Note 223 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

(b) An à priori method has served alike in freethinkers’ and in pietists’ hands to obscure the facts. When Michelet insists on the “irreconcilable opposition of Christianity to the Revolution”—a thesis in which he was heartily supported by Proudhon223—he means that the central Christian dogmas of salvation by sacrifice and faith exclude any political ethic of justice224—any doctrine of equality and equity. But this is only to say that Christianity as an organization is in perpetual contradiction with some main part of its professed creed; and that has been a commonplace since Constantine. It does not mean that either Christians in multitudes or their churches as organizations have not constantly proceeded on ordinary political motives, whether populist or anti-populist. In Germany we have seen Lutheranism first fomenting and afterwards repudiating the movement of the peasants for betterment; and in England in the next century both parties in the civil war invoke religious doctrines, meeting texts with texts. Jansenism was in constant friction with the monarchy from its outset; and Louis XIV and Louis XV alike regarded the Jansenists as the enemies of the throne. “Christianity” could be as easily “reconciled” with a democratic movement in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as with the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day in the sixteenth. If those Christians who still charge “the bloodshed of the French Revolution” on the spirit of incredulity desire to corroborate Michelet to the extent of making Christianity the bulwark of absolute monarchy, the friend of a cruel feudalism, and the guardian genius of the Bastille, they may be left to the criticism of their fellow-believers who have embraced the newer principle that the truth of the Christian religion is to be proved by connecting it in practice with the spirit of social reform. To point out to either party, as did Michelet, that evangelical Christianity is a religion of submission and preparation for the end of all things, and has nothing to do with rational political reform, is to bestow logic where logic is indomiciliable. While rationalism undoubtedly fosters the critical spirit, professed Christians have during many ages shown themselves as prone to rebellion as to war, whether on religious or on political pretexts.