Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/266

254 he considers that before it is reached the Western world will probably be distracted by a religious war; and he does not believe that the mere rejection of religious doctrine opposes any serious impediment to the spread of ultra-sacerdotal principles. The only effectual resistance to it, he thinks, was, offered by Protestantism. But, though out of this resistance the most splendid achievements of modern civilization have grown, Protestantism itself has been effectually checked in some countries, and gains ground in few or none.

The Belgian correspondent of the Times explains much in these opinions which otherwise would not be intelligible to an Englishman. At first sight, it is not easy to understand why a belief in the immaculate conception should have a more deadening influence on a shopkeeper, farmer, or artisan than a belief in predestination, final acceptance, or any other of the mysteries of Calvinistic Christianity. All seem equally remote from actual life and fact, and little likely to affect motives and springs of action. M. de Laveleye suggests that Protestantism, being a system of direct inference from the text of Scripture, carries with it the necessity of learning to read; but, though this necessity was really at one time the secret of the superiority of Scottish education, the Protestantism of England long managed to co-exist with very moderate knowledge of the alphabet. The true explanation why a Catholic of the middle or lower orders is a very different being from a Protestant of the same social position is given by the Times correspondent. He was present at a bitter quarrel between commercial travellers and local tradesmen over a table d'hôte, and he found that the actual subject of the dispute was the genuineness of a recent miracle by a local saint. One man of respectable appearance positively decclared that he knew of his own knowledge that a woman had been miraculously cured of blindness. Here, then, is the secret. It is not devotion to the Sacred Heart, or even to Our Lady of Salette, or the repudiation of all the doctrines condemned in the Syllabus, which makes the difference; it is (to take a saint singled out by a writer whom M. de aveleye quotes) the worship of St. Cupertin. The English gentleman or lady who goes on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Edmund by special steamer and train is not the better for the indulgence of washy religious sentiment; but enough remains from early education or present association to keep the devotee from the degrading effects of pure fetichism. But the small cultivator who in our day has been taught to believe that the saint of one parish cures rheumatism, while the saint of the next has power over blindness, and he of the next over the disobedience of children, has really sunk to a point of superstition to which not even such Protestants as the Peculiar People have descended. For these at all events believe not in many gods, but in one; and, though even apart from them there are very queer ideas abroad among Protestants as to special interpositions of Providence, they are at all events thought to be rare, and exercise in fact little influence on the daily course of life. But people who sincerely believe in the existence of a host of divinities, each specially present in a shrine at no great distance, each superseding at pleasure all secondary agencies, each infinitely more powerful than the doctor or the schoolmaster, have really returned to the familiar superstitions of the savage. Indeed, in its effects on exertion of mind or body, such a creed as this is in some respects more enervating than savage fetichism. For this last form of belief is at all events modified in its results by the manifold risks and surprises of barbarous life. The man, however, who, in the highly organized and carefully protected society of Western Europe, has been made to believe in omnipresent and ever-active supernatural agency, is least likely of all human beings to conceive a new idea, try a new experiment, or strike out a new path of conduct.

The correspondent of the Times saw plenty of evidence that the adversaries of the principles which all this apparatus of supernaturalism is made to subserve are rapidly changing, or have already changed, from political liberals into fanatical enemies of all religion; M. de Laveleye states the fact and bitterly laments it. As he tells us, it is no doubt in part the result of historical causes, but it is also in great measure the work of St. Cupertin, who has divided Continental society into two irreconcilable factions. "The father of a family," says the writer before quoted, "who believes in God without believing in St, Cupertin is in great difficulties between his atheistic sons and his religious daughters. The Lord deliver us from atheism and from the worship of St. Cupertin!" Here, in fact, we have the great 