François Guizot

“ Germain l'Auxerrois, would have paused in astonishment had it perceived that what it was so brutally attacking and destroying was—not the ancient régime, not absolutism—but religion and liberty.
To put an end to this confusion, full at once of deception and of peril, but a single thing was required: to banish from the Church, and from its relations with the State, worldly ambition and influences, and to replace them by influences of a moral description; instead of a political banner, they should have only hoisted the banner of religious faith and liberty of conscience. ”

“ When religious liberty reigns in a State, it is a great and a too common error to believe that the statesmen charged with its government have no religious belief whatever; that they are careless in matters of faith because they embrace and advocate the cause of liberty of conscience. The soul does not abdicate the right to its proper and intimate life, because it respects in other souls the rights of that same life; and nothing is more logical or more legitimate than to sustain with fervor the principle of freedom of conscience, and yet to be at the same time a true and an earnest Christian. ”

“ In a city inhabited no longer, there remain no sensation, no idea, no judgment; the houses remain, and even the streets, and with them nature, with all nature's laws, which are not suspended in their course. To the universe, the energetic presence of its Creator suffices; it does not require our presence; the absence of spectators would not make it languish; it existed before us, it will exist after us; its reality is independent of us and of our thoughts—it is absolute. ”

“ Man is not merely a being that thinks, but a being that feels, wills, and acts, a being moral and responsible for his acts, at the same time that he is a being of intelligence, and a being insatiate of knowledge. It is by his thought that he accounts to himself for his sentiments, and for the motives of his acts, but it is not from his thought that he derives either his sentiments or his liberty, neither does knowledge constitute his sole enjoyment. Spinoza mutilates man strangely when he places "the highest degree of human felicity in the highest degree of human knowledge." ”

“ And if we go back to the ancient history of Europe, who can doubt that at the fall of the Roman Empire, if the State and the Church had not, although distinct institutions, been allied, the development of Christianity would have been far less energetic, and its conquest of its barbarous conquerors far more problematical? This is, I repeat, a question not of principle, but of time, of place, of circumstance, and of condition of society. A complete separation of Church and State may be good and practicable; it is neither the only good system, nor is it always a practicable system. ”

“ Pantheists are entirely of the opinion of M. Scherer, for to enable man to comprehend God, they have found no other expedient than to make of man himself the God that man is desirous of comprehending. The passion for an universal science has ended by receiving no being as God but man.
The passion for universal unity has led to the same result. That truth is one—that is to say, that all truths, whatever their object, are in harmony with one another—the very word truth implies and proclaims. From the unity of truth the Pantheists passed, with a single bound, to the unity of being. ”

“ Just as no power of man has the right to strip any single soul, created by God free and responsible, of its liberty of conscience; so, equally, no science of man can define the laws and the facts that shall regulate the future state of the soul. Liberty is, on this earth, the principle of the moral life of man; man's state beyond this earth is a question between him and his Maker, and to be determined by the use which man may have here made of his liberty. To respect God's gift of liberty to man, and the mystery of God's decrees respecting man's salvation, is in reality the law of Christians ”

“ Whoever revolts against any single one of these laws, revolts against them all, and so abdicates all his nature. Are there weapons of legitimate use against that faculty by which we perceive the external world? These same weapons may be turned against the conscience, the memory, the moral sense, against reason itself. ... Let but, in any single point, the nature of knowledge—the nature, I say, and not the degree—be made subordinate to our means of knowing, and all certitude is at an end; nothing is true, nothing is false. ”

“ I am not here to reason in favor of the received opinion; that opinion needs neither proofs nor defenders; it is rooted deeply enough in our most intimate nature to brave all attack. It is not the world that risks anything at the hands of the philosophers; it is rather the honor of philosophy which suffers some discredit; it is rather philosophy that relieves the vulgar from a part of the respect which philosophy yet demands at its hands, when it gives birth to paradoxes bearing, seemingly, the very impress of folly. ”

“ M. Scherer asks himself sadly if in rejecting all dogma and all positive revelation, in obliging religious sentiment to be self-sufficing, and to feed itself with its own and single virtue, rational criticism does not inflict a deadly blow upon religion itself; and M. Sainte-Beuve, in the same perplexity, contents himself with saying, as resignedly, though more coldly, "The heart has its reasons, which the reason comprehends not." ”

“ When Authority has had a long dominion, and its abuse too has been long, a reaction occurs: Liberty has her revenge; but in her turn is prone to compromise her interests by abuses and by excess. It is the history of all human society; facts prove it quite as much as common sense foretells it. In the bosom of this general fact it is the peculiar character, as it is the glory, of Christianity that it has fully accepted these two rival forces; and the one in the face of the other—authority and liberty—both of divine origin. ”

“ It is then a fact that public and private morality, the order of society and the happiness of individuals, are directly at stake in the controversy between true philosophy and false philosophy respecting the reality of knowledge. For when existences themselves become problems, what force remains to the bond that unites them? We cannot divide the entire man; we cannot assign a part only to skepticism; as soon as skepticism once penetrates into the understanding it invades it throughout. ”

“ It is impossible to disavow more indignantly Materialism, Atheism, Skepticism, with their principles and their consequences. But after all these declarations and these disavowals, when M. Vacherot has to draw his conclusions, and has to set the affirmation of his own ideas by the side of his criticism of the ideas of other writers; when he, in his turn, undertakes to explain God and the world, this twofold object of Metaphysics, the perplexity of the thinker becomes at once apparent, and he falls, in spite of himself, into the very paths from which he proposed to escape. ”

“ When men affirm that mankind believes, and that skeptics do so with mankind, they affirm a fact in itself incontestable; when they add that mankind believes itself right in believing, that is to say, virtually admits that the human intelligence sees things as they are, this is true too, and skeptics do not deny it; but when, grappling with skepticism itself, men pretend to show that the human intelligence really sees things as they are, this is a pretension which I cannot understand. ”

“ Materialism is but an hypothesis adopted for the explanation of this great fact, and the hypothesis consists not in the solution of the problem, but in its suppression by the denial of the fact itself. What need, they say, to seek to explain how the union of soul and body is accomplished? Neither this complexity of the human being nor his unity in that complexity is a reality. Man is only a product and an ephemeral form of matter! ”

“ Impatience of an ancient yoke, a spirit of reaction, a love of innovation, frivolous instincts not a few, as well as evil impulses, may claim a share—and a large share—in the attacks of which Christianity is in these days the object; but what gives to these attacks their most formidable character is a sentiment far more serious, one that has made heroes and martyrs, the love of truth at all risk and in despite of consequence, for the sake of truth and for its sake alone. {210} The feeling that makes man thirst for truth is an honor to human nature. ”

“ Of profound convictions, with no selfish, worldly views, he aspired to the entire empire of the intellect, believing both the interests of social order and the honor of the human mind involved in the triumph of his doctrine; he ardently desired not only its propagation, but its organization as a permanent and potent institution, to insure and perpetuate his triumph. The real and practical government of nations, according to him, was only, as it ought to be only, a sort of stewardship, charged with the duty of realizing and carrying into effect the ideas of thinking men. ”

“ These men, with their heads in the air and their masks in their hand, with a confidence in themselves and a faith almost confounding itself with religion, profess openly as truth, fatalism, egotism, and atheism. This is what men want, and what, if they wish to be logical, men must want, when, closely or remotely, they adhere to a philosophy that reduces everything to sensation, and that which is the object of sensation. Let there then be no illusion upon this subject; all the principles of morals and of religion are at stake. Sensualism is what it is, and can be nothing else. ”

“ His philosophy stands midway between Theism and Pantheism; between historical right, as the expression of actual reason, and the absolute right to liberty and equality, as the end of universal history. His system seems to sanction the most profound piety, and to regard Christianity as the true and absolute religion, at the very time when it appears also as its negation; just as in politics it presents itself as at one and the same moment conservative and progressive, favorable to existing rights and yet revolutionary. ”

“ When a deep social wound has been laid bare, and measures on a large scale have been adopted to cure it, it is no longer in the power of any individual to keep that wound secret, or to stifle the hope of a remedy. How many times in the course of this century has not the papacy, and have not the ardent champions of liberty, condemned and combated the efforts made to reconcile Catholicism with modern civilization, and to cause the Church to accept the liberties of civil society, and the State to recognize the rights of the Church? ”

“ Positivism is a word, in language a barbarism, in philosophy a presumption. Unlike Geology, Ideology, Theology, Physics, it qualifies a doctrine, not by its object, but by its supposed merit. All science pretends to positiveness—that is, to be founded upon fact and truth. But "Positivism" alone arrogates to itself this quality. It is an arrogance, in my opinion, radically unjustifiable.
I knew its founder, M. Auguste Comte, personally. I had some communication with him in the period from 1824 to 1830. I then was struck by the elevation of his sentiments and by the vigor of his mind. ”

“ Here God reappears. "As for the real God," says M. Vacherot, "he lives, he develops himself in the immensity of space and in the eternity of time; he appears to us under the infinite variety of forms which are his manifestations—he is Cosmos. ... The world thought of is something else than the world imagined. Imagination represents to us the world as an immense mass of dispersed matter, as an infinite collection of forces disseminated in the vast fields of space. ”

“ That Christianity alone restored to man, as man, and for no other reason, his rights to liberty, is a fact that the comparative histories of the world, whether Christian or Pagan, place beyond all doubt; for confront these two histories, and name the nations among whom the idea of the dignity of man's liberty became a general idea, powerful in influence and fruitful in consequence! Another fact equally historic and certain is, that Christianity knew how to adapt itself, and did readily adapt itself, to the different states of society, and the different forms of government ”

“ In times of religious incredulity and of religious indifference, and even in the transitional times which immediately ensue, it is the error of many, and even of men who respect and support religion, to consider it in the light of a great political institution—a salutary system of moral police, however necessary to society, indebted for its merits and its prerogatives rather to its practical utility than to its intrinsic truth. {158} Grave error, misconceiving both the nature and the origin of religion, and calculated to deprive it both of its empire and its dignity! ”