MORAL CHANGES UNDER PROTESTANTISM. 179 explanation. Considering that every mind was confided to its own decision on subjects the most important, and about which it must be least disinterested, the wonder is that the moral dissolution has not been complete. That it has not been so,-that morality has remained stable in the most evident cases,-is owing first to the spontaneous rectitude of human nature, which it is impossible altogether to corrupt; and next, to the power of modern habits of steady toil, which divert the nations of our day from the social extravagances into which, in their position, the idle populations of Rome and Greece would certainly have fallen. Protestantism must be charged with having seriously impaired the fundamental principles of morality, both domestic and social, which Catholicism had established, under precepts and prohibitions which will be sanctioned, in their spirit, more and more emphatically as the positive philosophy prevails. It was a sound observation of Hume's, that the Lutheran revolution was aided by the passions of ecclesiastics who desired a release from celibacy, and the rapacity of nobles who coveted the territorial possessions of the clergy; and it was a necessary consequence of the lowered position of the moral authority, that it lost the power, and even the will, to sustain the inviolability of the most elementary rules of morality against the attacks of the critical spirit. I need point out only the permission of divorce, the relaxation of rules about the marriage of relations; and, as a decisive instance, the disgraceful dogmatic consultation by which the chiefs of Protestantism, with Luther at their head, solemnly authorized bigamy in the case of a German prince; and again, the accommodating temper of the founders of the English Church towards the shocking weaknesses of their strange national pope. Catholicism was never thus openly degraded; but its growing weakness produced nearly equivalent effects. It was unable to repress the license of the time, in public speech and private act; and it so far supported moral excess that it roused a spirit of rebellion against its own authority by its repression of mental development. Thus the various religious doctrines showed themselves inadequate to the moral guidance of mankind; either by using their intellectual liberty to impair the principles of morals, or by proving their impotence to keep moral order; or, by discrediting invariable laws by obstinately connecting them with articles of belief which human reason could never again receive. We shall perceive more and more as we proceed that morality, so far from having any occasion to dread philosophical analysis, can find a solid intellectual foundation only outside of all theology whatever; resting on a rational appreciation of human dispositions, actions, and habits, according to their total results, public and private. It was necessary to say thus much, to mark the period at which religious faith began to lose its power of moral guidance, and to show its tendency, so striking for three centuries past, to promote hatred and disturbance rather than order and charity. We see, now, that the degeneracy dates from the political degradation of the spiritual power, the dignity and purity of the moral laws being deeply impaired by their being subjected to the ascendancy of the passions which they were intended to rule. doctrine. Stage of full We have now observed the advent of the Development negative philosophy, and of the correspondof the Critical ing social crises. The last phase remains to be reviewed,—that which presents the revolutionary doctrine in its full development. This phase however is little more than a protraction of the last, and we shall have a sufficient view, generally speaking, of the historical course of the revolutionary philosophy if we merely attach deistical consequences to Protestant principles. Our attention must henceforth be concentrated on the spiritual disorganization, till we have to notice the great final explosion of the temporal power in connection with the reorganization which will be the closing topic of this Work. We give too much credit to human intelligence if we suppose that it could have dispensed with this final elaboration of the critical doctrine, on the ground that its great principles having been furnished by Protestantism, the consequences of those principles might be left to develop themselves without assistance from any systematic formation of negative doctrine. In the first place, human emancipation must thus have been seriously retarded, PROTESTANTISM OPPOSED TO PROGRESS. 181 as we shall admit if we consider how resigned the majority of men are to a state of logical in- Protestantism consistency like that sanctioned by Protes- opposed to tantism, and especially when the understand progress. ing is still subject to the theological system. In countries where the philosophical movement has not fully penetrated the national mind, as England and the United States, we see the Socinians and other sects, which have rejected almost all the essential dogmas of Christianity, persisting in their original restriction of free inquiry within the purely biblical circle, and fostering a thoroughly theological hatred towards all who have pursued their spiritual liberty beyond that boundary. Moreover, it is evident that the expansion of the revolutionary doctrine would have been wholly repressed without the deistical movement which characterized the last century; for Protestantism, after having introduced critical principles, always abandoned them when they could be dispensed with, using its triumph to organize a retrograde system of resistance. It was thus with Lutheranism, which was as hostile to mental liberty as Catholicism; and thus it was with every form of Christianity, according to its power, till the triumph of the Anglican church and the expulsion of the Calvinists from France gave a systematic character to Protestant discouragement of progress. Protestantism having thus seceded from the progressive movement, which it had hitherto represented, it became necessary that new and more consistent leaders should assume the conduct of the march; and we find in this case the usual correspondence between great social exigencies and their natural means of satisfaction. The Protestant period had brought the ancient social system to such a state of decay that it could not guide, but only impede the formation of modern society, so that a universal and decisive revolution was seen to be impending, by such thinkers for instance as Leibnitz. On the other hand, the system would have lasted for an indefinite time, in its state of decay, and without fulfilling its professions, in virtue of its mere inertia, if the revolutionary ferment, which we shall see more of presently, had not entered in to direct the movement of decomposition towards that regeneration which is its necessary issue. The heretical movement which I before noticed aided the systematic formation of the negative philosophy. We have seen how ancient was the tendency to entire emancipation from theology, as when, in the decline of polytheism, there were Greek schools which speculatively transcended the limits of simple monotheism. At that time, when the very conception of a true natural philosophy did not exist, such an effort could issue in nothing but a kind of metaphysical pantheism, in which nature was abstractly deified; but there was little difference in fact between such a doctrine and that which has since been improperly called atheism; and it resembled it particularly in its radical opposition to all religious beliefs susceptible of real organization,-which is the point that concerns us here, where our business is with negative ideas. This anti-theological disposition was overborne during the long continuance of Catholicism; but it never disappeared entirely, and we see its traces in the whole course of the persecution of the philosophy of Aristotle, in consequence of its sanction of the tendency. We trace it again in the predilection for the freest thinkers of Greece, who indirectly influenced many speculative men, and chiefly among the high Italian clergy, who were then the most thinking portion of mankind. Without actively interfering in the destruction of the Catholic system, the anti-theological spirit was stimulated and expanded by it: and in the sixteenth century, while leaving Protestantism to its work, it profited by the half-freedom afforded by philosophical discussion to develop its own intellectual influence, as we see by the illustrious examples of Erasmus, Cardan, Ramus, Montaigne, and others, confirmed by the artless complaints of true Protestants of the spread of an anti-theological spirit, which threatened the success of their nascent reform by showThe negative ing forth the decrepitude of the system to philosophy. which it related. Religious dissent was naturally favourable to the tendency, which ceased to become a source of mere personal satisfaction to leading minds, and extended to the multitude, to whom it served as the only refuge from the fury and extravagance of the various theological systems, which had now degenerated into mere principles of oppression or disturbance. The THE NEGATIVE PHILOSOPHY. 183 negative philosophy was, in fact, systematized about the middle of the seventeenth century, and not in the subsequent century, which was occupied by its universal propagation. Its advent was powerfully aided by an intellectual movement, which is perpetually confounded with it, but which is far nobler in nature and destination. The positive spirit had hitherto been concentrated upon obscure scientific researches; but, from the sixteenth century onwards, and especially during the first half of the seventeenth, it began to disclose its philosophical character, no less hostile to metaphysics than to theology, but obliged to ally itself with the one to exclude the other. Its influence arose from its favouring the invasion of faith by reason, by rejecting, provisionally at least, all articles of belief that were not demonstrated. Bacon and Descartes could hardly have entertained any anti-religious design, scarcely reconcilable with the object of their active solicitude; but it is unquestionable that the preparatory state of full intellectual enfranchisement which they prescribed to human reason must henceforth lead the best minds to entire theological emancipation at a time when the mental awakening had been otherwise in this respect sufficiently stimulated. The result was the more certain from its being unsuspected, for it was the consequence of a simple logical preparation, the abstract necessity of which could not be denied by any sensible man. Such is, in fact, the irresistible spiritual ascendancy of revolutions which relate purely to method, the dangers of which cannot commonly be perceived till it is too late to restrain them. While the best minds were thus inevitably influenced, the multitude were troubled, at the moment of shaken conviction, by the rising and growing conflict between scientific discovery and theological views. The memorable persecution of Galileo for his demonstration of the earth's motion must have made more unbelievers than all Jesuit intrigues and preachings could retrieve or save, to say nothing of the exhibition that Catholicism made of itself as hostile to the purest and noblest aspirations of the human mind. Many other cases, less conspicuous but perfectly analogous, brought out this antagonism more and more towards the end of the seventeenth century. In both its aspects this |