Page:Jean Jaurès socialist and humanitarian 1917.djvu/56

 private as in political and social life. Although a free-thinker, he made no difficulty about being married in a church.… But if the same man evolves personally towards a more hardy, more revolutionary conception of society, of the world, and of life, if he is revolted by injustice, and if he is led by study, by the passionate search for truth, into the party of the Social Revolution, if, from thenceforth, he is, in the great crises of the national life, more violently and more directly at war with the Church: has he the right to impose by force on all his family his own evolution ? … That is the problem that is set by life, not only for me, but for nine militants out of ten. And I know that as a matter of fact the greater part have replied as I have.…

"But I have never said (and that is the clerical ruse and an abominable lie) that it is by violence in the family or in the State that one should abolish old beliefs, never have I said that individual Socialists should in the family use violence against the conscience of the wife, the mother.… Never have I said that the Socialist Party, when master of the State, would use violence to abolish the traditional religion. I have never appealed to anything but the gradual organization of liberty, to the intimate force of science and reason."

Jaurès believed in the continuity of history. It