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During the last nineteen centuries, Christianity has been often assailed, and has successfully resisted every attack. Of these attacks, some have been more violent, but none more serious than that of which it is, in these days, the object.

For eighteen hundred years Christians were in turn persecutors and persecuted; Christians persecuted as Christians, Christians persecutors of every one who was not Christian—Christians mutually persecuting each other. This persecution varied, it is true, in degree of cruelty with the age and the country, as it also did in the degree of inflexibility evinced and success attained in the prosecution of its object; but whatever the diversity of state, church, or punishment, whatever the degree of severity or laxity in the application of the principle, this principle was ever the same. After having had to endure proscription and martyrdom under the imperial government of Paganism, the Christian religion lived, in its turn, under the guard of the civil law, defended by the arms of secular power.

In these days it exists in the very presence of Liberty. It has to deal with free thought,—with free discussion. It is called upon to defend, to guard itself, to prove incessantly and against every comer its moral and historical veracity, to vindicate its claims upon man's intelligence and man's soul. Roman Catholics, Protestants, or Jews, Christians or philosophers, all, at least in our country, are sheltered from every persecution; for no one without incurring the risk of ridicule could characterise as persecution the sacrifices or the inconveniences to which the expression of his opinion may occasionally subject him. To every man such expression of opinion is permitted, and can never lead to the forfeiture, on the part of any single individual, of any of his political rights or privileges. Religious Liberty—that is to say, the liberty of believing; of believing differently or of disbelieving—may be but imperfectly accepted and guaranteed as a principle in certain states; but it still is evident that it is becoming so every day more and more, and that it will eventually become the Common Law of the civilised world.

One of the circumstances that render this fact pregnant with importance is that it does not stand isolated; but holds its place in the great Intellectual and Social Revolution, which, after the fermentation and the preparation of centuries, has broken out and is in course of accomplishment in our own days. The scientific spirit, the preponderance of the democratic principle, and that of political liberty, are the essential characteristics and invincible tendencies of this revolution. These new forces may fall into enormous errors and commit enormous faults, the penalty for which they will ever dearly pay; still they are definitively installed in modern society; the sciences will continue to develop themselves in its bosom in the full independence of their methods and of their results; the democracy will establish itself in the positions which it has conquered, and on the ground which has been opened to it; political liberty in the midst of its storms and its disappointments will still, sooner or later, cause itself to be accepted as the necessary guarantee for all the acquisitions and all the progress possible in society. These are the grand predominant facts to which all public institutions will now have to adapt themselves, and with which all authority whose action is upon the mind requires to live at peace.

Christianity also must submit to the same tests and trials. As it has surmounted all others, so also will it surmount this; its essence and origin would not be divine did they not permit it to adapt itself to all the different forms of human institutions, to serve them now as a guide, now as a support in their vicissitudes whether of adversity or prosperity. It is, however, of the most serious importance for Christians not to deceive themselves, either as to the nature of the struggle which they will have to sustain, or as to its perils and the legitimate arms which they may use to combat them. The attack directed against the Christian religion is one hotly carried on, now with a brutal fanaticism, now with a dexterous learning; at one time with the appeal to sincere convictions, and at another invoking the worst passions; some contest Christianity as false, others reject it as too exacting and imposing too much restraint; the greater part apprehend it as a tyranny. Injustice and suffering are not so soon forgotten; nor does one readily recover from the effect of terror. The memory of religious persecutions still lives, and this it is that maintains, in multitudes, whose opinions vacillate, aversion, prejudice, and a lively sentiment of alarm. Christians on their side are loth to recognise and accommodate themselves to the new order of society; every moment they are shocked, irritated, terrified by the ideas and language to which that society gives utterance. Men do not so readily pass from a state of privilege to one of community of rights—from a state of dominion to one of liberty; they do not resign themselves without a struggle to the audacious obstinacy of contradiction, to the daily necessity of resisting and conquering. Government according to principles of liberty is still more influenced by passion, and entails a necessity of still more exertion in the sphere of religion than of civil politics: believers find it still more difficult to support incredulity than governments to bear with oppositions; and, nevertheless, these themselves are forced to do so, and can only find in free discussion and in the full exercise of their peculiar liberties the force which they require to rise above their perilous condition, and reduce—not to silence, for that is impossible, but to an idle warfare—their inveterate enemies.

To leave that civil society, in which the different sects of religion are now-a-days compelled to live in peace and side by side, and to enter religious society itself, the Christian Church of our days:—what is its actual position with respect to these grand questions which it has to discuss with the spirit of human liberty and audacity? Does it comprehend properly, does it suitably carry on the warfare in which it is engaged? Does it tend in its proceedings to a re-establishment of a real peace, and active harmonious relations between itself and that general society in the midst of which it is living?

I say Christian Church. It is, in effect, the whole Church of Christ, and not such or such a church that is in these days attacked, and vitally attacked. When men deny the Supernatural World, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and the Divinity of Jesus Christ, they really assail the whole body of Christians—Romanists, Protestants or Greeks: they are virtually destroying the foundations of faith in all the belief of Christians, what ever their particular difference of religious opinion or forms of ecclesiastical government.. It is by faith that all Christian Churches live; there is no form of government, monarchical or republican, concentrated or diffused, that suffices to maintain a church; there is no authority so strong, no liberty so broad, as to be able in a religious society to dispense with the necessity of faith. For what is it that unites in a church if it is not faith? Faith is the bond of souls. When then the foundations of their common faith are attacked, the differences existing between Christian Churches upon special questions, or the diversities of their organization or government, become secondary interests; it is from a common peril that they have to defend themselves; or they must reconcile themselves to see dried up the common source from which they all derive sustenance and life.

I fear that the sentiment of this common peril is not, in all the Christian Churches, as clear and well defined, as deep and predominant, as their common safety requires. In presence of similar questions everywhere varied, of identical attacks everywhere directed against the vital facts and dogmas of Christianity, I dread Christians of the different communions not concentrating all their forces upon the mighty struggles in which they are, all, to engage. My dread, however, is unattended by astonishment. Although the danger is the same for all, the traditional opinions and habits, and consequently the actual dispositions, are very different. Many Romanists feel the persuasion that Faith would be saved were they only delivered from liberty of thought. Many Protestants believe that they are but employing their right of free examination, and do not lose their title to be regarded as Christians, when they are in effect abandoning the foundations and withdrawing from the source of Faith. Roman Catholicism has not sufficient reliance on its roots, and respects too much its branches; no tree exists that does not need culture and clearing in accordance with climate and season, if it is to be expected to continue to bear always good fruit; but the roots should be especially defended from every attack. Protestantism is too forgetful that it also has roots from which it cannot be separated without perishing, and that religion is not what an annual is in vegetation: a plant that men cultivate and renew at their pleasure. Whilst the Romanists dread freedom of thought too much, the Protestants on their side have too great a fear of authority. Some believe that inasmuch as religious Faith has firm and fixed points, movement and progress are incompatible with religious society; others affirm that a religious society can never have fixed points, and that religion consists in religious sentiment and individual belief. What would have become of Christianity, had it from its birth been condemned to the immobility which the former recommend; and what would become of it at the present day, were it surrendered, as the latter would have it, to the caprice of every mind, and the wind of every day?

Happily, God permits not that, at this crisis, the true principles and the true interests of the Christian Religion should remain without sufficient defenders. Romanists there are who understand their age and the new constitution of society, who accept frankly its liberty, religious and politic: it is precisely they who have most boldly testified their attachment to the faith of Rome, who have claimed with most ardor the essential liberties of their church, and defended with most energy the rights of its chief. Nor are Protestants wanting who have used with the most untiring zeal all the liberty acquired in our days by Protestantism; they have founded all those associations and originated all those undertakings which have manifested the vital energy and extended the action of the Protestant Church; they have demanded and they continue to demand, for this church, the reestablishment of its Synods, that is to say, its religious autonomy. Amongst these Protestants, where men have appeared who have not found in the Protestant Church as by law established the entire satisfaction of their convictions, they have felt no hesitation to separate from it and to found, with their own means alone, independent churches. It may be affirmed also of the Protestants that they have most largely put in practice all the rights and all the liberties of Protestantism, in the internal ordeal through which Christianity is at present passing; it is precisely they who assert most loudly the dogmas of the Christian Faith and maintain most inflexibly the authoritative rights established by law in the bosom of their church. The Liberal Romanists of the present day are the most zealous defenders of the fundamental traditions and institutions of Catholicism. The Protestants who have been the most active during the last half-century in the exercise of the liberties of Protestantism are the firmest maintainers of its doctrines and of its vital rules.

Humanly speaking, it is upon the influence exercised and to be exercised in their respective churches and on the public, by these two classes of Christians, that depends the peaceable issue of the crisis through which Christianity is in these days passing. Our society is, doubtless, far from meriting the title of a Christian one; still it cannot be characterised as anti-Christian; considered as one vast whole, it has no hostile or general prejudice against the Christian religion: it maintains the habits, the instincts, I would willingly add the longings, of Christians; it is conscious that Christian Faith and Ordinance serve powerfully its interests with respect to order and peace; the fanatical opponents of Christianity exercise upon it far more disquieting than seductive influences, for it has already had experience of their empire; and where society appears to offer a silent acquiescence or even to pride itself upon them, still at bottom it dreads their progress.

Such being the state of the case, and such the constitution of society, how are we to draw men away from their apathy and their ignorance in matters of religion? How lead them back to Christianity? They alone can accomplish this object, who, in their defence and propagation of the religion of Jesus, shall not wound society itself in the ideas, sentiments, rights and interests which have at present rooted themselves in its very life and energies. Like religion, modern society has also its fixed points and its invincible tendencies: it can never be set on terms of harmony with the former unless by the concurring action of men who have with each of them a genuine and deep sentiment of sympathy. Since the Christian Religion lives in these times confronting civil liberty, those alone can be efficient champions of religion who at the same time profess fully the Christian Faith and accept with sincerity the tests of Liberty.

But in pursuing their pious and salutary enterprise, let not these liberal Christians flatter themselves with the probability of any prompt or complete success: maintain and propagate the Christian faith they may, but they will never be able in the bosom of society to get rid either of incredulity or doubt; even while combating them they must learn to endure their presence; in institutions of freedom there is essentially an intermixture of good and evil, of truth and error; contrary ideas and dispositions produce and develop themselves in it simultaneously. "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not," said Jesus to his apostles, "to send peace, but a sword." [Footnote 1] The sword of Jesus Christ, that is, Christianity, at war with human error and shortcomings; a victory, still a victory ever incomplete in an incessant struggle,—that is the condition to which those must submit with resignation who, in the bosom of liberty, defend the truth of Christianity.

[Footnote 1: Matthew x. 34.]

Were these valiant and intelligent champions of the faith of Jesus not adopted and accredited as such in the churches to which they belong; did the Church of Rome furnish ground for thinking her essentially hostile to the fundamental principles and rights of modern society, and that she only tolerates them as Moses tolerated divorce amongst the Jews, "because of the hardness of their heart"; and, on the other hand, did the rejectors of the Supernatural, of the Inspiration of the Scriptures, and of the Divinity of Jesus Christ, predominate in the bosom of Protestantism; and finally, did the latter then become nought but a hesitating system of philosophy; if all these deplorable things were to be realised, I am far from thinking that, owing to such faults, such disasters, the religion of Christ would vanish from the world and definitively withdraw from men its light and its support: the destinies of religion are far above human errors; but still, beyond all doubt, for mankind to be turned back from them, and for the light to return to their soul and harmony to modern society, there would have again to burst out in the human soul and in society one of those immense troubles, one of those revolutionary whirlwinds, whose evils man is compelled actually to undergo before he can derive benefit from its lessons.

On the point of addressing myself to questions more profound and of a less transitory nature, I content myself with having merely indicated what I think of the crisis that agitates Christendom at the present day, as also of its main cause, its perils, and the chances, good or bad, that it holds out for the future. In the work of which the first part is now before the public, I omit all the circumstantial facts and details as well as the discussions that grow out of them, and it is only with the Christian Religion as it is in itself, with its fundamental belief and its reasonableness, that I occupy myself; it has been my purpose to illustrate the truth of Christianity by contrasting it with the systems and the doubts that men set in array against it. It is my intention to avoid all direct and personal polemics; express reference to individuals embarrasses and envenoms all questions in controversy, and gives rise to ill-judged deference or unjust invective, two descriptions of falsity for which alike I feel no sympathy: let me have then for adversaries ideas alone; and whatever these may be, I admit beforehand the possibility of sincerity on the part of those that prefer them. Without this admission all serious discussion is out of the question; and neither the intellectual enormity of the error, nor its awful practical consequences, positively precludes sincerity on the part of him that promulgates it. The mind of man is still more easily led astray than his heart, and is still more egotistical; after having once conceived and expressed an idea, it attaches itself to it as to its own offspring, takes a pride in imprisoning itself in it, as if it were so taking possession of the pure and entire truth.

These Meditations will be divided into four series. In the first, which forms this volume, I explain and establish what constitutes, in my opinion, the essence of the Christian religion; that is to say, what those natural problems are, that correspond with the fundamental dogmas that offer their solution, the supernatural facts upon which these same dogmas repose—Creation, Revelation, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, God according to the Biblical account, and Jesus according to the Gospel narrative. Next to the Essence of the Christian religion comes its history; and this will be the subject of a second series of Meditations, in which I shall examine the authenticity of the Scriptures, the primary causes of the foundation of Christianity, Christian Faith, as it has always existed throughout its different ages and in spite of all its vicissitudes; the great religious crisis in the sixteenth century which divided the Church and Europe between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism; finally those different anti-Christian crises, which at different epochs and in different countries have set in question and imperilled Christianity itself, but which dangers it has ever surmounted. The third Meditation will be consecrated to the study of the actual state of the Christian religion, its internal and external condition: I shall retrace the regeneration of Christianity which occurred amongst us at the commencement of the nineteenth century, both in the Church of Rome and in the Protestant churches; the impulse imparted to it at the same epoch by the Spiritualistic Philosophy that then began again to flourish, and the movement in the contrary direction which showed itself very remarkably soon afterwards in the resurrection of Materialism, of Pantheism, of Scepticism, and in works of historical criticism. I shall attempt to determine the idea, and consequently, in my opinion, the fundamental error of these different systems, the avowed and active enemies of Christianity. Finally, in the fourth series of these Meditations I shall endeavour to discriminate and to characterise the future destiny of the Christian religion, and to indicate by what course it is called upon to conquer completely and to sway morally this little corner of the universe termed by us our earth, in which unfold themselves the designs and power of God, just as, doubtless, they do in an infinity of worlds unknown to us.

I have passed thirty-five years of my life in struggling, on a bustling arena, for the establishment of political liberty and the maintenance of order as established by law. I have learnt, in the labours and trials of this struggle, the real worth of Christian Faith and of Christian Liberty. God permits me, in the repose of my retreat, to consecrate to their cause what remains to me of life and of strength. It is the most salutary favour and the greatest honour that I can receive from His goodness.

Guizot.

Val-Richer, June, 1864.