ART. V.-PHILOSOPHICAL CHRISTIANITY IN

FRANCE.

Le Christianisme Expérimental; par Athanase Coquerel, l'un des Pasteurs de l'Eglise Reformée de Paris. Paris, 1847. Christianity its perfect Adaptation to the Mental, Moral, and Spiritual Nature of Man; by Athanase Coquerel, &c., translated by Rev. D. Davison, M.A., with a Preface, written expressly for the English Edition, by the Author. London, 1847.

It is the frequent error of a generous faith, to insist on the inefficacy, as well the wickedness, of persecution. The state of Protestantism in France presents formidable difficulties in the way of so consolatory a belief. The scanty circle of the Reformed Church in that country cannot be supposed to comprise all the fruits, which the genius of a great people would naturally gather from the Reformation: and the meagreness of the result is manifestly due, not to any national inaptitude for the Lutheran system, but to the fatal success of ecclesiastical and political coercion. Far from being indifferent to the corruptions of the Church, and careless as to the purity of religion, our continental neighbours were the first among modern nations to betray their sensitiveness on these points. The revolt of the Paterins of Languedoc against the abuses of the clergy and the pretensions of the Papacy had been suppressed by the policy of Innocent and the sword of Simon de Montfort two centuries before the ashes of Huss were thrown into the Rhine. Even before the close of the 11th century, Roscelin, followed by the celebrated Abelard, had vindicated the liberty of philosophizing with a popularity which awakened the alarm, and drew down the punishments of the Church. If a mediæval politician had been asked to name the country most likely to secede from allegiance to the Latin hierarchy, and to be the cradle of a new Christianity, it can scarcely be doubted that he would have mentioned France. That the fact turned out otherwise is no evidence against the sagacity of the prediction. The Papal Court provoked indeed the first fatal resistance at Wittenberg: but only because it had selected the German Empire as a hopeful field for its most audacious enterprise. No sooner

had the schism ripened itself into an independent religion, than it found a hospitable welcome among the subjects of the house of Valois. In no country did it more equally divide the State with the old faith; so that the history of Protestantism in France is the history of its civil wars. Had Henry of Navarre been succeeded by a prince equally magnanimous, and the Edict of Nantes been maintained as the basis of religious peace, no one can doubt that the whole course of European history would have assumed a different, and-according to all human estimate-a more visibly beneficent direction. France, disappointed of her Reformation, was driven forward to her Revolution. The crisis of grave, religious earnestness was allowed to pass: its remonstrances against wrong in the spiritual stage being spurned, slumbered till the evil assumed the palpable shape of debt and hunger; and then broke out, not from the sober middleclass as a cry of conscience, but from the populace as an outburst of despair. Every great national struggle leaves behind it a class triumphant and a class depressed; whose altered relations determine the destinies of many generations. The great social revolution of modern times was effected, in Germany by the princes and literati; in England, by the yeomen and the trades; in France, by the plebs and the press: and accordingly, the dominant influence remains, in the first case, with the secular powers and the Universities; in the second, with property; in the third, with personal qualities and democratic passion. Protestantism, successful in Germany by the weapons of learning more than by popular resolve, never forgot its first alliance: philosophy, in that country, has been developed side by side with theology; instead of waiting, as in England, till religion compelled it to awake, or pushing itself forward, as in France, to an independent completeness and sufficiency. Among us, it is the interest of the speculative thinker to keep on terms with the divine. In the country of Luther, they may recommend, without mutual disturbance, in the same building, and to the same audience, systems variously contradictory of each other. In Paris, it is necessary for theology to conciliate philosophy. It is unequal to a contest with M. Cousin, and must accept of truce or treaty: the claims of Isaiah being admitted, with reservation of the rights of Kant; the futurities of the Apocalypse and the third Heavens of Paul

remaining unchallenged, so far as may consist with the non-existence of both Time and Space. Notwithstanding the lofty tone of M. Coquerel's work, a painful feeling oppresses us that the conditions of his advocacy are essentially humiliating. We are fully alive to the importance of harmonising faith and science, so long as each retains its own ground, its own method, its own language. But we do not love to see religion playing the lackey to philosophy; aping its pomps, assuming its livery, and standing behind its chair. Even where a less obsequious relation prevails, it is but too evident which power is patron, and which the client. We are forcibly reminded by the book before us, that Protestantism has no lineage of great recollections in France, no continuous literature, no course of development; that its noblest traditions were abruptly dispersed through other lands, and checked in their indigenous results. For anything that appears, this might be the first work of dogmatic theology in the French language. The absence of all historical matter, the absolute isolation of the author's system, the curious subordination of Scriptural to metaphysical evidence, betray the peculiar conditions under which the task has been wrought out. Reformed Religion in fact has lost its parentage in France ; presents itself as an orphan or a foundling without the shelter of an ancestral home; and, though willing to work its way in part by its own merits, submits not unnaturally to appear as the adopted child of that powerful philosophy, which holds empire over the gravest minds in the metropolis of European culture. M. Coquerel himself speaks of the Bible as "little known to the public at large in this country:" and that it is expected to be far less familiar to his readers than the "Fragmens Philosophiques," is evident from the whole structure of his work. His instrument for determining "the principal problems of the Human Mind," including the theory of Redemption, is the Logic of the eclectic school: and the dexterity of fence with which its weapons are wielded, and its evolutions performed, contrast strangely with the elementary simplicity of the Scriptural illustrations and proofs. These however are banished, in each of the six books, to the dark closet of an Appendix, into which few will be inclined to penetrate from the light and airy chamber of our author's reasonings; and in which

still fewer will remain long enough to bring down their dazzled vision to so deep a dusk.

We refer to these features of M. Coquerel's book, that our readers may estimate its adaptation to a particular latitude of thought. It is a compromise with the spirit of the age in Paris. It accommodates its expression of what we hold to be eternal truth to the formulas of what we believe to be a transient fashion of the schools: and drives its admeasurements through the universe, from a base which, we fear, is ill-determined, and with instruments not unaffected by the metaphysical temperature of the hour. Strange to say, the subjective sciences, when they affect the most rigorous demonstration, and present a complexion most free from local and historic colouring, are the first to lose their persuasive efficacy by removal to a new place or time. By attaching his Christianity to them, our author has probably consulted well the temper and wants of the church for which he labours. But his logic, we fear, will neither migrate nor keep. It is like an electric charge, carefully collected from a well-dried machine and in a crisp air to be brilliant and effective, it must be discharged at once for we live in a wet world: and in awaiting the weather of another generation, or even crossing the Channel to this cloudy land, it oozes off in the damps and disappears. Upon ourselves at least, notwithstanding the most favourable predispositions, we confess that the experiment has been vainly tried. We retain the most delightful impression of M. Coquerel's preaching. We know that his character is no less dignified than his intellect is rich. We concur in the main results of his theology, and rejoice that a faith so generous should have an advocacy so splendid. We see in the title of the book an aim altogether just,-To draw from the self-consciousness of man a confession of the divine beauty and authority of our religion. We were encouraged, by the full and interesting Preface to the English Edition, to expect a privilege most precious, —and be admitted to the interior of a mind affluent in the gifts of nature and experience:

"The work," says M. Coquerel, assumes to be a complete view of Christianity, under the twofold aspect of reason and faith, of human knowledge and Divine Revelation; the volume unfolds, if the labour answers the aim, a complete system of philosophy and of

religion,—the religion of the Gospel, such as I consider and believe it to be.

66

It is the labour of my whole life, the summary of the long studies of thirty years spent in ministerial duties.

66 "The purpose of this treatise would not have been answered if the book, a work of conscience, was not a work of perfect sincerity; it is even so much so, that the system of religion unfolded in these pages is complete; all the deep and awful questions put to the human intellect by the Christian faith are answered. I have said all that I believe; I have kept nothing in reserve, no sentiment of my mind, no secret of my understanding, no conviction of my creed. I have spoken with that tranquil security which faith inspires; and if I have always found myself at ease with respect to the risk of error, it is simply because I have felt myself supported by the calmness of sincerity; in the language of Montaigne, I always could say to myself, 'Ma conscience ne falsifie pas un iota; mon inscience je ne sçay.'

“Every thing is consistent in the book; the thoughts are bound up together; they all serve in their turn as premises and conclusions; it belongs to the very essence of religious truths to be melted down into a condensed alloy, to be orderly disposed in a connected system. To detach a few fragments, to weigh some separate propositions, to discuss not the groundwork and the whole, but some scattered theories of the essay after breaking the links of the chain, would be to dispose of the volume without justice to the author, or without fruit to the reader.”—Page xiii.

The program is charming: and seldom have we opened a book with heartier hopes of finding rest for many a doubt and higher certainty for many a truth. Alas!slowly and sadly have we been brought to confess it,-we find here many problems, few solutions. These logical "chains," that seem so securely stringent to those who fasten them, are too often like the fetters that bind us in our dreams; to the prisoner, defiant of fracture; ideal and non-existent to the observer. The inconclusiveness of M. Coquerel's reasonings appears to us precisely of this kind: they press upon the brain, and do no more. We have read books which have profoundly convinced us of the falsehood of the positions they maintained: no writings, for instance, have ever so cleared for us the foundations of religious faith, as Hume's sceptical Essays. But the present work is innocent of so perverse a result. no doubt; but it helps no faith. We see the demonstration, but are unconscious of the

It provokes language of presence of