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CHRISTIANITY AND JUSTICE.

spurious attempts by which schoolmen, and others also since their time, have vainly attempted to institute a dogma founded upon reason, that is to say, a philosophical and jurist Christianity, must be discarded. They are devoid alike of virtue and strength. We can take no notice of them; they have passed into silence and oblivion. We must examine the system in itself, in its terrible purity, which constituted all its strength; we must follow it through its reign in the middle ages, and, above all things, mark its progress at the period when at length fixed, armed, and inflexible, it exercised a sway over the whole world.

A sombre doctrine this, which, at the destruction of the Roman empire, when civil order perished and human justice was, as it were, effaced, shut out all appeal to the supreme tribunal, and for a thousand years veiled the face of eternal justice.

The iniquity of conquest confirmed by decrees from God, becomes authorised and believes itself just. The conquerors are the elect, the conquered are the damned. Damnation without appeal. Ages may pass away and conquest be forgotten; but Heaven, devoid of justice, will not the less oppress the earth, though formed in its own image. Necessity, which constitutes the basis of this theology, will everywhere reappear with desperate fidelity in the political institutions, even in those wherein man had thought to build an asylum for justice. All monarchies, divine and human, govern for their elect.

Where then shall man take refuge? Grace reigns alone in heaven, and favour here below. That Justice, twice proscribed and banished, should venture to raise her head, requires indeed a difficult effort (so completely is the common sense of man extinguished beneath the weight of woes and the oppression of ages); it is necessary, in fact, that Justice should once more believe herself just, that she should arouse, remember herself, woman, upon the child, upon the family, in which it creates discord, maintaining in opposition two contrary authorities,-two fathers.

It weighs heavily upon the world by a negative power, which does little, but which impedes, especially by the facility of presenting either of two aspects,― to some the elastic morality of the Gospel, to others immutable fatality, adorned with the name of grace. Hence, many a misunderstanding. Hence, many are tempted to connect modern faith, that of Justice and the Revolution,-with the dogma of ancient injustice.

SUFFERINGS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

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and resume the consciousness of right. This consciousness, slowly endeavouring to awake throughout a period of six centuries of religious efforts, burst forth in the year '89 in the political and social world.

The Revolution is nothing but the tardy reaction of justice against the government of favour and the religion of grace.

SECTION III.

LEGENDS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

IF you have sometimes travelled among mountains, you may perhaps have observed the same spectacle which I once met with. From among a confused heap of rocks piled together, amid a landscape diversified with trees and verdure, towered a gigantic peak. That object, black, bare, and solitary, was but too evidently thrown up from the deep bowels of the earth. Enlivened by no verdure, no season changed its aspect; the very birds would hardly venture to alight on it, as if they feared to singe their wings on touching the mass which was projected from earth's central fire. That gloomy evidence of the throes of the interior world seemed still to muse over the scene, regardless of surrounding objects, without ever rousing from its savage melancholy.

What were then the subterraneous revolutions of the earth, what incalculable powers combated in its bosom, for that mass, disturbing mountains, piercing through rocks, shattering beds of marble, to burst forth to the surface! What convulsions, what agony forced from the entrails of the globe that prodigious groan!

I sat down, and from my eyes tears of anguish, slow and painful, began to flow. Nature had but too well reminded me of history. That chaos of mountain heaps oppressed me with the same weight which had crushed the heart of man throughout the middle ages; and in that desolate peak, which from her inmost bowels the earth had hurled towards heaven, I saw pictured the despair and the cry of the human race.

That Justice should have borne for a thousand years that mountain of dogma upon her heart, and, crushed beneath its weight, have counted the hours, the days, the years, so

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tears.

RESIGNATION OF THE MIDDLE AGES.

many long years-is, for him who knows it, a source of eternal He who through the medium of history has participated in that long torture, will never entirely recover from it; whatever may happen he will be sad; the sun, the joy of the world, will never more afford him comfort; he has lived too long in sorrow and in darkness; and my very heart bled in contemplating the long resignation, the meekness, the patience, and the efforts of humanity to love that world of hate and malediction under which it was crushed.

When man, resigning liberty and justice as something useless, entrusted himself blindly to the hands of Grace, and saw it becoming concentrated on an imperceptible point,—that is to say the privileged, the elect,-and saw all other beings, whether on earth or under the earth, lost for eternity, you would suppose there arose everywhere a howl of blasphemy!-No, only a groan.

And these affecting words: "If thou wilt that I be damned, thy will be done, O Lord!"

Then peaceful, submissive, and resigned, they folded themselves in the shroud of damnation!

This is, indeed, serious, worthy of remembrance; a thing which theology had never foreseen. It had taught that the

damned could do nothing but hate.

But these still loved.

These damned souls trained themselves to love theelect, their masters. The priest, the lord, those chosen children of heaven, found, for ages, only meekness, docility, love, and confidence in that humble people. They served, they suffered, in silence trod upon, they returned thanks; they did not sin even with their lips, as did the saintly Job.

;

What preserved them from death? One thing, we must say, which reanimated, refreshed the sufferer in his long torment. That astonishing meekness of soul which he preserved, gave him bliss; from that heart, so wounded, yet so good, sprung a living source of lovely and tender fancy, a flood of popular religion to counteract the dryness of the other. Watered by those fruitful streams, the legend flourished and grew; it shaded the unfortunate with its compassionate flowers-flowers of the native soil, blossoms of the fatherland, which somewhat refreshed and occasionally buried in oblivion Byzantine metaphysics and the theology of death.

Yet death was beneath those flowers. The patron, the good saint of the place, was not potent enough to defend his protégé against a dogma of dread. The Devil hardly waited till man expired in order to seize him. He beset him living. He was the lord of this world; man was his property, his fief. It appeared so but too plainly in the social order of the time.

What a constant temptation to despair and doubt! How bondage here below was, with all its miseries, the beginning,the foretaste of eternal damnation! First, a life of suffering; next, for consolation, hell!—Damned beforehand !—Then, wherefore those comedies of Judgment represented in the church-porches! Is it not barbarous to keep in uncertainty, in dreadful anxiety, ever suspended over the abyss, him who, before his birth, is adjudged to the bottomless pit, is due to it, and belongs to it?

Before his birth!-The infant, the innocent, created expressly for hell! Nay, did I say the innocent? This is the horror of the system; innocence is no more. I know not, but I boldly and unhesitatingly affirm this to be the insoluble knot at which the human soul stopped short, and patience was staggered.

The infant damned! I have elsewhere pointed out that deep, frightful wound of the maternal heart. I pointed it out, and again drew the veil over it. In exploring its depths we should find there much more than the terrors of death.

Of

Thence it was, believe me, that the first sigh arose. protestation? No! And yet, unknown to the heart whence it escaped, there was a terrible remonstrance in that humble, low, agonising groan.

So low, but so heart-rending! The man who heard it at night, slept no more-not for many a night after and in the morning, before day-light, he went to his furrow; and there found many things were changed. He found the valley and the field of labour lower-much lower,-deep, like a sepulchre; and the two towers in the horizon more lofty-more gloomy and heavy; gloomy the church-steeple, and dismal the feudal castle. Then he began to comprehend the sounds of the two bells. The church-bell murmured, Ever; that of the donjon, Never. But, at the same time, a mighty voice spoke louder in his heart. That voice cried, One day! And that One day justice shall return! Leave

was the voice of God!

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CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

those idle bells; let them prate to the wind. Be not alarmed with thy doubt. That doubt is already faith. Believe, hope! Right, though postponed, shall have its advent; it will come to sit in judgment, on the dogma and on the world. And that day of Judgment will be called the Revolution.

SECTION IV.

THE CLERGY AND THE PEOPLE.

I HAVE often asked myself, whilst pursuing the dismal study of the middle ages, through paths full of thorns "tristis usque ad mortem," how a religion, which is the mildest in its principle, and has its starting-point in love itself, could ever have covered the world with that vast sea of blood?

Pagan antiquity, entirely warlike, murderous, and destructive, had been lavish of human life, unconscious of its value. Youthful and merciless, beautiful and cold, like the virgin of Tauris, she killed and remained unmoved. You do not find in her grand immolations so much passion, inveteracy, or fury of hate, as characterise, in the middle ages, the combats and the vengeances of the religion of love.

The first reason which I have assigned for this, in my book Du Prêtre, is the prodigious intoxication of pride which this belief gives to its elect. What maddening dizziness! Every day, to make God descend upon the altar, to be obeyed by God!-Shall I say it? (I hesitated for fear of blaspheming) to make God! How shall he be called who does this miracle of miracles every day? A God? That would not be enough.

The more strange, unnatural, and monstrous this greatness, the more uneasy and full of misgiving is he who pretends to it: he seems to me as though he were sitting on the steeple of Strasburg, upon the point of the cross. Imagine his hatred and violence towards any man who dares to touch him, shake him, or try and make him descend !-Descend? There is no descending. He must fall from such a place,—he must fall; but so heavy is the fall, that it would bury him into the earth.

Be well convinced that if, in order to maintain himself, he