Untitled article by W. A. SPICER

Pacific Press Publishing Company · New York · January 19, 1893

Religion and Irreligion in France.

By W. A. SPICER

The truth stated in a recent SENTINEL, regarding the influences which fostered the infidelity of the French Revolution, is put in very similar words by Prof. Goldwin Smith, the very well-known essayist:—

The religion of the French Revolution was a State church which, deserted by the convictions of the people, but retaining their outward allegiance, reduced them to hypocrisy and to atheism.

Is there not also a lesson timely for us now in the fact that even the Reign of Terror, away down beneath the surface, was a blind and mad effort to force France into that ideal millennium of the philosophers, wherein was to be unity, equality, and brotherly love? Every man was responsible that every other man had this brotherly love in his heart, or that he was put where he would not block the wheels of progress. Legislative assemblies produced “paper models” of the millennium, and the pike and guillotine were unceasingly busy, but all were alike powerless to force the reign of peace and goodwill into hearts unsubdued by the power of God.

Replying to M. Roux, who in his “Historie Parlementaire” held that the French Revolution was “a dead-lift effort, after eighteen hundred years of preparation, to realize—the Christian religion,” Carlyle says in his history of that epoch:—

Alas, no, M. Roux. A gospel of brotherhood, not according to any of the four old evangelists and calling on men to repent, and amend each his own wicked existence that they might be saved; but a gospel rather, as we often hint, according to a new fifth evangelist, Jean-Jacques, calling on men to amend the whole world's wicked existence, and be saved by making a constitution. A thing different and distant toto cœlo, as they say; the whole breadth of the sky, and further if possible.

The history of those days shows also that men who pledge themselves to wrong principles, and seek to attain their aims by methods subversive of civil as well as

religious liberty, know not to what lengths they may be led. Mild manners and a genial disposition are not proof against the remorseless and resistless logic of wrong principles coupled with human depravity and Satanic suggestion. It is a matter of record that Robespierre in his early career resigned a judgeship at Arras rather than condemn a criminal to death; yet he followed his theories to the bitter end and now stands “pilloried in history as a monster of cruelty which he never believed himself to be.” Another, Danton, saw too late the ruin and strove to restrain from going to its full length the flood he had helped to let loose. When at last condemned to the guillotine for trying to stay the torrent, he was heard to say:—

This time twelve month I was moving the creation of that same Revolutionary Tribunal. I crave pardon for it of God and man. They are all brothers of Cain. . . . O, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with governing of men!

These and other popular idols were cast down by the maddened Paris mob when it “found itself to have been guided, not to a millennium, but to a massacre.” What a warning to those who in the slightest degree, for any fancied good to come out of it, are diverging from principles of right and truth and teaching men to do so.

Those who nowadays believe in an official religion, and the enforcement of Sunday laws in our country, frequently cite the unhappy condition of France, with its “continental Sunday” and irreligion. “This country is not France,” said a Chicago clergyman lately, giving his reasons why the World's Fair should be closed by act of Congress. True; but is not the situation in France very like that which these same clergy are working to bring about in our country? When Napoleon was reconstructing France, Lafayette tried to have him adopt the true principle regarding the separation of religion and the State, which was working so well in the new Republic across the Atlantic. But Napoleon counted only immediate expediency, and said: “Lafayette may be right in theory; but what is a theory? A folly, when it is wished to apply to a mass of men.” So was fastened upon the new France the old curse of making religion a department of State. And to-day why should those who wish to make the State a teacher of religion and a guardian of religious observances in this country, point the finger of reproach at France, where the State now subsidizes the churches as public ministers of morality, and salaries not only Catholics and Protestants, but Jews and Mohammedans as well? Official religion has helped to make France what it is, and anyone knows that one of the greatest dangers in that republic for years has been the intriguing of religionists for political power and prestige. How then can American citizens hope to see anything but ruin and disruption in the efforts of religious zealots to set in operation here the same forces which have been the curse of Church and State countries in all time?

W. A. SPICER.