AN ULTRAMONTANE ADIEU TO THE PROTESTANT POPE.
MHE first number of the Univers that appeared after its recent suspension. contained a very long and striking essay on
Guizot by M. Louis Veuillot It was a brilliant piece of writing, charged with all the condensed force of epithet, the picturesque hits, and the rich store of curses that the great Ultmmontane journalist has given to the service of thelreligion which says, "Blessed are the meek." M. Guizot himself would have ad- mired so fine a piece of French. Its sarcasm would scarcely have ruffled the Olympian serenity of a soul which disdained, if it did not even court, the hostility of his infinitely small fellow-
beings. Guizot would have greeted an Archangel like an equal
and an old acquaintance, and five minutes:afterwards, he would have lectured the heavenly visitor with the austere gravity of a Professor at the Sorbonne. He would therefore have read the maledictions of Louis Veuillot against himself with the mingled pleasure of an artist and the curiosity of a philo- sopher. But the essay was not wholly an indictment. Coming from the chief satirist in the service of the Vatican, and speaking of the most distinguished Protestant of France, it was at times indeed strangely respectful. The editor of the Univers often seems to divide civilisedjmankind into two great catagories,—Catholics and Atheists, or those who agree with M. Veuillot and those who agree with the Devil. But he found it somewhat difficult to push Guizot into the throng of sceptical villains. The usual simplicity of his;theological intellect forsook him, when he came to write out the:warrant which should consign the Protestant statesman to the keeping of that useful diabolic personage who takes charge of the tremendous host of M. Veuillot's enemies. For the satirist and the philosopher had known and liked each other in former days. When Guizot was Louis Philippe's President of the Council and Minister of Foreign' Affairs, Veuillot was a humblelofficial of the State. He tells us that his duty was to give Guizot a report every day of the opinions expressed by the morning journals,[and to write his comments for the Ministry of the Interior. He then admired and liked his chief. The Minister was dignified, patient, obliging ; full of respect for his aged and venerable mother, full ofLserious and grave tender- ness for his children ; simpler,amid the7greatness of his fortune ; ever clear in word and prompt in act ; armed with superb oratori- cal gifts and boundless knowledge when he went into the Tribune. Veuillot thought that, in his way, the Minister was a King of men. And in spite of the [immense distance between the greatest of European statesmen .andirthe young unknown official, they frankly talked together on the, themes of religion. Sometimes things were said that startled Veuillot. At these moments, he would have sworn that Guizot would have become a Catholic, and one day he had the audacity to acquaint him with that con-
viction. Guizot was not offended, and no doubt he only smiled at the evangelical zeal ofA his [young subordinate. Veuillot pro- mises to tell us some other time; how he lost all hope that the philosopher would enter the true Church. Perhaps he will also explain what Guizot meant by saying to him one day, " Je ne suis pas cc qu'on appelle un protestant," a sufficiently mystic
utterance, in the moutkiof the Pope of the Protestant Church. Even after he had ceased to expect that Guizot would become a Catholic, Veuillot could not cease to regard him with a lingering sentiment of respect and admiration. He thinks that the Pro- testant and philosophic„{statesman sometimes betrayed profound instincts which were the relics of a better state,—instincts of a soul naturally Catholic,—instincts which represented the unknown part of his nature, and which he disdained or feared to touch. Nay, Veuillot adds that Guizot was the most acceptable product of the age of Voltaire and Rousseau. "After him the age has nothing to lose. Let the famous giddy-brained trifler who has disputed
with him the palm in the arena of letters and politics disappear, and all the nineteenth century will be dead." For M. Veuillot, it is summed up in the names of Guizot and Thiers.
We have picked out all the compliments that M. Veuillot pays to his former political chief. We doubt whether he ever paid half as
many to any other human being who happened to differ from him, and therefore to be a child of perdition. But those praises are embedded in characteristically rich strata of contempt, invective, and malediction. We learn that the bitterest satire on Guizot's age, was the fact that Guizot was the greatest of its representative - men; for he had fed upon the east wind, and sought to nourish his generation on the same diet. He had forgotten to study religion, regarding it as a social element of the past, so embarrassing to- civilisation that statesmen must brush it out of the way. He had no faith, no religion. Consequently, he could govern neither himself nor the world. To the man who has no religion the past gives no certain instruction, and the present is no trustworthy guide. He cannot choose between good and evil, because he does not even know the difference between the two.
Such a judgment may astonish the reader who remembers that Guizot had a profound acquaintance with the history of the Latin Church, knew theology better than the Bishops them- selves, had composed volumes of Meditations on the Christian Religion, had proved the immortality of the soul, written the life of Calvin, described in precise rhetoric the conditions on which the Catholicism and the Protestantism of +France could live at peace, was the Pope of the Protestant Church, and had saved the orthodoxy of the Protestant Consistory from- annihilation. Veuillot hastens to reply that he knows these facts. He knows that Guizot wrote volumes of medita- tions,—" too many meditations " ; and that he made discourses at the Consistory, at synagogues of every kind,—too, many discourses, and always the same discourse." But throughout the essays, histories, meditations, and addresses, "there is not the trace of a great thought ; there are only words." He had no deep, original, life-giving ideas, heated in the furnace of his own soul. He had only the forms, the dry husks of thought. "These pretended principles of the pretended chief of the .doc- trinaires were only instincts which had become habits, attitudes; and indifferences." His religion was only a form of speech and a negation. He could talk about theology, but he did not know what it meant, for he had no faith. Much as he spoke about the Christian religion, and mourned over the spread of scepticism, he belonged to the same great army as the sceptics themselves. Veuillot wonders whether Guizot ever spent ten minutes of his long life in seriously considering the things of eternity.
All these charges may well astonish Englishmen. They merely mean, however, that M. Guizot strove to carry into practice those principles of 1789 which M. Veuillot holds to be atheistic. He was "nothing more, nothing less, nothing else" than a revolutionary. "He wished to set up a revolutionary State which should be decent, correct, monarchical; the Republic without Republicans." "He said, 'The State is laic!' That means the banishment of God. That is the true principle of '89, the last word of Protestantism and the Revolution." Here M. Veuillot is quite logical. He thinks that the Catholic Church is divinely appointed to infallibly declare at all times what is truth and what is falsehood. He thinks that the infallible interpreter of God's will is the elderly gentleman whom Marshal MacMahon has been protecting by means of the ' Ordnoque.' He speaks of Pius IX. as "this immense cone temporary, this man in whom are incarnate justice, right, duty, by whom civilisation will be corrected and saved, and whom civilisa- tion does not comprehend." The Catholic religion and the Pope alike say that the State, the schools, and every part of human life should be Catholic. The commonsense of the secular intel- lect says that the Church and the Pope are quite right, if they really are what they assume to be. It entirely agrees with their declaration that the directors of such a Church must be the directors of all human affairs, that the pretensions of Hildebrand were absolutely logical, and that to make the State laic is to make it deny the pretensions of Catholicity. Only, the common-sense of the secular intellect does not admit the preliminary claims of the Church and the Pope. Louis Venillot calls such a denial Atheistic ; but that is only his way of speaking. "Atheist" and " Protestant " are to him names that signify the same thing. Guizot, however, was all his life deluded by the idea that the Papacy could so far accept the principles of the French Revolution as to practise the doctrine of religious toleration, and allow the State to treat Catholic faith and Protestant heresy as equals in the eye of
the law. Veuillot contemptuously replies that the Papacy cannot recognise any equality between the truths of God and the falsehoods of the Devil. He laughed at the philosopher's sugges- tion that the Catholic Church should join the Protestant in order to fight their common foes, impiety and unbelief. "Your Pro- testantism," said the satirist, "is impiety and infidelity. If you would win intellectual respect, be consistent with yourself ; be- lieve more, or deny more." Broad Churchmen might give a reply to such a challenge, but Guizot could not. When a theologian, he himself was too much of a Protestant-Ultramontane to be able to fight the theology of the Catholic Ultramontanes. When a statesman, he acted too much in the spirit of a sceptic to be able to fight the sceptics.
His political creed, says Veuillot, was of a piece with his theology, for it was a bundle of contradictions. He wrote and he spoke against the encroachments of Democracy, and yet, by helping to set up the Monarchy of July, he admitted the "sovereignty of the people, that is to say, the sovereignty of destruction." He fancied that he had formed a breakwater against the hungry waves of Democracy by creating the political bourgeoisie. But he deceived himself. " Sa bourgeoisie n'etait qu'une portion petite et faible du grand ocean democratique dont ilisolait seulement une ligne tracee sur le papier, invisible sur lea eaux ; elle etait agitee de toute.s ses passions, livree h toutes sea imprevoyances." Nothing could be truer. Guizot deluded him- self with the idea that, after having destroyed an aristocracy of lineage, France could be ruled by an aristocracy of shopkeepers, nobles by the virtue of having paid 200 francs a year of direct taxation. He fancied that the garrison of 200,000 electors would defend the pays ligal with the mingled virtues of the old patricians and the new Democracy, and without the fatal vices of either. But France rejected that feeble com- promise as emphatically as the Papacy refused to accept the offer of an alliance with banded heresy. There is, indeed, a close affinity between the Democracy of France and the Catholic Church. Each acts on the assumption that it is infallible, and each obeys overmastering influences which disdain the prudential whisperings of statecraft. When Democracy reaches the intellectual stage that we see in France, it becomes the deadly foe of Catholicity, and the battle between them must be fought out to the end. Those who intervene with feeble theological compromises fare badly at the hands of both hosts, and thus has it been with Guizot. Neither will such a Democracy bear the artificial curbs of a Con- stitutionalism which every man sees to be only another name for the creation of new privileged classes. Guizot was hated by the Republicans because they held him to be the hidden ally of an aristocracy. He was hated by the representatives of the aristo- cracy because they declared that his principles led straight to the sovereignty of the mob. What he thought the wisdom of modera- tion was, after all, only the weakness of confused thought ; and that is the truth which underlies the dogmatic satire and invective of Louis Veuillot.
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