François Guizot

“ He changes the moral state and the social state of the world; He pours into the souls of men new enlightenment and new powers; for all classes, for all human conditions, He prepares destinies before his advent unknown; He liberates them at the same time that He lays down rules for their guidance; He quickens them and stills them; He places the divine law and human liberty face to face, and yet still in harmony; He offers an effectual remedy for the evil which weighs upon humanity; to sin He opens the path of salvation, to unhappiness the door of hope. ”

“ I will not give way to anguish of soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hesitate to affirm that no imagination can represent with adequate fidelity what would take place in us and around us if the place at present occupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to become vacant, and its empire annihilated. No one could pronounce to what degree of disorder and degradation humanity would be precipitated. But awful indeed would be the result if all faith in the Supernatural were extinct in the soul, and if man had in a supernatural state neither trust nor hope. ”

“ But if the moral problems that beset his thought are not solved, what he experiences may be poetry,—it is not religion.
I cannot contemplate unmoved the troubles of men of lofty minds, seeking in the religious sentiment alone a refuge against doubt and impiety. It is well to preserve, in the shipwreck of faith and the chaos of thought, the great instincts of our nature, and not to lose sight of the sublime requirements which remain unsatisfied. ”

“ Manifestly between the soul without spot and the soul tainted with evil, between the creature who is merely fallible and the creature who has sinned, there is a very great change of state, a distance immense, an abyss. We have a secret feeling of this deplorable change, of the fall into this abyss; and it is without premeditation, by the mere impulse of our nature, that we suffer our thoughts to bear us far—far beyond that abyss, and to pause on the rapturous contemplation of a state anterior to the fall. ”

“ For from that moment philosophy corrupts and destroys itself. When it has no other God than the universe, no other man than the chief of the mammalia, what is it but a mere system of Zoology? {94} Zoology constitutes the whole science of the epoch, of the Materialists, and to speak plainly, that is our position at the present day. But materialism can never be the be-all and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt and enervated, society is passing through immense catastrophes, is falling in ruins; the iron harrow of Revolution is breaking up mankind like the clods of the field ”

“ It is thus that at the commencement of the observational process there is the abjuration of beauty. But it soon reappears in another form, and brightens as we advance, and at length there arises on solid foundation, a fairer and goodlier system than ever floated in airy romance before the eye of genius. Nor is it difficult to perceive the reason of this. What we discover by observation is the product of divine imagination bodied forth by creative power into a stable and enduring reality. What we devise by our own ingenuity is but the product of human imagination. ”

“ I know no more striking spectacle than that of the unshakeable faith and inexhaustible energy of Moses in the pursuit of a work not his own, in which he executes what he has not conceived, in which he obeys rather than commands. Obstacles and disappointments meet him at each turn; he has to struggle with weaknesses, infidelity, caprices, jealousies, and seditions, and these not merely in his own nation, but in his own family. He has himself his moments of sadness, of disquietude: "And Moses cried unto the Lord, saying, What shall I do unto this people? ”

“ But as far as mankind is here concerned, it is far more than a mere accession of an honour or a glorifying of his nature: it is a striking manifestation of the value that all men have in the eyes of God. For it is not for some of them only, for some class or nation, or portion of humanity, it is for all humanity that God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ has submitted to all human sufferings. Every human soul is the object of this divine sacrifice, and called upon to gather the fruit. ”

“ This objection, so often repeated, never fails to astonish me. The majority of those who urge it, assert at the same time that God is incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate the secret of his nature. What then is this but to pretend to comprehend God? and by what right do they oppose his nature to his providence, if his nature is, to us, an impenetrable mystery? I refrain from reproaching them for their ambition; ambition is the privilege and the glory of man; but in retaining it, let them not overlook its legitimate limits. ”

“ But that judgment man's mind has never accepted, and never will accept; the great problems which pass beyond the finite world lie propounded before him; never will he renounce the attempt to solve them; he is impelled to it by an irresistible instinct, an instinct full of faith and of hope, in spite of the repeated failure of his efforts. {131} As man is in the sphere of action, so is he also in that of thought; he aspires higher than it is possible to achieve: this is his nature and his glory; to renounce his aspirations would be declaring his own forfeiture. ”

“ We may interrogate mankind in all times and places, in all states of society and degrees of civilization, we find it always and everywhere spontaneously believing in facts and causes beyond the sphere of this palpable world, of this living piece of mechanism termed nature. In vain do we extend, explain, amplify nature itself; the instinct of man, the instinct of human masses, has never suffered that nature to confine it: it has always sought and seen something beyond. ”

“ Amidst all the vicissitudes and errors of the people of the Bible, the God of the Bible remains invariably the same, without any tincture of anthropomorphism, without any alteration in the idea which the Hebrews conceive of his nature, either during their fidelity or disobedience to his Commandments. It is always the God who has said, "I Am That I Am," of whom his people demand no other explanation of himself, and who, ever present and sovereign, pursues the designs of his providence with men, who either use or abuse the liberty of action which that God had accorded to them at their creation. ”

“ Paul in the first century, and by Bossuet in the seventeenth, this very suffering, this humiliation, this martyrdom of Jesus Christ, have constituted his victory and his empire. And I would ask, what other spectacle than that of God made man to constitute himself victim—made victim to become the saviour—could have excited in the soul of mankind those outbursts of admiration, of respect, and of love, that ardent, invincible, and contagious faith, of which the Apostles and the primitive Christians have left us the evidences and the example? ”

“ The attack directed against the Christian religion is one hotly carried on, now with a brutal fanaticism, now with a dexterous learning; at one time with the appeal to sincere convictions, and at another invoking the worst passions; some contest Christianity as false, others reject it as too exacting and imposing too much restraint; the greater part apprehend it as a tyranny. Injustice and suffering are not so soon forgotten; nor does one readily recover from the effect of terror. ”

“ All religions that have taken place in the world's history, have been established by moral and by material agency; all appealed from their very commencement as much to force as to persuasion, as much to the arm as to the tongue. Christianity alone lived and grew during three centuries by its own single native virtue, without any other appeal than that made to Truth, without any other aid than that of Faith. During those three centuries the dogmas, the precepts, and the miracles of its Author constituted its only weapons, and weapons which have prevailed against all other arms. ”

“ He does not pace up and down like Socrates with his learned friends in the gardens of the Academy, nor lose himself in the mazes of the human understanding. Jesus speaks to men, to all men without distinction; He speaks to them of man's life, man's soul, man's destiny, of matters that touch all alike. And He speaks to them "as one having authority." ”

“ No: these impressions, which the picture of innocence awakens in us, are connected with and carry us back to ourselves; this change in the state of man, that mysterious Past which has thrown him so far from innocence, leaving him, nevertheless, the idea and the worship of it—these were not the lot of the first man alone: the entire human race was, and remains, subject to them. Our present evil does not proceed solely from ourselves; we have received it as a heritage before having brought it upon us as a penalty: we are not merely fallible beings, we are the children of a being who has sinned. ”

“ If faith everywhere resists, and everywhere outlives all the denials, all the doubts, and all the darkness which oppress mankind, it is that man bears within himself an imperishable consciousness of the enduring bond which connects him with God, and God with him.
Far from destroying this sentiment, experience and the spectacle of life explain and confirm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man recognises in it three different sources, and divides, so to say, into three classes the facts which make up the whole. ”

“ I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me; for they are thine. And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. And now I am no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee. Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are. ”

“ Jesus was incessantly warning, making appeals to the Jews; and when He saw that they pertinaciously disavowed and rejected Him, He cried, in an impulse of patriotic, affectionate sadness:—"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her wings, and ye would not!" ”

“ Have we not daily the example and the spectacle before our eyes? It is an incontestable and undisputed fact, that two elements enter into the moral life of man: on the one side, his innate dispositions, his natural and involuntary inclinations,—on the other, his inmost and individual will. The natural inclinations of a man do not destroy his moral liberty nor enslave his will, but they render its exercise more laborious and more difficult to him; it is not a chain which he carries, it is a burden that he bears. ”

“ There is not in this whole history a single grand human action, a single grand event, proceeding from human agency; all, all is the work of God; and Moses is nothing on any occasion but the interpreter and instrument of God: to this mission he has consecrated soul and life; it is only by virtue of this title that he is powerful, and that he shares, as far as his capacity as a man permits, a work infinitely grander and more enduring than that accomplished by all the heroes and all the masters that the world ever acknowledged. ”

“ God is not an expedient, invented to explain the first link in the chain of causation, an actor called to open by creation the drama of the world, then to relapse into a state of inert uselessness. By the very fact of his existence, God is present with his work, and sustains it. Providence is the natural and necessary development of God's existence; his constant presence and permanent action in creation. The universal and insuperable instinct which leads man to prayer, is in harmony with this great fact; he who believes in God cannot but have recourse to Him and pray to Him. ”

“ In these days it exists in the very presence of Liberty. It has to deal with free thought,—with free discussion. It is called upon to defend, to guard itself, to prove incessantly and against every comer its moral and historical veracity, to vindicate its claims upon man's intelligence and man's soul. ”

“ Whenever I find my faith in miraculous agency vacillating within me, the image of my God seems to be fading away from my eyes: He ceases to be for me God the free, the living, the personal; the God with whom the soul converses, as with a master and friend; and this holy dialogue once interrupted, what is left us? How does life become sad? ”

“ In their view, the world has existed, of itself, from all eternity, as have the laws also by which it is sustained and developed. In their elementary principles, and taken altogether, all things have ever been what they now are, and what they will ever continue to be. There is no mystery in this universe; there exist only facts and laws, naturally and necessarily linked together; and these furnish the field for human science, which, although incomplete, is yet indefinitely progressive, in its power as well as in its operations. ”