above a hundred fortresses, baffled the coalition of eight mighty empires, and caused the sovereigns of the sea to tremble behind all the deserts of Asia ?" In answer to this pompous detail it may be observed en passant, that the French are very much belied by the rest of Europe, if the greater part of them were not atheists; but, however this may be, at any rate religion cannot be necessary for scenes of blood and devastation; in fact, it had little to do with it: the French owe to the spirit of liberty their brave defence of their country, and to the spirit of ambition their subsequent conquests. In serious truth, it is impossible to crowd more absurdities together than this author does in his defence of religion. In the first place, embracing as he does the narrow and bigotted system of popery, he ought to know, that, according to his belief, every other mode of religion is an abomination to the Divine Being; and that all the brave and virtuous heathens, as well as all the pious Protestants, are under the wrath of God, and will be miserable to all eternity: this is a tenet which it is well known the Roman Catholics do not depart from, even with regard to their most intimate friends; yet, provided there be a religion, it seems almost indifferent to him what religion it is. In recommending the principle of faith, he takes equal advantage of the names of Bossuet and Fenelon, Locke and Newton, Numa and Alexander; he even gives it as an instance of the piety of the fatter, that he called himself the Son of Jupiter: this is entirely to abandon the basis of truth, and to establish a political basis, to recommend a national reli gion. Again he seems to think that every thing is good, provided a little religion is mixed with it; a crusade, a preux chevalier fighting for the honour of his mistress's beauty, an expedition for plunder, all are sanctified by having a religion along with them: but we have been accustomed to think that religion is only good as it is the basis of norality, and that a bad action is still more atrocious by being committed under the sanction of orthodox creeds and ppm pous ceremonies. He also, by a misre presentation of an opposite nature, common to him with many her writers, confounds his invectives against unbelief with those against immorality; but the one does by no means always imply the other. Very often too his arguments, with a little different colouring, might be turned against the cause he' defends. For instance, where he endeavours to shew how favourable the catholic religion is to the happiness of the female sex in their relations of wife, mother, &c. would it not be easy to reverse his picture, and to say, See that unhappy victim of a cruel superstition, that counteracts all the best feelings of her nature; taught that her perfection consists in a barren and joyless celibacy, she is afraid to trust the instincts which the Divine Being has implanted in her, and her whole life is a perpetual struggle against the destination marked out for her by Providence; or if she enters into a state that she was so plainly intended for, she is afraid to indulge her affection for her husband, lest God should be jealous of his creature: her confessor, and not her husband, is the confident of the secret thoughts of her heart. She looks upon her innocent offspring with horror, as being covered with sin, and objects of the wrath of the Omnipotent; and should any one of them happen to die without the ceremony of sprinkling upon him a little water, she is delivered over to irremediable sorrow; days and years may pass over her head, but no balm can be found for her affliction, for she believes that she has given birth to a being destined to misery through eternal ages. The joys and duties of life are neglected for visionary hopes and fears, and every hour claims some minute observance, some unprofitable ceremony. Is this a religion that allies itself with the real interests of man? The second volume more particularly treats of the poetry of Christianity; and to this the work should properly have been. confined. The taste of the author, for he certainly has taste, has pointed out, in a striking manner, the advantages which may be drawn from the various rites and tenets (he says all along of Christianity, we beg leave to say of Popery) in works addressed to the imagi nation; for this purpose he gives a cursory view of the chief epic poems, ancient and modern. It is a defect here that he has taken such slight notice of Dante, whose poem, being entirely founded on the supernatural of the Christian mythology, afforded a better test of his assertion even than Milton. He next compares particular characters antient and modern, as he finds them delineated either in the drama or the epic. His pendants are for conjugal love, Ulysses and Penelope, opposed to Adam and Eve; for the character offraternity, Priam and Lusignan; of filial duty, Iphigenia and Zaire-he compares the Sybil of Virgil and the Joad of Racine; Dido with the Phædra of Racine. Phædra, the reader will probably object, was nothing less than a Christian heroine; true, but Mr. Chateaubriand says Racine, who draws her character, is a Christian, and her passion, in passing through his hands, is reFined from its grossness. This, indeed, is true; but unfortunately in the English Phædra, though equally the work of a Christian, the grossness appears again. To the Cyclops and Galatea of Theocritus, he opposes, oddly enough, the Paul and Virginie of St. Pierre. Every where it is his aim to shew that the spirit of Christianity has given dignity to sentiment, purity to morals, grace to the poet, delicacy to the lover, and enthusiasm to the hero. But he considers its greatest force as displayed where religion itself becomes a passion; and he instances the Polyeucte of Corneille as a character superior to any that could have been drawn by a weaker poet. Many of his criticisms are ingenious and just; yet, though we do not mean to deny the influence of Christianity, well understood, in refining the passions, much of what he points out may more fairly be attributed to the influence of modern refinement, and the natural progress of mental cultivation. Having shewn the effects of Christianity on the passions, he proceeds to exhibit its resources in the marvellous; and here, indeed, Mr. Chateaubriand triumphs. He ranges his circles of seraphims and cherubims, and the whole hierarchy of angels, as pompously as if they were meant for one of the painted ceilings of Mignard; he musters his armies of saints, male and female, pastoral or warlike; he forgets not the witches cauldron; he triumphs in the tortures of the Christian hell, and he allows us particularly to plume ourselves upon the invention of purgatory. To all this we have nothing to say; we are now upon poetic ground, and let the poets make the best of it: yet one of our best poets, after addressing the powers of imagination, the genii and the muses, invokes as supreme, The guide the guardian of their lovely sports, Majestic Truth. She, we fear, would cause most of his phantoms to vanish into air. The third volume is dedicated to shewing the influence of Christianity on the fine arts, on philosophy, history, and eloquence, and on the harmony of the Christian religion with the scenes of nature and the passions of the human heart. In all this there is a good deal of agreeable reading, and often just criticism. We cannot but observe that Voltaire is treated more gently by our author than one should have supposed, from his decided opposition to Christianity. We suspect we have found the reason in a quotation he makes from him, where he says he hates the canaille; Voltaire was no democrat. The protestant reader will here see a very curious chapter on popular devotions, many of which will doubtless be new to him. "Who does not know, he says, 'Notre Dome des Bois! The young girls who have lost their betrothed lovers, have often, by moonlight, seen the souls of these young men in this solitary place, and heard their voices in the murmur of the fountain. The populace is much wiser than philosophers; every fountain, every cross in a highway, has a Prodigy belonging to it. For the believer, nature is a constant wonder: Is he in pain, he prays to his little image and is relieved. Does he want to see a relation, a friend; he makes a vow, takes the stick and wallet of a pilgrim, passes the Alps or the Pyrennees, visits our Lady of Loretto or St. James of Compostella, prays to the saint for the safety of a poor sailor his son, a pregnant wife, a sick father; his heart is lightened, he sets off the country comes out to meet him, every to return to his cottage laden with shells; one asks for a relique, every slip of his coat works a miracle How many disorders are cured by a consecrated ribband? The pilgrim approaches his home; the first person who comes to meet him is his wife, recovered from her lying-in, his son restored to him, his old father grown young again." All this is mighty well; but suppose while the pilgrim was rambling from his home, his wife and infant had perished for want of his assistance, that his son had taken to bad courses, and that he was wanted to close the eyes of his old father; suppose nothing was left to manure his land but the cockle-shells he has picked up-all which is full as likely, what becomes then of the eulogium on la bella devotiona? In a different style is the comparison, which we think an excellent one, between the sterility and coldness of atheistical principles, so unfavourable to genius of every kind, and the glow of heart and energy of sentiment inspired by the grand truths of religion. to society by the institutions of Christianity; for though his partiality for the marvellous and the romantic is every where apparent; this part of his work has much in it that is just and interesting. The following remark is much to his purpose: 66 in the middle of the world; others have died of grief; and those monks of La Trappe, so much pitied, instead of enjoying the charms of liberty, and the pleasures of life, are continuing their macerations on the heaths of England, or the deserts of Russia." The fourth volume contains an eulogium on the rites, worship, and different People pretended that it was doing a observances of the Romish church. great service to the religious of both sexes, Among other remarks we find the folto oblige them to quit their retreats; what lowing on the cross, that it is found in has been the result? The nuns who were various parts of nature, that there is a fortunate enough to find an asylum in fofamily of cruciform flowers, and that reign monasteries, eagerly took refuge there; all these flowers show a decided inclina-others united together to live a monastic life, tion for solitude. In the chapter on bells alone, he has exhausted as much eloquence as would have served an ordinary writer for a volume. The vestments of the priests, the funeral ceremonies, the fête Dieu, the rogations, the ceremonies of the holy week, and all the other festivals, are equally subjects of admiration, and described in the most pompous manner. With regard to having the service performed in an unknown tongue, it is a remarkable thing: he observes that Latin services are al ways attended to by the crowd with peculiar devotion; and with his usual love of the mysterious, he adds, "Is not this a natural effect of our fondness for any thing which is secret? In the tumult of his thoughts and the fund of misery of which his life is composed, man, in pronouncing words not familiar to him, or even unknown, seems to ask all the blessings which he wants, or even which he is ignorant of; the indistinctness of his prayer is its very charm, and his restless soul, scarce ly knowing what it desires, loves to form petitions as mysterious as are its wants." This is very ingenious, and we do not doubt but the people, while reciting their Latin prayers, form each for himself a variety of petitions which would never be found in any collect; but does not the church lose by this the great advantage of directing their minds to the proper objects of prayer? But it is little necessary for a Protestant to follow Mr. Chateaubriand through all the ceremonies of a Romish masss, nor in his description of tombs, antient and modern, to which he has given a whole book; we attend him with more pleasure in his history of the life of Christ, his account of the clergy secular and regular, the eulogium and defence of monastic institutions, the account of the missions, and the enumeration of the services rendered The monks, he justly observed, suc-. ceeded the ancient philosophers; they wore their dress, and imitated their manners; some even had chosen the manual of Epictetus for their only rule. He adds, "The greater part of the laws of these religious societies shew a profound knowledge in the art of governing men. Plato imagined republics without being able to establish any, but Saint Augustine, Basil, and Benedict, have been real legislators, and the patriarchs of many great communities." The services of the missionaries are justly appreciated, as well as the benefit derived to society from the various hospitals. It is unnecessary to follow the author in his picturesque description of the Maronite monks, the hermits of Thebais, the monks of Saint Bernard, so well known for their assiduity in saving the travellers lost in the snow; of the severities of La Trappe, and the awful silence of the Chartreux; even the bold and beg ging Capuchin is elevated into a figure of wonderful dignity, travelling about, we are told, and demanding hospitality, like Thales or Anacharsis. After the monks come the missionaries, whose zeal and labours, though no doubt considerably exaggerated by the glowing pencil of our author, are justly worthy of admiration; he shews that we owe to them much of our knowledge of foreign countries; and he adds, with a little stroke of satire upon a late expedition of ours, "When powerful nations, at a prodigi ous expence, have sent out pompous embas sies, have they informed us of any thing more than Duhalde and Le Compte had already told us; or have they in any thing shaken the credit of those writers ?" The observation which follows is very just: "A missionary must of necessity be an excellent traveller, obliged to speak the language of the people to whom he preaches the gospel, to conform himself to their customs, to live for a length of time with all classes of society; he seeks to penetrate equally into the cottage and the palace; and even if nature should have denied him genius, he cannot fail of treasuring up many important facts. On the other hand, a man who passes rapidly through a country with his interpreter, who has neither time nor inclination to expose himself to a thousand dangers, in or der to learn the secret of their manners, this man, had he every talent for observation, can acquire but a very superficial knowledge of a people which have only glided before his eyes and disappeared.” He says in another place, "Never will a company of philosophers visiting foreign countries, with all the justruments and the plans of an academy, perform what a poor monk, travelling on foot from his convent, has executed with only his chaplet and his breviary." We must observe, however, that this poor monk was generally supported by a very rich and powerful body. The next object of eulogium is the orders of chivalry; and here the author's love of the romantic has full play; Don Quixotte himself could not have expressed a greater reverence for the preux chevafier, and every thing belonging to him; we seem to be reading one of the old romances; love and war, and religion, plumes and crosses, and vigils and feasts, and tournaments, and Clorinda and Rinaldo, and Bradamant, and the knights of the round table, and the troubadours, whose verses, by the way, were very different from pious hymns, and the pages and their amours, all are enumerated, all are commended. The author finds a better subject in the following chapters, on the services rendered to the world by Christianity, in the establishment of hospitals, schools, universities, and various foundations, literary or charitable. The subject is a very pleasing one, and we should quote with great satisfaction some of the truly edifying instances of zeal and beneficence which embellish this article, if our account were not already too far extended. Among the services done to society by the religious orders, he insists upon their skill in agriculture; they were the best farmers, the best landlords, and the first to practise many useful arts; the sciences of law and policy were equally obliged to them. He concludes triumphantly with a picture of the depraved morals of the Romans, and conjectures of the state which the world might have fallen into, if it had not been rescued by the influences of a new and purer religion. The fifth volume is taken up by notes and autho rities. If, after going through this singular publication, we ask ourselves what has the author done? what has he proved? it may be answered, he has proved that the Roman Catholic religion, with all its pomps and ceremonies, is wonderfully he has scarcely aimed at establishing the adapted to amuse the imagination, but truth of its doctrines. On the contrary, by shewing the same predilection for the most obsolete and trivial supersti tions of the vulgar, which he expresses for the doctrines and rites most essential to it, he makes us suspect that he re ceives the whole rather as a matter of taste than of belief. He has shown that religious enthusiasm is favourable to the higher kinds of poetry, but it remains to be shewn how far it is friendly to the happiness of life. He has done too much, or too little. For a religious work there is too much of the profane; the nymphs and the graces, and the he roes and heroines of elysium are introduced, as it were, hand in hand with the Virgin Mary and the saints; and we think it impossible that a serious Catholic should not be scandalized by many of his images. On the other hand, if it is a work of criticism, and he is only examining whether Virgil or Dante possessed a mythology the most favourable to poetry, he goes out of his way to defend the doctrinal part. In fact, the strength of the work is in its descriptions. Mr. Chateaubriand is a very weak divine, a tolerable critic, an indifferent naturalist, no philosopher, but a very good painter; his style is rich, but often blemished with hyperbolical images, and exaggerated expressions. Two novels are inserted into the body of the work, Attala and René; the former was separately published previous to, and as a kind of forerunner of his great work, of which it was announced as a part; it is written after the manner of Paul and Virginie; that is to say, it joins a pathetic story to the description of natural objects, and though it is not equal to the beautiful and simple production of M. de St. Pierre, it has a great deal of merit, but it is of a gloomy cast, and its tendency is rather unfavourable to the doctrines it is meant to recommend. The scene is in North America. Attala is a young Christian Indian, whose mother, a Christian also, by a vow made when her life was in danger, had devoted her to perpetual virginity, in honour of the Virgin Mary. She falls in love with a youth, whom she saves from the torments to which, as a prisoner, he was devoted, and escapes with him into the woods. She there wanders with him through the vast solitudes of those unpeopled regions, and has the strength of mind to resist the feelings of her own heart, and the pleading of her lover, though consumed by the most ardent pas sion. At length, no longer able to bear the struggle between inclination and apprehended duty, she destroys herself by poison. This catastrophe is not calculated, one should suppose, to make us think well of a religion in which vows are recommended so contrary to the tendencies of our nature. It is true Attala meets, when it is too late, with a humane priest, who tells her that her mother's vow was rash, and that she might have been pardoned, if she had broken it; but it is evident, that had she never met with a Romish priest, and had her mother and herself never heard of Christianity, her misfortune would not have happened. The novel of Attala does, indeed, show the force of religious principle, in bridling the strongest passions of our nature; it shows, therefore, a great power, which may do good or harm according as it is directed. As to the rest, the scenery is beautiful, and the feelings of passion strongly described. Attala has been extremely popular in Paris. René, which is also inserted in this work, is more uniformly gloomy than Attala, and its design is less obvious, for what has the love of René's sister for him to do with Christianity? It is introduced by a chapter on what he calls le vague des passions, by which he seems to mean a state in which the mind feels an indistinct tendency to passionate emotion without any specific object. This void of the heart he thinks should be filled up by the passion of religion; a very ready way to make gloomy fanatics, to make a Count de Comminges, or perhaps a Ravaillac; but active employment, mingled with the innocent pleasures of life, we presume to think, would make better citizens and happier men. On the whole, this work can only be read by an Englishman and a Protestant, as a work of fancy, in which here and there are some touching moral paintings; a sober Catholic will certainly not defend it; a person who professes to believe every thing, to defend every thing, is very near be lieving nothing; for how can the faith of that man be built on a firm foundation, who seems as loth to part with the lowest popular superstition, with a procession, or a relick, as with the most essential doctrines of his faith; besides, M.Chateaubriand is not aware that when once these mummeries have lost their cre dit, they are flat and uninteresting even to the common people, all attempt to revive them is vain; the poet may make use of them for some time after the divine has done with them; but even with him, after a little while, St. Genevieve and Notre Dame des Bois, become as insipid as the Floras and Venuses of antiquity. |