CHAPTER XIX.

THE FUTURE OF MISSIONS.

Such was the world which Christian missionaries undertook to convert. It appears to me, however, that we may here see that such an enterprise was not a madness, and that no miracle was required to insure its success. The world was troubled with moral necessities, to which the new religion answered admirably. Manners were growing softer; a purer worship was required; the notion of the rights of man, the ideas of social 194ameliorations were everywhere gaining ground. On the other hand there was extreme credulity; the number of educated persons inconsiderable. Let ardent apostles, Jews, that is to say, monotheists, disciples of Jesus, that is to say, men penetrated with the sweetest moral teaching that the ears of man have yet heard, present themselves to such a world, and they will assuredly be listened to. The dreams, which mingle with their teaching, will not be an obstacle to their success; the number of those who do not believe in the supernatural, in miracles, is very small If they are humble and poor, so much the better. Humanity, at its present point, can be saved only by an effort coming from the people. The ancient Pagan religions cannot be reformed; the Roman State is what the State always will be, harsh, dry, just, and hard. In this world, which is perishing for want of love, the future belongs to him, who will touch the living source of popular piety. Greek liberalism, the old Roman gravity, are altogether impotent for that.

The foundation of Christianity, from this point of view, is the greatest work that the men of the people have ever achieved. Very quickly, without doubt, men and women of the high Roman nobility joined themselves to the Church. At the end of the first century, Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla, show us Christianity penetrating almost into the palace of the Cæsars. In the time of the first Antonines, there are rich people in the community. Towards the end of the second century, it embraces some of the most considerable persons in the Empire. But in the beginning all, or almost all, were humble. In the most ancient churches, nobles and powerful men were no more to be found than in Galilee about Jesus. Now, in these great creations, it is the first hour which is decisive. The glory of religions belongs wholly to their founders. Religion is, in fact, a matter of faith. To believe is something vulgar; the great thing to do is to inspire faith.

When we attempt to delineate these marvellous beginnings, we usually represent things on the model of our own times, and are thus brought to grave errors. The man of the people in the first century of our era, especially in Greek and Oriental countries, in no way resembled what he is to-day. Education did not then mark out between the classes a barrier as strong as now. These races of the Mediterranean, if we except the population of Latium, which had disappeared, or had lost all their importance since the Roman Empire, in conquering the world, had become the heritage of the conquered peoples—these races, I say, were less solid than ours, but lighter, more lively, more spiritual, more idealistic. The heavy materialism of our disinherited classes, that something mournful and burnt out, the effect of our climate, and the fatal legacy of the middle ages, which gives to our poor so wretched a countenance, was not the defect of the poor of those earlier days. Though very ignorant and very credulous, they were scarcely more so than rich and powerful men. We ought therefore not to represent the establishment of Christianity as analogous in any way to a movement amongst ourselves, starting from the lower classes (a thing in our eyes impossible) by obtaining the assent of educated men. The founders of Christianity were men of the people, in the sense that they were dressed in a common fashion, that they lived simply, that they spoke ill, or rather sought in speaking only to express their ideas with vivacity. But they were inferior in intelligence to only a very small number of men, the survivors who were becoming every day more rare, from the great world of Cæsar and of Augustus. Compared with the elite of the philosophers, who formed the bond between the century of Augustus and that of the Antonines the first Christians were feeble. Compared with the mass of the subjects of the Empire, they were enlightened. Sometimes they were treated as freethinkers; the cry of the populace against them was, “Death to the 196atheists!” And this is not surprising. The world was making frightful progress in superstition. The two first capitals of the Christianity of the Gentiles, Antioch and Ephesus, were the two cities of the Empire, the most addicted to supernatural beliefs. The second and third centuries pushed even to insanity, credulity, and the thirst for the marvellous.

Christianity was born outside the official world, but not precisely below it. It is in appearance, and according to earthly prejudices that the disciples of Jesus were unimportant persons. The worldly man loves what is proud and strong; he speaks without affability to the humble man; honour as he understands it, consists in not allowing himself to be insulted; he despises those who avow themselves weak, who suffer everything, yield to everything, who give up their coat to him who would take their cloak, who turn their cheeks to the smiters. There lies his error, for the weak, whom he despises, are usually superior to him; the highest virtue is amongst those who obey (servants, work-people, soldiers, sailors, etc.)—higher than amongst those who command and enjoy. And that is almost in order, since to command and to enjoy, far from aiding virtue, make virtue difficult.

Jesus marvellously comprehended that the people carry in their bosoms the great reserve of devotion and of resignation which will save the world. This is why he proclaimed the blessedness of the poor, judging that they find it more easy than other people to be good. The primitive Christians were essentially poor. “Poor” (Ebionim) was their name. Even when the Christian was rich, in the second and third centuries, he was in spirit a tenuior; he escaped, thanks to the law of the Collegia tenuiorum. Christians were certainly not all slaves and people of low condition; but the social equivalent of a Christian was a slave; what was said of a slave was said of a Christian also. On both sides they honoured the same virtues, goodness, humility, resignation, 197sweetness. The judgment of Pagan authors is unanimous on that point. All, without exception, recognize in the Christian, the features of the servile character; indifference to great affairs, a sad and contrite air, morose judgments upon the age, aversion to games, theatres, gymnasia, baths.

In a word, the Pagans were the world; Christians were not of the world. They were a little flock apart, hated by the world, finding the world evil, seeking “to keep themselves unspotted from the world.” The ideal of Christianity will be the reverse of that of the worldly man. The perfect Christian will love abjection; he will have the virtues of the poor and the simple, of him who does not seek to exalt himself. But he will also have the defect of his virtues; he will declare many things to be vain and frivolous, which are not so at all; he will depreciate the universe; he will be the enemy of the admirer of beauty. A system where the Venus of Milo is but an idol is a system, partial, it not false for beauty, is almost as valuable as the good and the true. A decadence of art is in any case inevitable with such ideas. The Christian will not care to build well, nor to sculpture well, nor to design well; he is too idealistic. He will care little for knowledge; curiosity seems a vain thing to him. Confounding the great voluptuousness of the soul, which is one of the methods of reaching the infinite, with vulgar pleasure, he will for-bid himself to enjoy it. He is too virtuous.

Another law shows itself as dominating this history. The establishment of Christianity corresponds to the suppression of political life in the world of the Mediterranean. Christianity was born and expanded itself at a period when there was no such thing as patriotism. If anything is wholly wanting to the founders of the Church it is that quality. They are not Cosmopolitan; for, the whole planet is for them, but a place of exile, they are idealistic in the most absolute sense. Our country is composed of body and soul. The soul: its 198memories, images, legends, misfortunes, hopes, common regrets; the body: the soil, race, language, mountains, rivers, characteristic products. Now, never were people more detached from all that than the primitive Christians. They did not hold to Judea; at the end of a few years they had forgotten Galilee; the glory of Greece and Rome was indifferent to them. The countries where Christianity first established itself, Syria, Cyprus, Asia Minor, no longer remembered the time when they had been free; Greece and Rome had still a great national sentiment. But in Rome patriotism was confined to the army and to some families; in Greece, Christianity fructified only in Corinth, a city, which since its destruction by Mummius and its reconstruction by Cæsar, was a collection of people of all sorts. The true Greek countries then, as now, very jealous, much absorbed by the memory of their past, paid little attention to the new preaching; they were always indifferently Christian. On the contrary, those soft, gay, voluptuous countries of Asia, countries of pleasure, of free manners, of easy indifference, habituated to take life and government from others, had nothing to abdicate in the matter of pride and of traditions. The ancient metropolitan cities of Christianity, Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica, Corinth, Rome, were common cities, if I may dare to say so, cities after the fashion of modern Alexandria, into which poured men of all races, and in which the marriage between man and the soil, which constitutes a nation, was absolutely broken through.

The importance given to social questions is always in an inverse ratio to political pre-occupations. Socialism rises when patriotism grows weak. Christianity was the explosion of social and religious ideas for which the world had been waiting, since Augustus put an end to political conflicts. As with Islamism, Christianity being a universal religion, will be at bottom the enemy of nationalities. It will require many centuries and 199many schisms before the idea takes root of forming national churches with a religion, which was at first the negation of all earthly countries, which was born at a period when there were no cities and citizens in the world, and when the old rough and strong republics of Italy and of Greece would surely have been expelled from the State as a mortal poison.

And this was one of the causes of the greatness of the new religion. Humanity is a varying, changeable thing at the mercy of contradictory desires. Great is the country; its saints are the heroes of Marathon, of Thermopylæ, of Valmy, and of Fleurus. Country, however, is not everything here below. One is man and Son of God before being Frenchman or German. The Kingdom of God, eternal dream which will never be torn from the heart of man, is a protest against a too exclusive patriotism. The thought of an organization of humanity in view of its greatest happiness and its moral amelioration is Christian and legitimate. The State knows but one thing—how to organise egotism. That is not indifferent, for egotism is the most powerful and the most assailable of human motives. But that is not sufficient. Governments which have started with the belief that man is swayed only by his instincts of cupidity, are deceived. Devotion is as natural as egotism to the man of a noble race, and the organization of devotion, is religion. Let no one hope then to get away from religion or from religious associations. Every step in the progress of modern society has made the need for them more imperious.

It is in this way that these accounts of strange events may be for us full of both teaching and of example. There is no need for delay over certain details which the difference of time renders strange and eccentric. When it is a question of popular beliefs there is always an immense disproportion between the grandeur of the idealism, which faith pursues, and the triviality of the material circumstances, which we are called upon to 200accept. Hence the particularity, with which in religious history shocking details and acts like those of madness may be mixed up with everything that is really sublime. The monk who invented the holy ampulla was one of the founders of the kingdom of France. Who would efface from the life of Jesus the episode of the demoniac in the country of the Gergesenes? Never has man in cold blood done the things that were done by Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, Peter the Hermit, Ignatius Loyola. Nothing is of more relative application than the word “madness” as applied to the past of the human mind. If we carried out the ideas which are current in our own times there is not a prophet, not an apostle, not a saint, who would not be locked up. The human conscience is very unstable at times when reflection has not advanced; in these conditions of the soul it is by insensible transitions that good becomes evil, that the beautiful borders upon the ugly, and that the ugly becomes the beautiful. There is no possible justice towards the past if so much is not admitted. A single divine breath penetrates all history, and makes an admirable whole of it; but the variety of the combinations which the human faculties may produce is infinite. The apostles differ less from us than the founders of Buddhism, who were, however, nearer to us by language. and perhaps by race. Our age has seen religious movements quite as extraordinary as those of old times, movements which have excited quite as much enthusiasm, which have had already—proportion being kept in view—more martyrs, and the future of which is still uncertain.

I do not speak of the Mormons, a sect which is in some respects so silly and so abject that it is hard to speak of it seriously. It is, however, instructive to see in the middle of the nineteenth century, thousands of men living by miracle, believing with a blind faith in the marvels, which, they say, they have seen and handled. There is already a whole literature devoted to the agreement between Mormonism and science; what is 201better, that religion, founded as it is upon the most silly impostures, has been able to accomplish miracles of patience and self-abnegation? In five hundred years learned men will prove its divine origin by the miracles of its establishment. Babism, in Persia was a phenomenon otherwise considerable. A gentle and unpretentious man, a sort of modest and pious Spinoza, has found himself almost against his own will raised to the rank of miracle worker, of incarnation of the divine, and has become the leader of a numerous, ardent and fanatical sect, which has very nearly brought about a revolution comparable to that of Islam. Thousands of martyrs have run to him with joy before death. A day unequalled perhaps in the history of the world was that of the day of the great butchery which was made of the babis of Teheran. “On that day were seen in the streets and bazaars of Teheran,” says a writer of undoubted authority, “a spectacle which it would seem as if the population were likely never to forget. When the conversation even yesterday turned upon that matter, you may judge of the admiration mixed with horror, which the crowd felt and which years have not diminished. We saw advancing amongst the executioners women and children, their flesh gashed all over their bodies, with lighted and flaming wicks fixed in their wounds. The victims were hauled along with cords and forced to walk by strokes of the whip. Children and women advanced singing a verse which said:—‘Of a truth we come from God and return to Him.’ Their voices rose loudly above the profound silence of the crowd. When one of the victims fell and was forced to rise by blows from the whip or thrusts of the bayonet, though the loss of blood, which ran over all his limbs, left him yet a little strength, he began to dance and to cry with an increase of enthusiasm, ‘Of a truth we come from God and we return to Him.’ Some of the children died during the journey. The executioners cast their corpses under the feet of their 202fathers and their sisters, who walked proudly over them and did not glance twice at them. When they arrived at the place of execution, the victims were offered their lives on condition of abjuration. One executioner took the fancy of saying to a father that if he did not yield he would cut the throats of his two sons upon his breast. They were two little lads, the eldest of whom might have been about fourteen and who, red with their own blood and with calcined flesh, listened coolly to this dialogue. The father answered, crouching on the ground, that he was ready, and the elder of the boys, claiming with some importance his right of seniority, demanded to be slaughtered the first. At last all was finished; night fell upon a mass of mangled flesh; heads were hung in baskets to the scaffold of justice and the dogs of the suburbs met in troops on that side of the city.”

That happened in 1852. The sect of Mazdak under Chosroes Nouschirvan, was suffocated in a similar bath of blood. Absolute devotion is, for simple natures, the most exquisite of joys and a species of necessity. In the affair of the Bab, people who were hardly members of the sect, came forward to denounce themselves, so that they might be joined with the sufferers. It is so sweet for man to suffer for something, that in many cases the thirst for martydom causes men to believe. A disciple who was companion of Bab at his execution, hanged by his side on the ramparts of Tabriz and momentarily expecting death, had only one word in his mouth:—“Are you satisfied with me, master?”

The persons who consider as miraculous or chimerical all that in history surpasses the calculations of ordinary good sense, find such things inexplicable. The fundamental condition of criticism is to know how to understand the varying conditions of the human mind. Absolute faith is for us wholly out of the question. Outside of the positive sciences, of a certainty in some 203degree material, every opinion is in our eyes only approximate, implying partial truth and partial error. The proportion of error may be as small as you will; it is never reduced to zero when morals implying a question of art, of language, of literary form, or of persons are concerned. Such is not the manner of seeing things which narrow and obstinate spirits adopt—Orientals for example. The eye of those people is not like ours; it is the glassy eye of men in mosaics—dull and fixed. They can see only only a single thing at a time; that thing besets them, takes possession of them; they are not then masters of their beliefs or their unbeliefs; there is no room for a reflective after-thought. For an opinion thus embraced a man will allow himself to be killed. The martyrs in religion are what the party man is in politics. Not many very intelligent men have been made martyrs. The confessors of the time of Diocletian would have been, after the peace of the Church, wearisome and imperious personages. Men are never very tolerant when they believe that they are altogether right and the rest of the world altogether wrong.

The great conflagrations of religion, being the results of a too definite manner of seeing things, thus became enigmas for an age like ours, when the rigour of conviction is weakened. With us the sincere man constantly modifies his opinions; in the first place, because the world changes, in the second, because the observer changes also. We believe more things at the same time. We love justice and truth; for them we would risk our lives; but we do not admit that justice and truth belong to a sect or a party. We are good French-men, but we admit that the Germans and the English are superior to us in many ways. It is not thus at the periods and in the countries where everyone belongs with his whole nature to his communion, race, or political school; and this is why all great religious creations have taken place in societies, the general spirit of 204which was more or less analogous to that of the East. Until now, in short, absolute faith only has succeeded in imposing itself upon others. A good serving maid of Lyons, named Blandina, who caused herself to be killed for her faith at seventeen years of age, caused a brutal brigand chief, Clovis, who found her to his taste fourteen centuries ago, to embrace Catholicism, makes laws for us to this day.

Who is there who has not, while passing through our ancient towns which have become modem, stopped at the feet of gigantic monuments of the faith of olden times? All is externally renewed; there is not a vestige of ancient habits; the cathedral remains, a little lowered in height may be by the hand of man, but profoundly rooted in the soil. Mole sua stat! Its massiveness is its law. It has resisted the deluge, which swept away everything else around it; not one of the men of old times returning to visit the places where he lived would find his home again; the crow alone, who has fixed his nest in the heights of the sacred edifice, has not seen the hammer threatening his dwelling. Strange prescription! These honest martyrs, these rude converts, these pirate church builders, rule us still. We are Christians because it pleased them to be so. As in politics it is the barbarous foundations only that live, so in religion there are only spontaneous, and, if I may dare to say so, fanatical affirmations that can be contagious. This is because religions are wholly popular works. Their success does not depend upon the more or less convincing proofs of their divinity which they bring forward; their success is in proportion to what they say to the heart of the people.

Does it follow from thence that religion is destined to diminish little by little, and to disappear like popular errors concerning magic, sorcery, spirits? Certainly not. Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, imperfectly seen by the people, expressed by the people. All the symbols which serve to give a form to 205the religious sentiment are incomplete, and it is their fate to be rejected one after another. But nothing is more false than the dream of certain persons, who, seeking to conceive a perfect humanity, conceive it without religion. It is the very reverse which ought to be said. China is a very inferior species of humanity, and China has almost no religion. On the other hand, let us suppose a planet inhabited by a humanity whose intellectual, moral and physical power are double those of terrestrial humanity, that humanity would be, at least, twice as religious as ours. I say, at least, for it is probable that the augmentation of the religious faculties would take place in a more rapid progression than the augmentation of the intellectual capacity, and would not be done in a simple direct proportion. Let us so suppose a humanity ten times as strong as ours, that humanity would be infinitely more religious. It is even probable, that in that degree of sublimity, disengaged from all material cares and from all egotism, gifted with perfect tact, and a divinely delicate taste, seeing the baseness and the nothingness of all that is not true, good, or beautiful, man would be exclusively religious, plunged in a perpetual adoration, rolling from ecstasies to ecstasies, being born, living and dying, in a torrent of bliss. Egotism, in short, which gives a measure of the inferiority of being, diminishes in proportion, as the animal is got rid of. A perfect being would be no longer an egotist; he would be altogether religious. Progress then will have for its effect the increase of religion and neither its destruction nor its diminution.

But it is time to return to our three missionaries, Paul, Barnabas and John—Mark, whom we left at the moment when they went out of Antioch by the gate, which led to Seleucia. In my third volume I will endeavour to trace these messages of good news by land and by sea, through calm and tempest, through good and evils days. I am in haste to retell that unequalled epic, to describe those infinite routes of Asia and of 206Europe by the side of which the seed of the gospel was sown, those seas which they traversed so many times under circumstances so diverse. The great Christian Odyssey is about to commence. Already the apostolic barque has spread its sails; the wind sighs and aspires only to carry upon its wings the words of Jesus.

THE END.