world in which Jesus had to live and act, was not less full of mysteries and terrors than our own. His filial piety alone gave Him the means and strength by which to overcome them. The duty of man, He considered, was to change his heart rather than to change the order of things, i.e. the will of God. There is no trace of sorcery or magic or the appetite for miracles in the prayer He taught to His disciples. At bottom it amounts to this: "Our Father, let Thy will be done!" His heart-obedience was composed half of childlike confidence, half of heroic renunciation. In face of His trials He submitted without weakness and without complaint, and in face of death He breathed the prayer of faith, the only one that still remains to us: "Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit."

In face of the universe and its laws the individual ego is necessarily called on to submit and to renounce itself. The only matter of importance is to know upon what altar we shall make this sacrifice. Those who offer it on the altar of that blind divinity, "the nature of things," remain still unconsoled. Those who, with Jesus, make it in the arms of the Heavenly Father, accomplish it with strength and joy. From the awakening of consciousness to its highest point of development, man carries within him this radical contradiction: he feels that there is a mortal conflict between the idea that he gradually forms of the world and the idea he forms of himself. The ego wishes to conquer and does actually conquer the world; it even goes beyond it by thought; but the world has its revenge; it dominates the ego, it crushes it beneath the weight of its invincible laws, and it swallows it up,—itself, its efforts, its works, its thought,—like an ephemeral nonentity. Jesus felt this opposition; He suffered from this conflict. He resolved the antithesis by a third term, in which was realised the other two: the notion of the Father, whose beneficent will is equally sovereign in man and in the universe. And it is this happy solution of the enigma of life that still renders the religion of Jesus the religion of hope.

Amongst men, in the midst of society, Jesus felt other relations and new obligations formed in His heart. His filial piety became a fraternal piety. The first commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart," necessarily gave birth to the second: "And thy neighbour as thyself." The Father who lives in me lives equally in my neighbour; He loves him as much as He loves me. I ought therefore to love Him in my neighbour as well as in myself. This paternal presence of God in all human souls creates in them not only a link but a substantial and moral unity which makes them members of one body, whatever may be the external and contingent differences which separate them. From the Fatherhood in heaven flows the brotherhood on earth. From a relation of righteousness and love towards God springs a similar relation between men.

In thus defining the religious connection of Jesus with His brethren I am afraid of weakening it. For Him it was not a matter of theory; for He never constructed any theory or formulated any doctrine of human fraternity; it was with Him a passionate sentiment, a deep-felt solidarity and kinship, a true family life, in which this Elder Brother's heart reverberated on the one hand with the love and pity of the Father, and, on the other, with the miseries and distresses of His brethren. In His parables Jesus does not say "The Father" simply; He habitually says "the father of the family," "the head of the house." It is because the father does not exist without his children, and because humanity, on earth at least, is the family, by means of which the paternity of God is realised.

But in the society of men Jesus encountered sin with all its effects in the shape of moral deformity and physical suffering. From the contact of His filial piety with this enormous human misery sprang a twofold appeal: the voice of His Father in His soul, the plaint of His brethren all around; and to this double cry the answer was—His ministry of relief, of consolation, and salvation: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach good tidings to the poor; He hath sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord" (Luke iv. 18, 19, R.V.).

It all flows from the same source. It was not only individuals who needed to be healed and saved. The family of God was not less broken down, oppressed, disorganised, by all the powers of evil, a prey to hatred, selfish ambition, intestine wars. Would it not be necessary here also to effect a work of restoration, to reconstruct this family so highly-favoured of the Father for the salvation of the world, to inaugurate the kingdom of God announced by so many of the prophets, and expected so impatiently by all pious souls and all the victims of unrighteousness? This was His messianic vocation. But how would this victory of the Messiah be realised? Would it be the work of Divine power, flashing forth and executing its pitiless reprisals? Since the paternal heart of God had been opened and poured into His own, Jesus had perceived another law and another force, the law and force of love, which triumphs by self-sacrifice. Soon there arose in His consciousness a new image of the Messiah, that of the Servant of Jehovah, bearing the sins and miseries of His people, bruised, humiliated, dying to procure them life and healing. It was the gospel of the Cross. The further He advanced in this emptying of self, and in this work of love and pain, the larger and more luminous became the revelation of the Father in His soul. When at last He had the clear and perfect consciousness that He had no longer any will to do but the will of God, no other plan to follow than His mysterious designs, no other cause to serve and to defend but His, He did not doubt the final victory; His faith shone forth triumphantly, appropriating to itself, to express itself in perfect freedom, the boldest promises of the Ancient Testament and of the contemporary apocalyptic seers. By His union with the Father, the heir of the past felt Himself master of the future. On the throne of immolated love He has founded a kingdom that will never end. Such is the inner secret of His hope, such the moral and religious meaning of His prophecies of speedy victory, and of His return upon the clouds of heaven.

Jesus was fond of saying that a wise man knew how to bring forth from the treasury of his heart things new and old. It was in this way that He accomplished the most radical of religious revolutions while seeming only to fulfil the law and the prophets. What was there then that was so new and potent in the least of His discourses? The treasure of His filial consciousness. The inner inspiration springing up in them incessantly gives to every detail of His teaching, the oldest words, the most familiar metaphors, a meaning altogether new, a reach and bearing infinite. His speech confines itself to the antithesis that had become traditional with all the prophets, of man's weakness and God's strength, of sin and pardon, of repentance and confidence, of sickness and healing, of humility and exaltation. But He had a way of looking at them, and even of making them spring out of each other, that entirely renovated them. "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven! Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted! Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled!" To press thus and to stimulate the sense of need, of misery and sin, so far that it changes into its opposite; to draw riches out of poverty, comfort out of sorrow, victorious strength from weakness; to find in sorrow for sin the germ of saintly life and in hunger and thirst the very source of satisfaction; to make every human soul thus pass through this inward drama of repentance and conversion in which it is regenerated and renewed,—such is the unique but admirable and all potent mystery of the Gospel.

Christ did not construct a theory of man, of his moral life, any more than He constructed a theory with respect to God and the universe. He was content to place Himself at the centre of the human consciousness, and to dig down to the source of life. He takes man as he is in all climates and in all conditions. He does not declare him to be radically impotent for good, but neither does He flatter him by veiling his natural misery. He knows him to be ardent and feeble, full of needs and of illusions, capable of conversion, subject to all passions, the victim of all slaveries. He treats him as diseased, which is the truth, and He does not think He can make him find the principle of a serious cure, save in the very sense of his malady. So far from blunting the edge of the moral law, He sharpens it as one sharpens a dissecting knife in order the better to pierce the living flesh and penetrate to the very joints and marrow; He infinitely enhances the demands of the traditional ideal; from the outward act He descends to the inward feeling; He makes lust equal to adultery, and anger or hatred to murder itself. He tells His disciples to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, to answer violence by gentleness, and injuries by love. He speaks thus not to weaken the vigour of righteousness, but because He sees in love and gentleness a higher righteousness and the sole means of securing the final triumph of good over evil. That is why the righteousness of His friends exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees. It is no longer dictated by an outward letter, but it has, for soul, the very spirit of the Father, and, for inward rule, the ideal the Master has lit up in the conscience: "Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect."

This morality would easily become ascetic and appear impossible if it were not blended with an opposite element which renders it human and fruitful without either lowering or destroying it. That element is mercy and forgiveness; it is pure, unconditional grace which in misery makes room for hope, and in repentance opens the door to faith and to the work of faith. These two elements, inexorable law and unconditional grace, are so intimately blended in the Gospel of Christ that the Gospel only subsists in its originality and with its power by their perfect fusion and reciprocal and constant action. Without the inflexible rigours of the moral ideal, repentance would not be possible—at least it would never be profound enough to produce the renovation of the heart; but, without faith in the divine mercy, repentance itself, changing into despair, would be barren and ineffectual. These two elements of the Christian life are as fruitful by their union as they are impotent and liable to degeneration when isolated or opposed. What does Christian law become without the sentiment of love, without the impulse of mercy, but a sort of moral Stoicism, rigid and severe? And what would be the doctrine of grace apart from the sacred obligation of the law but the theory of a mischievous indulgence or a Pagan mysticism? To decompose the Gospel salt is to destroy its savour.

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4. A Necessary Distinction

At the close of this long meditation, one thing seems to me very clear, the necessity, or rather the obligation under which I stand henceforth of distinguishing between the purely moral essence of Christianity and all its historical expressions or realisations, even the highest and most faithful of them. If religion is an inward life, a real and felt relation between God and man, and if Christianity is that life carried to a higher degree, it is certain that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, must have the two characteristics of all living things. Life is a force, ideal in its essence, real in its manifestations. It can only manifest itself in the organisms that it creates and animates. But, while incarnating itself in its works, it does not exhaust itself or remain imprisoned in any of them. Jesus was well aware of this when He compared His gospel to the leaven which raises the dough and to the seed which germinates in the soil into which it falls.

This necessary distinction will neither be made nor admitted by everybody. Many who concede it in theory deny it in practice. Protestants smile at the Catholics, who identify Christianity with the Church. But while admitting and making the distinction, when it comes to particular churches and particular systems of dogmas, they resist and protest in their turn, if it becomes necessary to apply it to the Bible, and to distinguish between the Word and its human and historical expression.

Should we go further still? May we, ought we in all fidelity to apply the distinction to the Gospel of Christ itself and to the primitive form in which it has come down to us? Most of those who have accompanied us thus far will now recoil and leave us. They will employ against us the very same arguments which appear to them so pitiful when used with respect to the Church and to the Bible. For my part, I cannot comprehend this fear of the freedom left to criticism. It seems to me impossible to deny that in the teaching of Jesus there are parts which are uncertain, things which have been either badly understood or badly reported, an oriental and contingent form which needs to be translated into our modern languages. Who does not see that neither in His language nor in His thought is there anything absolute? Both of them are constantly determined by the generally received ideas of His time, the state of mind of His interlocutors; and unless you desire to deny that Jesus was a man of His age and of His race, how can you abstract Him from His environment and attribute to Him ideas which have neither date nor place? I have already compared Christianity to an oak which has lived and grown for eighteen centuries, and the Gospel to the acorn from which it sprang. But in that acorn itself, as in the tree, it is manifest that there are two things: a principle of life, and some matter borrowed from the Hebraic soil, with which the creating principle was obliged to amalgamate itself in order to enter into history and to become fruitful. The characteristic of life is to render possible and to institute the constant exchange of the materials with which it builds up its works. When this exchange has ceased, life has disappeared. If the Gospel of Jesus were something fixed and finished like a code of laws or a collection of formulas, it would no longer be a power of life. His words defy the centuries and never wither; they are truly eternal, because they leave free and do not imprison in a rigid and immutable letter the spirit of life which animates them.

Arrived at this point of view, I see the relations between Christianity and historical criticism change completely, and find myself once more in the greatest religious security. Criticism will always be a just cause of alarm to those who elevate any historical and contingent form whatever into the absolute, for the excellent reason that an historical phenomenon, being always conditioned, can never have the characteristics of the absolute. But criticism can do nothing against the Christian principle, which, brought back to the consciousness, always disengages itself from the relative and fleeting expressions in which it has clothed itself by the way. Criticism makes it to appear again in its ideal purity and eternal worth. Far from being injurious, it becomes necessary to it. It is not doubtful that the teaching and the work of Christ, having been preserved in the simple oral tradition for half a century, have not been transmitted to us without some corruptions and some legendary elements. What then does historical criticism, with all its rigour, do? Nothing but purify this uncertain tradition, remove the veils, set forth more certainly the authentic soul of Christ, and, consequently, place the Christian principle in its surest, clearest light.

What has been said of the Master's teaching is still more true of that of His disciples. The Christian plants have all sprung from the same seed; but they vary according to the soil in which they grow. They are all of the same species, but in that species there are innumerable varieties. How could the external result possibly have been the same whether the divine seed fell into the heart of a simple fisherman of Galilee, or a rabbi of genius, or a thinker brought up in the school of Alexandria? Could you possibly have the same Church, the same theology, the same ritual in Arabia and in Greece, among a savage race and in the university circles of Germany, at Rome or in England, in the Middle Ages in a feudal society, and in our democracies in a time of emancipated reason and free government?

And here it will be convenient to pause and reflect a moment on that wonderful variety in the historical forms of Christianity, none of which are perfect and none contemptible. A superficial examination may draw from this spectacle a lesson of indifference; a more conscientious and attentive study finds in it an opposite lesson, the lesson of an ever-pressing obligation on both individuals and churches never to repose in a deceitful satisfaction, but to progress unceasingly; for Christianity is nothing if it is not in us at once an ideal which is never reached and an inner force which ever urges us beyond ourselves.

5. The Corruptions of the Christian Principle

The differences which separate the historical forms of Christianity are, like those of religion in general, of two kinds: there are differences of kind and differences of degree. The differences of kind are those which arise from diversity of races, languages, civilisations, temperaments, genius. The differences of degree are those connected with the very intensity and purity of the Christian faith and life. Churches and peoples are diversified at once by their constitution and by their degree of culture and of moral life. It goes without saying that these two classes of differences are not juxtaposed; they are mixed incessantly and complicated endlessly. It remains none the less true that they provoke and legitimate two sorts of judgment. The first are accepted with tolerance and sympathy, since it would not be reasonable to blame a man for the colour of his skin. But the second may and should be discussed and analysed, for they imply intellectual errors or moral defects, the corruption or the weakness of the Christian principle, and they can only be corrected and remedied by discussion and criticism.

The Christian seed is never sown in a neutral and empty soil. No soul, no social state, is a tabula rasa. The place is always occupied by anterior traditions of ideas, rites, or customs, by institutions in possession. Christianity cannot therefore root itself anywhere without entering into conflict with the regnant powers, without giving battle to prejudices, manners, and superstitions which naturally resist, and which, when conquered, spring up again in other forms in the victorious religion. Take the Ebionite Christianity of the first centuries: what is it but a mixture, a compromise between Jewish and Christian elements? What shall we say of the Catholic Church after Constantine? Is it not true that, in the religious transformation at that time effected, there was a double and mutual conversion, and that it is hard to say whether the pagan world was more modified by Christianity or Christianity more deeply penetrated and invaded by the manners and the religion that it was supposed to replace?

In this order the most striking victories are never complete. Even after the most radical conversion, the old man survives, at least by its roots, in the new man. The Pharisee long survived in St. Paul after he became an Apostle of Christ. The same in human societies: political or moral revolutions never abolish the past. After those great battles in which passions and interests have often as much weight as noble ideas and generous sentiments, there is always established a sort of equilibrium by mutual concessions and spontaneous alliances between the vanquished and the victorious tendencies. Hence come what we have named the corruptions of the Christian principle in the course of historical Christianity, for which alone should be reserved the name of heresies.

It must not be imagined, however, that these corruptions or heresies, against which it is the duty of Christian criticism ceaselessly to protest, are arbitrary things, or that their number is unlimited. On the contrary, they fall, and must necessarily fall, into two categories. The cause of the corruptions of the Christian principle in social life can only be found in the previous tradition, in one of the moral and religious tendencies that Christianity aspires to conquer and replace. Now, these tendencies may be reduced to two: the tendencies of the religions of Nature, or Pagan; and the tendency of the legal, or Jewish, religion. Closely examine all that has disfigured or that still disfigures historical Christianity, and you will see that each of these corruptions is connected, by its character, with a Jewish or a Pagan root. The Gospel as the religion of free spirit and pure morality has never had, and could never have had, any other enemies than Judaism or Paganism, ever ready to spring up in its bosom and transform it either into the religion of Nature or into the religion of the Law.

Christianity, for example, in its pure essence, implies the absoluteness of God—that is to say, His perfect spirituality and His perfect independence. Hence, worship in spirit and in truth, the only worship that can be universal, the only one that corresponds to the Christian idea of God. Therefore every tendency, even in Christianity itself, to shut up God in a phenomenal form, to bind Him to something material, local, or temporary, to blend the Creator with the creature, or to fill up the gap between them by a hierarchy of divine beings which, under pretext of serving us as intermediaries, interrupt our free and immediate communion with the Father, is, properly speaking, a resurrection of Paganism, and a return to idolatry. Paganism and idolatry, of which we pretend to have so much horror, are simply the localisation and materialisation, more or less conscious, of the divine spirit and of divine grace, whatever may be the visible organ to which you bind them, or on which you make their action to depend,—Pope of Rome or Pythoness of Delphi, images of gods or images of virgin and of saints, sacramental liturgies, the deification of a church, a priesthood, or a book.

Take another example: Christianity is not only the liberty of God; it is also His holiness; it is pure morality placed above all the instincts of nature; it is, finally, the unity of morality and religion. Hence, all that tends to break this unity, every blow at the divine law, every attempt to cultivate religious emotion apart from conscience, all magic and mystagogy, æsthetic piety, religious romanticism, Christianity à la Chateaubriand, sensuous mysticism,—these essays, so numerous in our day, at philosophic or at literary gnosis, these new religions without repentance or conversion, all these cults without any element of moral sanctification—these are so many corruptions of the Christian principle, and consequences more or less immediate of the Paganism always latent in the human heart.

By the side of this Pagan is the Judaising heresy. Christianity is not only moral law and intransigeant holiness; it is also unconditional love, grace, mercy, the inward action of the Spirit of God in the spirit of man in order to produce in it that which He desires to find, and to realise that which His law commands; it is everything that scandalised Pharisaism in the teaching and conduct of Jesus in regard to the sinful and the lost: pardon without reproach, rehabilitation and salvation through repentance and affection, the sincere impulse of the heart that has been raised above external works; the very opposite of legal compacts, meritorious and atoning virtue, formalist religion and ritual piety. All that tends to separate the Father from the child; that places the liberty and virtue of man outside and apart from God as having some merit in His sight; all Pelagianism, every theory of salvation by works, every condition laid down to divine grace except faith to receive it: adhesion to a doctrinal formula, sacramental usages, priestly absolution, outward mortification, asceticism whether monkish or puritanical, which divides morality and, in the name of a fantastic sanctity, introduces dualism into the work of God,—all this should be called by its right name; it should be taken for what it really is—a relapse into the legal and formalist spirit of Jewish Pharisaism.

Finally, I see on what condition Christianity may remain faithful to itself while realising itself in history. It is only by an incessant struggle of the Christian principle against all the elements of the past which find, alas, in human propensities, and in the inertia of the multitude, a complicity so constant and effectual. So far from religious indifference being permissible, critical action and Christian prayer become, in every church and every life, permanent duties. I now understand the paradox of Christ: "I am not come to send peace on the earth, but a sword." For the Christian principle, in fact, war is life. To cease to fight is to succumb; it is to allow yourself to be submerged by the rising tide of human superstitions; it is to die. Who does not see the danger of allowing Christianity to become absorbed in one church form, Christian truth in one formula, the Christian principle in one of its particular realisations? All these contingent expressions, being imperfect, must be reformed sooner or later. How can they be unless the spirit of Christianity disengages itself without ceasing and floats above them as an ideal? For eighteen centuries a river of life has flowed through human history. Break down the barriers which fanaticism and superstition are always setting up athwart its course. If the waters cease to flow they stagnate, and corrupt and poison the very land it was their mission to fertilise.