by acclamation, upon his proposition, at the AntiCouncil held at Naples, in 1869:

"Considérant, que l'idée de Dieu est la source et le soutien de tout despotisme et de toute iniquité, considérant que la religion Catholique est la plus complète et la plus terrible personification de cette idée, que l'ensemble de ses dogmes est la négation même de la société, les Libres-Penseurs assument l'obligation de travailler à l'abolition radicale du Catholicisme et son anéantissement par tous les moyens, y compris la force révolutionnaire."

:

Such is the attitude of the Revolution towards "all religions and all religiosity." And the reason is because it claims itself to be a religion and a religiosity. Man is a religious animal. A religion of some sort he must have, even if it be a mere anti-religion a religion without God, without future life: * a religion which, to borrow a phrase from Aristotle, obliterates the higher self, the self of the reason and moral nature, and recognises only the lower self of the appetites and passions. Such a religion, or anti-religion, the Revolution provides and burns to substitute for all others.

This is a truth which it is well worth while to elucidate. I propose to do so, with the help of a distinguished man of letters, who may fairly be

* So M. de Tocqueville: "Une sorte de religion nouvelle; religion imparfaite, il est vrai, sans Dieu, sans culte, et sans autre vie, mais qui néanmoins, comme l'islamisme, a inondé toute la terre de ses soldats, de ses apôtres, et de ses martyrs." L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, Liv. I. c. 3.

considered as the chief English authority regarding it. Mr. John Morley is the professed apologist of the Revolution. He has devoted many years of an active life to the endeavour to recommend it to his countrymen. And his character, no less than his ability, invests him with a special claim upon our attention. Although he has attained to a conspicuous place among party leaders, no one who has intelligently studied his writings can, for one moment, confound him with the sort of men of whom party leaders are usually made. A very able journalist—the late Mr. IIannay-when some one accused Sir Robert Peel of having no principles, replied: "Oh yes, he has principles, as a horsedealer has horses." The saying was monstrously unjust to that conscientious statesman. But who can deny that it is only too applicable to a large and ever-increasing number of prominent politicians? There is the gravest reason to fear that at no distant date the designation of public man will be as little honourable as that of public woman. "Estce qu'il n'est pas tout naturel que vos convictions tournent avec votre intérêt ? Elles ne changent pas pour ça: elles se déplacent: voilà tout." So observes the clever American lady in Rabagas. But Mr. Morley's convictions are of another order. They are held with an intensity of belief and an earnestness of purpose which breathe in every page of his writings. They are the very springs of his intellectual life. For these reasons Mr. Morley

may claim to speak with authority, and not as the scribes of the newspapers, regarding the inner meaning and spirit of the Revolution, regarding its relation to religion. In the remainder of this chapter I shall do little more than collect and tabulate* his utterances on this matter. The necessity for doing so arises from the fact that Mr. Morley, with the one exception of his work on Compromise, has not systematically or consecutively expounded the faith that is in him. In an interesting article† he observes how dexterous Robespierre used to be in presenting a case. "First, he said everything important at the exact moment, when he had brought the minds of his hearers into the state most fitted to receive it. Second, he insinuated gradually and indirectly into their minds ideas which would have aroused opposition if they had been expressed more directly." This is also Mr. Morley's favourite method. And he has pursued it with great skill and with abundance of success.

"His plausive words

He scattered not in ears, but grafted them,
To grow there, and to bear."

He is well aware, as he has told us in his book on
Compromise, that "it is not easy to wind an

My references to Mr. Morley in this chapter, and throughout the present volume, are made to the edition of his writings published by Messrs. Macmillan in 1886.

† Miscellanies, vol. i p. 47.

+ Ibid. p. 6.

Englishman up to the level of dogma." But that is his avowed end. And he has displayed quite remarkable astuteness in his choice of means.

To begin with the beginning. "At the heart of the Revolution," declares Mr. Morley, "is a new way of understanding life." * He accepts the formula, "Révolution, Révélation." In a passage worth citing at some length he draws this out:

66

Christianity is the name for a great variety of changes which took place, during the first centuries of our era, in men's ways of thinking and feeling about their spiritual relations to unseen powers, about their moral relations to one another, about the basis and type of social union. So the Revolution is now the accepted name for a set of changes which began faintly to take a definite practical shape . . . towards the end of the eighteenth century.

While one movement supplied the energy and the principles which extricated civilisation from the ruins of the Roman Empire, the other supplies . . . amid the distraction of the various representatives of an obsolete ordering, the only forces to be trusted, at once for multiplying the achievements of human intelligence stimulated by human sympathy, and for diffusing their beneficent results with an ampler hand and more far-scattering arm. Faith in a divine power, devout obedience to its supposed will, hope of ecstatic, unspeakable reward—these were the springs of the old movement. Undivided love of our fellows, steadfast faith in human nature, steadfast search after justice, firm aspiration towards improvement, and generous contentment in the hope that others may reap whatever reward may be-these are the springs of the new. There is no given set of practical maxims agreed to by all members of the revolutionary schools for achieving the work of release from the pressure of an antiquated social condition, any more than there is one set of doctrines and one kind of discipline accepted by all Protestants. Voltaire was a revolutionist in one sense, Diderot in

* Rousseau, vol. i. p. 4.

another, and Rousseau in a third; just as in the practical order, Lafayette, Danton, Robespierre, represented three different aspirations and as many methods.*”

The Revolution, he goes on to tell us, "emphatically belongs" to the "class of great religious and moral movements."+ It is, in fact, he would have us understand, "a new gospel" and a better one; and he delights in decorating it with the terms consecrated by the usage of the old. Thus, in one place he speaks of Rousseau as "our spiritual father that begat us." § Elsewhere he styles Hume, Rousseau, Diderot, "the fathers of the new Church," and Condorcet, Mirabeau, Robespierre, its "fiery apostles." || Robespierre is also pronounced to be "the great preacher of the Declaration of the Rights of Man; "¶ and the Encyclopædists are described as "a new order," ** bound by the new vows of " poverty, truth, and liberty,"++ and destined, happily, to replace the Society of Jesus. "The best men of the eighteenth century," Mr. Morley avers, were possessed by "a furious and bitter antipathy against the Church, its creeds, and its book;" §§ just as the best men of the first century had their spirits stirred within them when they saw fair cities wholly given to idolatry. He describes