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A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 03

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Title: A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 03

Author: Voltaire

Commentator: Oliver Herbrand Gordon Leigh
        John Morley
        T. Smollett

Translator: William F. Fleming


        
Release date: March 28, 2011 [eBook #35623]
                Most recently updated: March 19, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY, VOLUME 03 ***

A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY

VOLUME III

By

VOLTAIRE




EDITION DE LA PACIFICATION

THE WORKS OF VOLTAIRE

A CONTEMPORARY VERSION


  With Notes by Tobias Smollett, Revised and Modernized
     New Translations by William F. Fleming, and an
           Introduction by Oliver H.G. Leigh


A CRITIQUE AND BIOGRAPHY

BY

THE RT. HON. JOHN MORLEY

FORTY-THREE VOLUMES



  One hundred and sixty-eight designs, comprising reproductions
      of rare old engravings, steel plates, photogravures,
                    and curious facsimiles

VOLUME VII

E.R. DuMONT

PARIS--LONDON--NEW YORK--CHICAGO



     _The WORKS of VOLTAIRE_

     _"Between two servants of Humanity, who appeared eighteen hundred
     years apart, there is a mysterious relation. * * * * Let us say it
     with a sentiment of profound respect: JESUS WEPT: VOLTAIRE SMILED.
     Of that divine tear and of that human smile is composed the
     sweetness of the present civilization."_

     _VICTOR HUGO._



LIST OF PLATES--VOL. III


VOLTAIRE'S RECEPTION OF MADAME D'ÉPINAY AT LES DÉLICES _Frontispiece_

THE DEATH OF COLIGNY

CATHERINE II. OF RUSSIA

THE ALMONER AND THE ANABAPTIST


[Illustration: Voltaire receives Mme. d'Épinay at Les Délices.]


       *       *       *       *       *

VOLTAIRE

A PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY

IN TEN VOLUMES

VOL. III

CANNIBALS--COUNCILS


       *       *       *       *       *


CANNIBALS.


SECTION I.

We have spoken of love. It is hard to pass from people _kissing_ to
people _eating_ one another. It is, however, but too true that there
have been cannibals. We have found them in America; they are, perhaps,
still to be found; and the Cyclops were not the only individuals in
antiquity who sometimes fed on human flesh. Juvenal relates that among
the Egyptians--that wise people, so renowned for their laws--those pious
worshippers of crocodiles and onions--the Tentyrites ate one of their
enemies who had fallen into their hands. He does not tell this tale on
hearsay; the crime was committed almost before his eyes; he was then in
Egypt, and not far from Tentyra. On this occasion he quotes the Gascons
and the Saguntines, who formerly fed on the flesh of their countrymen.

In 1725 four savages were brought from the Mississippi to Fontainebleau,
with whom I had the honor of conversing. There was among them a lady of
the country, whom I asked if she had eaten men; she answered, with great
simplicity that she had. I appeared somewhat scandalized; on which she
excused herself by saying that it was better to eat one's dead enemy
than to leave him to be devoured by wild beasts, and that the conquerors
deserved to have the preference. We kill our neighbors in battles, or
skirmishes; and, for the meanest consideration, provide meals for the
crows and the worms. There is the horror; there is the crime. What
matters it, when a man is dead, whether he is eaten by a soldier, or by
a dog and a crow?

We have more respect for the dead than for the living. It would be
better to respect both the one and the other. The nations called
polished have done right in not putting their vanquished enemies on the
spit; for if we were allowed to eat our neighbors, we should soon eat
our countrymen, which would be rather unfortunate for the social
virtues. But polished nations have not always been so; they were all for
a long time savage; and, in the infinite number of revolutions which
this globe has undergone, mankind have been sometimes numerous and
sometimes scarce. It has been with human beings as it now is with
elephants, lions, or tigers, the race of which has very much decreased.
In times when a country was but thinly inhabited by men, they had few
arts; they were hunters. The custom of eating what they had killed
easily led them to treat their enemies like their stags and their boars.
It was superstition that caused human victims to be immolated; it was
necessity that caused them to be eaten.

Which is the greater crime--to assemble piously together to plunge a
knife into the heart of a girl adorned with fillets, or to eat a
worthless man who has been killed in our own defence?

Yet we have many more instances of girls and boys sacrificed than of
girls and boys eaten. Almost every nation of which we know anything has
sacrificed boys and girls. The Jews immolated them. This was called _the
Anathema_; it was a real sacrifice; and in Leviticus it is ordained that
the living souls which shall be devoted shall not be spared; but it is
not in any manner prescribed that they shall be eaten; this is only
threatened. Moses tells the Jews that unless they observe his ceremonies
they shall not only have the itch, but the mothers shall eat their
children. It is true that in the time of Ezekiel the Jews must have been
accustomed to eat human flesh; for, in his thirty-ninth chapter, he
foretells to them that God will cause them to eat, not only the horses
of their enemies, but moreover the horsemen and the rest of the
warriors. And, indeed, why should not the Jews have been cannibals? It
was the only thing wanting to make the people of God the most abominable
people upon earth.


SECTION II.

In the essay on the "Manners and Spirit of Nations" we read the
following singular passage: "Herrera assures us that the Mexicans ate
the human victims whom they immolated. Most of the first travellers and
missionaries say that the Brazilians, the Caribbees, the Iroquois, the
Hurons, and some other tribes, ate their captives taken in war; and
they do not consider this as the practice of some individuals alone, but
as a national usage. So many writers, ancient and modern, have spoken of
cannibals, that it is difficult to deny their existence. A hunting
people, like the Brazilians or the Canadians, not always having a
certain subsistence, may sometimes become cannibals. Famine and revenge
accustomed them to this kind of food; and while in the most civilized
ages we see the people of Paris devouring the bleeding remains of
Marshal d'Ancre, and the people of The Hague eating the heart of the
grand pensionary, De Witt, we ought not to be surprised that a momentary
outrage among us has been continual among savages.

"The most ancient books we have leave no room to doubt that hunger has
driven men to this excess. The prophet Ezekiel, according to some
commentators, promises to the Hebrews from God that if they defend
themselves well against the king of Persia, they shall eat of 'the flesh
of horses and of mighty men.'

"Marco Polo says that in his time in a part of Tartary the magicians or
priests--it was the same thing--had the privilege of eating the flesh of
criminals condemned to death. All this is shocking to the feelings; but
the picture of humanity must often have the same effect.

"How can it have been that nations constantly separated from one another
have united in so horrible a custom? Must we believe that it is not so
absolutely opposed to human nature as it appears to be? It is certain
that it has been rare, but it is equally certain that it has existed. It
is not known that the Tartars and the Jews often ate their fellow
creatures. During the sieges of Sancerre and Paris, in our religious
wars, hunger and despair compelled mothers to feed on the flesh of their
children. The charitable Las Casas, bishop of Chiapa, says that this
horror was committed in America, only by some nations among whom he had
not travelled. Dampierre assures us that he never met with cannibals;
and at this day there are not, perhaps, any tribes which retain this
horrible custom."

Americus Vespucius says in one of his letters that the Brazilians were
much astonished when he made them understand that for a long time the
Europeans had not eaten their prisoners of war.

According to Juvenal's fifteenth satire, the Gascons and the Spaniards
had been guilty of this barbarity. He himself witnessed a similar
abomination in Egypt during the consulate of Junius. A quarrel happening
between the inhabitants of Tentyra and those of Ombi, they fought; and
an Ombian having fallen into the hands of the Tentyrians, they had him
cooked, and ate him, all but the bare bones. But he does not say that
this was the usual custom; on the contrary, he speaks of it as an act of
more than ordinary fury.

The Jesuit Charlevoix, whom I knew very well, and who was a man of
great veracity, gives us clearly to understand in his "History of
Canada," in which country he resided thirty years, that all the nations
of northern America were cannibals; since he remarks, as a thing very
extraordinary, that in 1711 the Acadians did not eat men.

The Jesuit Brebeuf relates that in 1640 the first Iroquois that was
converted, having unfortunately got drunk with brandy, was taken by the
Hurons, then at war with the Iroquois. The prisoner, baptized by Father
Brebeuf by the name of Joseph, was condemned to death. He was put to a
thousand tortures, which he endured, singing all the while, according to
the custom of his country. They finished by cutting off a foot, a hand,
and lastly his head; after which the Hurons put all the members into a
cauldron, each one partook of them, and a piece was offered to Father
Brebeuf.

Charlevoix speaks in another place of twenty-two Hurons eaten by the
Iroquois. It cannot, then, be doubted, that in more countries than one,
human nature has reached this last pitch of horror; and this execrable
custom must be of the highest antiquity; for we see in the Holy
Scriptures that the Jews were threatened with eating their children if
they did not obey their laws. The Jews are told not only that they shall
have the itch, and that their wives shall give themselves up to others,
but also that they shall eat their sons and daughters in anguish and
devastation; that they shall contend with one another for the eating of
their children; and that the husband will not give to his wife a morsel
of her son, because, he will say, he has hardly enough for himself.

Some very bold critics do indeed assert that the Book of Deuteronomy was
not composed until after the siege of Samaria by Benhadad, during which,
it is said in the Second Book of Kings, that mothers ate their children.
But these critics, in considering Deuteronomy as a book written after
the siege of Samaria, do but verify this terrible occurrence. Others
assert that it could not happen as it is related in the Second Book of
Kings. It is there said: "And as the king of Israel was passing by upon
the wall [of Samaria], there cried a woman unto him, saying, 'Help, my
lord, O king.' And he said, 'If the Lord do not help thee, whence shall
I help thee? out of the barn floor? or out of the wine-press?' And the
king said unto her, 'What aileth thee?' And she answered, 'This woman
said unto me, give thy son, that we may eat him to-day, and we shall eat
my son to-morrow. So we boiled my son, and did eat him; and I said unto
her on the next day, 'Give thy son, that we may eat him,' and she hath
hid her son.'"

These censors assert that it is not likely that while King Benhadad was
besieging Samaria, King Joram passed quietly by the wall, or upon the
wall, to settle differences between Samaritan women. It is still less
likely that one child should not have satisfied two women for two days.
There must have been enough to feed them for four days at least. But
let these critics reason as they may, we must believe that fathers and
mothers ate their children during the siege of Samaria, since it is
expressly foretold in Deuteronomy. The same thing happened at the siege
of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar; and this, too, was foretold by Ezekiel.

Jeremiah exclaims, in his "Lamentations": "Shall the women eat their
fruit, and children of a span long?" And in another place: "The hands of
the pitiful women have sodden their own children." Here may be added the
words of Baruch: "Man has eaten the flesh of his son and of his
daughter."

This horror is repeated so often that it cannot but be true. Lastly, we
know the story related in Josephus, of the woman who fed on the flesh of
her son when Titus was besieging Jerusalem. The book attributed to
Enoch, cited by St. Jude, says that the giants born from the commerce of
the angels with the daughters of men were the first cannibals.

In the eighth homily attributed to St. Clement, St. Peter, who is made
to speak in it, says that these same giants quenched their thirst with
human blood and ate the flesh of their fellow creatures. Hence resulted,
adds the author, maladies until then unknown; monsters of all kinds
sprung up on the earth; and then it was that God resolved to drown all
human kind. All this shows us how universal was the reigning opinion of
the existence of cannibals.

What St. Peter is made to say in St. Clement's homily has a palpable
affinity with the story of Lycaon, one of the oldest of Greek fables,
and which we find in the first book of Ovid's "Metamorphoses."

The "Relations of the Indies and China," written in the eighth century
by two Arabs, and translated by the Abbé Renaudot, is not a book to
which implicit credit should be attached; far from it; but we must not
reject all these two travellers say, especially when their testimony is
corroborated by that of other authors who have merited some belief. They
tell us that there are in the Indian Sea islands peopled with blacks who
ate men; they call these islands Ramni.

Marco Polo, who had not read the works of these two Arabs, says the same
thing four hundred years after them. Archbishop Navarette, who was
afterwards a voyager in the same seas, confirms this account: "_Los
Europeos que cogen, es constante que vivos se los van comiendo_."

Texeira asserts that the people of Java ate human flesh, which
abominable custom they had not left off more than two hundred years
before his time. He adds that they did not learn milder manners until
they embraced Mahometanism.

The same thing has been said of the people of Pegu, of the Kaffirs, and
of several other African nations. Marco Polo, whom we have just now
cited, says that in some Tartar hordes, when a criminal had been
condemned to death they made a meal of him: _"Hanno costoro un bestiale
e orribile costume, che quando alcuno e guidicato a morte, lo tolgono,
e cuocono, e mangian' selo."_

What is more extraordinary and incredible is that the two Arabs
attributed to the Chinese what Marco Polo says of some of the Tartars:
that, "in general, the Chinese eat all who have been killed." This
abomination is so repugnant to Chinese manners, that it cannot be
believed. Father Parennin has refuted it by saying that it is unworthy
of refutation.

It must, however, be observed that the eighth century, the time when
these Arabs wrote their travels, was one of those most disastrous to the
Chinese. Two hundred thousand Tartars passed the great wall, plundered
Pekin, and everywhere spread the most horrible desolation. It is very
likely that there was then a great famine, for China was as populous as
it is now; and some poor creatures among the lowest of the people might
eat dead bodies. What interest could these Arabians have in inventing so
disgusting a fable? Perhaps they, like most other travellers, took a
particular instance for a national custom.

Not to go so far for examples, we have one in our own country, in the
very province in which I write; it is attested by our conqueror, our
master, Julius Cæsar. He was besieging Alexia, in the Auxois. The
besieged being resolved to defend themselves to the last extremity, and
wanting provisions, a great council was assembled, in which one of the
chiefs, named Critognatus, proposed that the children should be eaten
one after another to sustain the strength of the combatants. His
proposal was carried by a majority of voices. Nor is this all;
Critognatus in his harangue tells them that their ancestors had had
recourse to the same kind of sustenance in the war with the Cimbri and
Teutones.

We will conclude with the testimony of Montaigne. Speaking of what was
told him by the companions of Villegagnon, returned from Brazil, and of
what he had seen in France, he certifies that the Brazilians ate their
enemies killed in war, but mark what follows: "Is it more barbarous to
eat a man when dead than to have him roasted by a slow fire, or torn to
pieces by dogs and swine, as is yet fresh in our memories--and that not
between ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow-citizens--and,
which is worse, on pretence of piety and religion?" What a question for
a philosopher like Montaigne! Then, if Anacreon and Tibullus had been
Iroquois, they would have eaten men! Alas! alas!


SECTION III.

Well; two Englishmen have sailed round the world. They have discovered
that New Holland is an island larger than Europe, and that men still eat
one another there, as in New Zealand. Whence come this race? supposing
that they exist. Are they descended from the ancient Egyptians, from the
ancient people of Ethiopia, from the Africans, from the Indians--or from
the vultures, or the wolves? What a contrast between Marcus Aurelius, or
Epictetus, and the cannibals of New Zealand! Yet they have the same
organs, they are alike human beings. We have already treated on this
property of the human race; it may not be amiss to add another
paragraph.

The following are St. Jerome's own words in one of his letters: _"Quid
loquar de cæteris nationibus, quum ipse adolescentulus in Gallia viderim
Scotos, gentem Britannicam, humanis vesci carnibus, et quum per silvas
porcorum greges pecudumque reperiant, tamen pastorum nates et fæminarum
papillas solere abscindere et has solas ciborum delicias
arbitrari?"_--What shall I say of other nations; when I myself, when
young, have seen Scotchmen in Gaul, who, though they might have fed on
swine and other animals of the forest, chose rather to cut off the
posteriors of the youths and the breasts of the young women, and
considered them as the most delicious food."

Pelloutier, who sought for everything that might do honor to the Celts,
took the pains to contradict Jerome, and to maintain that his credulity
had been imposed on. But Jerome speaks very gravely, and of what he
_saw_. We may, with deference, dispute with a father of the church about
what he has heard; but to doubt of what he has _seen_ is going very far.
After all, the safest way is to doubt of everything, even of what we
have seen ourselves.

One word more on cannibalism. In a book which has had considerable
success among the well-disposed we find the following, or words to the
same effect: "In Cromwell's time a woman who kept a tallow chandler's
shop in Dublin sold excellent candles, made of the fat of Englishmen.
After some time one of her customers complained that the candles were
not so good. 'Sir,' said the woman, 'it is because we are short of
Englishmen.'"

I ask which were the most guilty--those who assassinated the English, or
the poor woman who made candles of their fat? And further, I ask which
was the greatest crime--to have Englishmen cooked for dinner, or to use
their tallow to give light at supper? It appears to me that the great
evil is the being killed; it matters little to us whether, after death,
we are roasted on the spit or are made into candles. Indeed, no
well-disposed man can be unwilling to be useful when he is dead.




CASTING (IN METAL).


There is not an ancient fable, not an old absurdity which some simpleton
will not revive, and that in a magisterial tone, if it be but authorized
by some classical or theological writer.

Lycophron (if I remember rightly) relates that a horde of robbers who
had been justly condemned in Ethiopia by King Actisanes to lose their
ears and noses, fled to the cataracts of the Nile and from thence
penetrated into the Sandy Desert, where they at length built the temple
of Jupiter Ammon.

Lycophron, and after him Theopompus, tells us that these banditti,
reduced to extreme want, having neither shoes, nor clothes, nor
utensils, nor bread, bethought themselves of raising a statue of gold
to an Egyptian god. This statue was ordered one evening and made in the
course of the night. A member of the university much attached to
Lycophron and the Ethiopian robbers asserts that nothing was more common
in the venerable ages of antiquity than to cast a statue of gold in one
night, and afterwards throw it into a fire to reduce it to an impalpable
powder, in order to be swallowed by a whole people.

But where did these poor devils, without breeches, find so much gold?
"What, sir!" says the man of learning, "do you forget that they had
stolen enough to buy all Africa and that their daughters' earrings alone
were worth nine millions five hundred thousand livres of our currency?"

Be it so. But for casting a statue a little preparation is necessary. M.
Le Moine employed nearly two years in casting that of Louis XV. "Oh! but
this Jupiter Ammon was at most but three feet high. Go to any pewterer;
will he not make you half a dozen plates in a day?"

Sir, a statue of Jupiter is harder to make than pewter plates, and I
even doubt whether your thieves had wherewith to make plates so quickly,
clever as they might be at pilfering. It is not very likely that they
had the necessary apparatus; they had more need to provide themselves
with meal. I respect Lycophron much, but this profound Greek and his yet
more profound commentators know so little of the arts--they are so
learned in all that is useless, and so ignorant in all that concerns
the necessaries and conveniences of life, professions, trades, and daily
occupations that we will take this opportunity of informing them how a
metal figure is cast. This is an operation which they will find neither
in Lycophron, nor in Manetho, nor even in St. Thomas's dream.

I omit many other preparations which the encyclopædists, especially M.
Diderot, have explained much better than I could do, in the work which
must immortalize their glory as well as all the arts. But to form a
clear idea of the process of this art the artist must be seen at work.
No one can ever learn in a book to weave stockings, nor to polish
diamonds, nor to work tapestry. Arts and trades are learned only by
example and practice.




CATO.

ON SUICIDE, AND THE ABBE ST. CYRAN's BOOK LEGITIMATING SUICIDE.


The ingenious La Motte says of Cato, in one of his philosophical rather
than poetical odes:

     _Caton, d'une âme plus égale,_
     _Sous l'heureux vainqueur de Pharsale,_
     _Eût souffert que Rome pliât;_
     _Mais, incapable de se rendre,_
     _Il n'eut pas la force d'attendre_
     _Un pardon qui l'humiliât._

     Stern Cato, with more equal soul,
     Had bowed to Cæsar's wide control--
     With Rome had to the conqueror bowed--
     But that his spirit, rough and proud,
     Had not the courage to await
     A pardoned foe's too humbling fate.

It was, I believe, because Cato's soul was always equal, and retained
to the last its love for his country and her laws that he chose rather
to perish with her than to crouch to the tyrant. He died as he had
lived. Incapable of surrendering! And to whom? To the enemy of Rome--to
the man who had forcibly robbed the public treasury in order to make war
upon his fellow-citizens and enslave them by means of their own money. A
pardoned foe! It seems as if La Motte-Houdart were speaking of some
revolted subject who might have obtained his majesty's pardon by letters
in chancery.

It seems rather absurd to say that Cato slew himself through weakness.
None but a strong mind can thus surmount the most powerful instinct of
nature. This strength is sometimes that of frenzy, but a frantic man is
not weak.

Suicide is forbidden amongst us by the canon law. But the decretals,
which form the jurisprudence of a part of Europe, were unknown to Cato,
to Brutus, to Cassius, to the sublime Arria, to the Emperor Otho, to
Mark Antony, and the rest of the heroes of true Rome, who preferred a
voluntary death to a life which they believed to be ignominious.

We, too, kill ourselves, but it is when we have lost our money, or in
the very rare excess of foolish passion for an unworthy object. I have
known women kill themselves for the most stupid men imaginable. And
sometimes we kill ourselves when we are in bad health, which action is a
real weakness.

Disgust with our own existence, weariness of ourselves is a malady
which is likewise a cause of suicide. The remedy is a little exercise,
music, hunting, the play, or an agreeable woman. The man who, in a fit
of melancholy, kills himself to-day, would have wished to live had he
waited a week.

I was almost an eye-witness of a suicide which deserves the attention of
all cultivators of physical science. A man of a serious profession, of
mature age, of regular conduct, without passions, and above indigence,
killed himself on Oct. 17, 1769, and left to the town council of the
place where he was born, a written apology for his voluntary death,
which it was thought proper not to publish lest it should encourage men
to quit a life of which so much ill is said. Thus far there is nothing
extraordinary; such instances are almost every day to be met with. The
astonishing part of the story is this:

His brother and his father had each killed himself at the same age. What
secret disposition of organs, what sympathy, what concurrence of
physical laws, occasions a father and his two sons to perish by their
own hands, and by the same kind of death, precisely when they have
attained such a year? Is it a disease which unfolds itself successively
in the different members of a family--as we often see fathers and
children die of smallpox, consumption, or any other complaint? Three or
four generations have become deaf or blind, gouty or scorbutic, at a
predetermined period.

Physical organization, of which moral is the offspring, transmits the
same character from father to son through a succession of ages. The
Appii were always haughty and inflexible, the Catos always severe. The
whole line of the Guises were bold, rash, factious; compounded of the
most insolent pride, and the most seductive politeness. From Francis de
Guise to him who alone and in silence went and put himself at the head
of the people of Naples, they were all, in figure, in courage, and in
turn of mind, above ordinary men. I have seen whole length portraits of
Francis de Guise, of the Balafré, and of his son: they are all six feet
high, with the same features, the same courage and boldness in the
forehead, the eye, and the attitude.

This continuity, this series of beings alike is still more observable in
animals, and if as much care were taken to perpetuate fine races of men
as some nations still take to prevent the mixing of the breeds of their
horses and hounds the genealogy would be written in the countenance and
displayed in the manners. There have been races of crooked and of
six-fingered people, as we see red-haired, thick-lipped, long-nosed, and
flat-nosed races.

But that nature should so dispose the organs of a whole race that at a
certain age each individual of that family will have a passion for
self-destruction--this is a problem which all the sagacity of the most
attentive anatomists cannot resolve. The effect is certainly all
physical, but it belongs to occult physics. Indeed, what principle is
not occult?

We are not informed, nor is it likely that in, the time of Cæsar and the
emperors the inhabitants of Great Britain killed themselves as
deliberately as they now do, when they have the vapors which they
denominate the spleen.

On the other hand, the Romans, who never had the spleen, did not
hesitate to put themselves to death. They reasoned, they were
philosophers, and the people of the island of Britain were not so. Now,
English citizens are philosophers and Roman citizens are nothing. The
Englishman quits this life proudly and disdainfully when the whim takes
him, but the Roman must have an _indulgentia in articulo mortis_; he can
neither live nor die.

Sir William Temple says that a man should depart when he has no longer
any pleasure in remaining. So died Atticus. Young women who hang and
drown themselves for love should then listen to the voice of hope, for
changes are as frequent in love as in other affairs.

An almost infallible means of saving yourself from the desire of
self-destruction is always to have something to do. Creech, the
commentator on Lucretius, marked upon his manuscripts: "N.B. Must hang
myself when I have finished." He kept his word with himself that he
might have the pleasure of ending like his author. If he had undertaken
a commentary upon Ovid he would have lived longer.

Why have we fewer suicides in the country than in the towns? Because in
the fields only the body suffers; in the town it is the mind. The
laborer has not time to be melancholy; none kill themselves but the
idle--they who, in the eyes of the multitude, are so happy.

I shall here relate some suicides that have happened in my own time,
several of which have already been published in other works. The dead
may be made useful to the living:

_A Brief Account of Some Singular Suicides._

Philip Mordaunt, cousin-german to the celebrated earl of
Peterborough--so well known in all the European courts, and who boasted
of having seen more postillions and kings than any other man--was a
young man of twenty-seven, handsome, well made, rich, of noble blood,
with the highest pretensions, and, which was more than all, adored by
his mistress, yet Mordaunt was seized with a disgust for life. He paid
his debts, wrote to his friends, and even made some verses on the
occasion. He dispatched himself with a pistol without having given any
other reason than that his soul was tired of his body and that when we
are dissatisfied with our abode we ought to quit it. It seemed that he
wished to die because he was disgusted with his good fortune.

In 1726 Richard Smith exhibited a strange spectacle to the world from a
very different cause. Richard Smith was disgusted with real misfortune.
He had been rich, and he was poor; he had been in health, and he was
infirm; he had a wife with whom he had naught but his misery to share;
their only remaining property was a child in the cradle. Richard Smith
and Bridget Smith, with common consent, having embraced each other
tenderly and given their infant the last kiss began with killing the
poor child, after which they hanged themselves to the posts of their
bed.

I do not know any other act of cold-blooded horror so striking as this.
But the letter which these unfortunate persons wrote to their cousin,
Mr. Brindley, before their death, is as singular as their death itself.
"We believe," say they, "that God will forgive us.... We quit this life
because we are miserable--without resource, and we have done our only
son the service of killing him, lest he should become as unfortunate as
ourselves...." It must be observed that these people, after killing
their son through parental tenderness, wrote to recommend their dog and
cat to the care of a friend. It seems they thought it easier to make a
cat and dog happy in this life than a child, and they would not be a
burden to their friends.

Lord Scarborough quitted this life in 1727, with the same coolness as he
had quitted his office of Master of the Horse. He was reproached, in the
House of Peers, with taking the king's part because he had a good place
at court. "My lords," said he, "to prove to you that my opinion is
independent of my place, I resign it this moment." He afterwards found
himself in a perplexing dilemma between a mistress whom he loved, but
to whom he had promised nothing, and a woman whom he esteemed, and to
whom he had promised marriage. He killed himself to escape from his
embarrassment.

These tragical stories which swarm in the English newspapers, have made
the rest of Europe think that, in England, men kill themselves more
willingly than elsewhere. However, I know not but there are as many
madmen or heroes to be found in Paris as in London. Perhaps, if our
newspapers kept an exact list of all who had been so infatuated as to
seek their own destruction, and so lamentably courageous as to effect
it, we should, in this particular, have the misfortune to rival the
English. But our journals are more discreet. In such of them as are
acknowledged by the government private occurrences are never exposed to
public slander.

All I can venture to say with assurance is that there is no reason to
apprehend that this rage for self-murder will ever become an epidemical
disorder. Against this, nature has too well provided. Hope and fear are
the powerful agents which she often employs to stay the hand of the
unhappy individual about to strike at his own breast. Cardinal Dubois
was once heard to say to himself: "Kill thyself! Coward, thou darest
not!"

It is said that there have been countries in which a council was
established to grant the citizens permission to kill themselves when
they had good and sufficient reasons. I answer either that it was not
so or that those magistrates had not much to do.

It might, indeed, astonish us, and does, I think, merit a serious
examination, that almost all the ancient Roman heroes killed themselves
when they had lost a battle in the civil wars. But I do not find,
neither in the time of the League, nor in that of the Frond, nor in the
troubles of Italy, nor in those of England, that any chief thought
proper to die by his own hand. These chiefs, it is true, were
Christians, and there is a great difference between the principles of a
Christian warrior and those of a Pagan hero. But why were these men whom
Christianity restrained when they would have put themselves to death,
restrained by nothing when they chose to poison, assassinate, and bring
their conquered enemies to the scaffold? Does not the Christian religion
forbid these murders much more than self-murder, of which the New
Testament makes no mention?

The apostles of suicide tell us that it is quite allowable to quit one's
house when one is tired of it. Agreed, but most men would prefer
sleeping in a mean house to lying in the open air.

I once received a circular letter from an Englishman, in which he
offered a prize to any one who should most satisfactorily prove that
there are occasions on which a man might kill himself. I made no answer:
I had nothing to prove to him. He had only to examine whether he liked
better to die than to live.

Another Englishman came to me at Paris in 1724; he was ill, and promised
me that he would kill himself if he was not cured by July 20. He
accordingly gave me his epitaph in these words: "_Valet curia!_"
"Farewell care!" and gave me twenty-five louis to get a small monument
erected to him at the end of the Faubourg St. Martin. I returned him his
money on July 20, and kept his epitaph.

In my own time the last prince of the house of Courtenai, when very old,
and the last branch of Lorraine-Harcourt, when very young, destroyed
themselves almost without its being heard of. These occurrences cause a
terrible uproar the first day, but when the property of the deceased has
been divided they are no longer talked of.

The following most remarkable of all suicides has just occurred at
Lyons, in June, 1770: A young man well known, who was handsome, well
made, clever, and amiable, fell in love with a young woman whom her
parents would not give to him. So far we have nothing more than the
opening scene of a comedy, the astonishing tragedy is to follow.

The lover broke a blood-vessel and the surgeons informed him there was
no remedy. His mistress engaged to meet him, with two pistols and two
daggers in order that, if the pistols missed the daggers might the next
moment pierce their hearts. They embraced each other for the last time:
rose-colored ribbons were tied to the triggers of the pistols; the lover
holding the ribbon of his mistress's pistol, while she held the ribbon
of his. Both fired at a signal given, and both fell at the same instant.

Of this fact the whole city of Lyons is witness. Pætus and Arria, you
set the example, but you were condemned by a tyrant, while love alone
immolated these two victims.

_Laws Against Suicide._

Has any law, civil or religious, ever forbidden a man to kill himself,
on pain of being hanged after death, or on pain of being damned? It is
true that Virgil has said:

     _Proximo, deinde tenent mæsti loca, qui sibi lethum_
     _Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi_
     _Projecere animas. Quam vellent æthere in alto_
     _Nunc et pauperiem et duros perferre labores!_
     _Fata obstant, tristique palus inamabilis unda_
     _Alligat, et novies Styx interfusa coercet._
                    --ÆNEIS, lib. vi. v. 434 et seq.

     The next in place, and punishment, are they
     Who prodigally throw their souls away--
     Fools, who repining at their wretched state,
     And loathing anxious life, suborn their fate;
     With late repentance now they would retrieve
     The bodies they forsook, and wish to live;
     Their pains and poverty desire to bear,
     To view the light of heaven and breathe the vital air;--
     But fate forbids, the Stygian floods oppose,
     And, with nine circling streams, the captive souls inclose.
                                   --DRYDEN.

Such was the religion of some of the pagans, yet, notwithstanding the
weariness which awaited them in the next world it was an honor to quit
this by killing themselves--so contradictory are the ways of men. And
among us is not duelling unfortunately still honorable, though forbidden
by reason, by religion, and by every law? If Cato and Cæsar, Antony and
Augustus, were not duellists it was not that they were less brave than
our Frenchmen. If the duke of Montmorency, Marshal de Marillac, de Thou,
Cinq-Mars, and so many others, chose rather to be dragged to execution
in a wagon, like highwaymen, than to kill themselves like Cato and
Brutus, it was not that they had less courage than those Romans, nor
less of what is called _honor_. The true reason is that at Paris
self-murder in such cases was not then the fashion; but it was the
fashion at Rome.

The women of the Malabar coast throw themselves, living, on the funeral
piles of their husbands. Have they, then, more courage than Cornelia?
No; but in that country it is the custom for the wives to burn
themselves.

In Japan it is the custom for a man of honor, when he has been insulted
by another man of honor, to rip open his belly in the presence of his
enemy and say to him: "Do you likewise if thou hast the heart." The
aggressor is dishonored for ever if he does not immediately plunge a
great knife into his belly.

The only religion in which suicide is forbidden by a clear and positive
law is Mahometanism. In the fourth sura it is said: "Do not kill
yourself, for God is merciful unto you, and whosoever killeth himself
through malice and wickedness shall assuredly be burned in hell fire."

This is a literal translation. The text, like many other texts, appears
to want common sense. What is meant by "Do not kill yourself for God is
merciful"? Perhaps we are to understand--Do not sink under your
misfortunes, which God may alleviate: do not be so foolish as to kill
yourself to-day since you may be happy to-morrow.

"And whosoever killeth himself through malice and wickedness." This is
yet more difficult to explain. Perhaps, in all antiquity, this never
happened to any one but the Phrædra of Euripides, who hanged herself on
purpose to make Theseus believe that she had been forcibly violated by
Hippolytus. In our own times a man shot himself in the head, after
arranging all things to make another man suspected of the act.

In the play of George Dandin, his jade of a wife threatens him with
killing herself to have him hanged. Such cases are rare. If Mahomet
foresaw them he may be said to have seen a great way. The famous
Duverger de Haurane, abbot of St. Cyran, regarded as the founder of Port
Royal, wrote, about the year 1608, a treatise on "Suicide," which has
become one of the scarcest books in Europe.

"The Decalogue," says he, "forbids us to kill. In this precept
self-murder seems no less to be comprised than murder of our neighbor.
But if there are cases in which it is allowable to kill our neighbor
there likewise are cases in which it is allowable to kill ourselves.

"We must not make an attempt upon our lives until we have consulted
reason. The public authority, which holds the place of God, may dispose
of our lives. The reason of man may likewise hold the place of the
reason of God: it is a ray of the eternal light."

St. Cyran extends this argument, which may be considered as a mere
sophism, to great length, but when he comes to the explanation and the
details it is more difficult to answer him. He says: "A man may kill
himself for the good of his prince, for that of his country, or for that
of his relations."

We do not, indeed, see how Codrus or Curtius could be condemned. No
sovereign would dare to punish the family of a man who had devoted
himself to death for him; nay, there is not one who would dare neglect
to recompense it. St. Thomas, before St. Cyran, had said the same thing.
But we need neither St. Thomas, nor Cardinal Bonaventura, nor Duverger
de Haurane to tell us that a man who dies for his country is deserving
of praise.

The abbot of St. Cyran concludes that it is allowable to do for
ourselves what it is noble to do for others. All that is advanced by
Plutarch, by Seneca, by Montaigne, and by fifty other philosophers, in
favor of suicide is sufficiently known; it is a hackneyed topic--a
wornout commonplace. I seek not to apologize for an act which the laws
condemn, but neither the Old Testament, nor the New has ever forbidden
man to depart this life when it has become insupportable to him. No
Roman law condemned self-murder; on the contrary, the following was the
law of the Emperor Antoine, which was never revoked:

"If your father or your brother not being accused of any crime kill
himself, either to escape from grief, or through weariness of life, or
through despair, or through mental derangement, his will shall be valid,
or, if he die intestate his heirs shall succeed."

Notwithstanding this humane law of our masters we still drag on a sledge
and drive a stake through the body of a man who has died a voluntary
death; we do all we can to make his memory infamous; we dishonor his
family as far as we are able; we punish the son for having lost his
father, and the widow for being deprived of her husband.

We even confiscate the property of the deceased, which is robbing the
living of the patrimony which of right belongs to them. This custom is
derived from our canon law, which deprives of Christian burial such as
die a voluntary death. Hence it is concluded that we cannot inherit from
a man who is judged to have no inheritance in heaven. The canon law,
under the head "_De Pœnitentia_," assures us that Judas committed a
greater crime in strangling himself than in selling our Lord Jesus
Christ.




CELTS.


Among those who have had the leisure, the means, and the courage to seek
for the origin of nations, there have been some who have found that of
our Celts, or at least would make us believe that they had met with it.
This illusion being the only recompense of their immense travail, we
should not envy them its possession.

If we wish to know anything about the Huns--who, indeed, are scarcely
worth knowing anything about, for they have rendered no service to
mankind--we find some slight notices of those barbarians among the
Chinese--that most ancient of all nations, after the Indians. From them
we learn that, in certain ages, the Huns went like famishing wolves and
ravaged countries which, even at this day are regarded as places of
exile and of horror. This is a very melancholy, a very miserable sort of
knowledge. It is, doubtless, much better to cultivate a useful art at
Paris, Lyons, or Bordeaux, than seriously to study the history of the
Huns and the bears. Nevertheless we are aided in these researches by
some of the Chinese archives.

But for the Celts there are no archives. We know no more of their
antiquities than we do of those of the Samoyeds or the Australasians.

We have learned nothing about our ancestors except from the few words
which their conqueror, Julius Cæsar, condescended to say of them. He
begins his "Commentaries" by dividing the Gauls into the Belgians,
Aquitanians, and Celts.

Whence some of the daring among the erudite have concluded that the
Celts were the Scythians, and they have made these Scythio-Celts
include all Europe. But why not include the whole earth? Why stop short
in so fine a career?

We have also been duly told that Noah's son, Japhet, came out of the
Ark, and went with all speed to people all those vast regions with
Celts, whom he governed marvellously well. But authors of greater
modesty refer the origin of our Celts to the tower of Babel--to the
confusion of tongues--to Gomer, of whom no one ever heard until the very
recent period when some wise men of the West read the name of Gomer in a
bad translation of the Septuagint.

Bochart, in his "Sacred Chronology"--what a chronology!--takes quite a
different turn. Of these innumerable hordes of Celts he makes an
Egyptian colony, skilfully and easily led by Hercules from the fertile
banks of the Nile into the forests and morasses of Germany, whither, no
doubt, these colonists carried the arts and the language of Egypt and
the mysteries of Isis, no trace of which has ever been found among them.

I think they are still more to be congratulated on their discoveries,
who say that the Celts of the mountains of Dauphiny were called
Cottians, from their King Cottius; that the Bérichons were named from
their King Betrich; the Welsh, or Gaulish, from their King Wallus, and
the Belgians from Balgem, which means quarrelsome.

A still finer origin is that of the Celto-Pannonians, from the Latin
word _pannus_, cloth, for, we are told they dressed themselves in old
pieces of cloth badly sewn together, much resembling a harlequin's
jacket. But the best origin of all is, undeniably, the tower of Babel.




CEREMONIES--TITLES--PRECEDENCE.


All these things, which would be useless and impertinent in a state of
pure nature, are, in our corrupt and ridiculous state, of great service.
Of all nations, the Chinese are those who have carried the use of
ceremonies to the greatest length; they certainly serve to calm as well
as to weary the mind. The Chinese porters and carters are obliged,
whenever they occasion the least hindrance in the streets, to fall on
their knees and ask one another's pardon according to the prescribed
formula. This prevents ill language, blows and murders. They have time
to grow cool and are then willing to assist one another.

The more free a people are, the fewer ceremonies, the fewer ostentatious
titles, the fewer demonstrations of annihilation in the presence of a
superior, they possess. To Scipio men said "Scipio"; to Cæsar, "Cæsar";
but in after times they said to the emperors, "your majesty," "your
divinity."

The titles of St. Peter and St. Paul were "Peter" and "Paul." Their
successors gave one another the title of "your holiness," which is not
to be found in the Acts of the Apostles, nor in the writings of the
disciples.

We read in the history of Germany that the dauphin of France, afterwards
Charles V., went to the Emperor Charles IV. at Metz and was presented
after Cardinal de Périgord.

There has since been a time when chancellors went before cardinals;
after which cardinals again took precedence of chancellors.

In France the peers preceded the princes of the blood, going in the
order of their creation, until the consecration of Henry III.

The dignity of peer was, until that time, so exalted that at the
ceremony of the consecration of Elizabeth, wife to Charles IX., in 1572,
described by Simon Bouquet, _échevin_ of Paris, it is said that the
queen's _dames_ and _demoiselles_ having handed to the _dame d'honneur_
the bread, wine and wax, with the silver, for the offering to be
presented to the queen by the said _dame d'honneur_, the said _dame
d'honneur_, being a duchess, commanded the _dames_ to go and carry the
offering to the princesses themselves, etc. This _dame d'honneur_ was
the wife of the constable Montmorency.

The armchair, the chair with a back, the stool, the right hand and the
left were for several ages important political matters. I believe that
we owe the ancient etiquette concerning armchairs to the circumstance
that our barbarians of ancestors had at most but one in a house, and
even this was used only by the sick. In some provinces of Germany and
England an armchair is still called a sick-chair.

Long after the times of Attila and Dagobert, when luxury found its way
into our courts and the great men of the earth had two or three
armchairs in their donjons, it was a noble distinction to sit upon one
of these thrones; and a castellain would place among his titles how he
had gone half a league from home to pay his court to a count, and how he
had been received in an easy-chair.

We see in the Memoirs of Mademoiselle that that august princess passed
one-fourth of her life amid the mortal agonies of disputes for the
back-chair. Were you to sit in a certain apartment, in a chair, or on a
stool, or not to sit at all? Here was enough to involve a whole court in
intrigue. Manners are now more easy; ladies may use couches and sofas
without occasioning any disturbance in society.

When Cardinal de Richelieu was treating with the English ambassadors for
the marriage of Henriette of France with Charles I., the affair was on
the point of being broken off on account of a demand made by the
ambassadors of two or three steps more towards a door; but the cardinal
removed the difficulty by taking to his bed. History has carefully
handed clown this precious circumstance. I believe that, if it had been
proposed to Scipio to get between the sheets to receive the visit of
Hannibal, he would have thought the ceremony something like a joke.

For a whole century the order of carriages and taking the wall were
testimonials of greatness and the source of pretensions, disputes, and
conflicts. To procure the passing of one carriage before another was
looked upon as a signal victory. The ambassadors went along the streets
as if they were contending for the prize in the circus; and when a
Spanish minister had succeeded in making a Portuguese coachman pull up,
he sent a courier to Madrid to apprise the king, his master, of this
great advantage.

Our histories regale us with fifty pugilistic combats for precedence--as
that of the parliament with the bishops' clerks at the funeral of Henry
IV., the _chambre des comptes_ with the parliament in the cathedral when
Louis XIII. gave France to the Virgin, the duke of Epernon with the
keeper of the seals, Du Vair, in the church of St. Germain. The
presidents of the _enquêtes_ buffeted Savare, the _doyen_ of the
_conseillers de grand' chambre_, to make him quit his place of honor (so
much is honor the soul of monarchical governments!), and four archers
were obliged to lay hold of the President Barillon, who was beating the
poor _doyen_ without mercy. We find no contests like these in the
Areopagus, nor in the Roman senate.

In proportion to the barbarism of countries or the weakness of courts,
we find ceremony in vogue. True power and true politeness are above
vanity. We may venture to believe that the custom will at last be given
up which some ambassadors still retain, of ruining themselves in order
to go along the streets in procession with a few hired carriages, fresh
painted and gilded, and preceded by a few footmen. This is called
"making their entry"; and it is a fine joke to make your entry into a
town seven or eight months before you arrive.

This important affair of punctilio, which constitutes the greatness of
the modern Romans--this science of the number of steps that should be
made in showing in a _monsignor_, in drawing or half drawing a curtain,
in walking in a room to the right or to the left--this great art, which
neither Fabius nor Cato could ever imagine, is beginning to sink; and
the train-bearers to the cardinals complain that everything indicates a
decline.

A French colonel, being at Brussels a year after the taking of that
place by Marshal de Saxe, and having nothing to do, resolved to go to
the town assembly. "It is held at a princess'," said one to him. "Be it
so," answered the other, "what matters it to me?" "But only princes go
there; are you a prince?" "Pshaw!" said the colonel, "they are a very
good sort of princes; I had a dozen of them in my anteroom last year,
when we had taken the town, and they were very polite."

In turning over the leaves of "Horace" I observe this line in an epistle
to Mæcenas, "_Te, dulcis amice revisam_."--"I will come and see you, my
good friend." This Mæcenas was the second person in the Roman Empire;
that is, a man of greater power and influence than the greatest monarch
of modern Europe.

Looking into the works of Corneille, I observed that in a letter to the
great Scuderi, governor of Notre Dame de la Garde, etc., he uses this
expression in reference to Cardinal Richelieu: "Monsieur the cardinal,
your master and mine." It is, perhaps, the first time that such language
has been applied to a minister, since there have been ministers, kings
and flatterers in the world. The same Peter Corneille, the author of
"Cinna," humbly dedicates that work to the Sieur de Montauron, the
king's treasurer, whom in direct terms he compares to Augustus. I regret
that he did not give Montauron the title of monseigneur or my lord.

An anecdote is related of an old officer, but little conversant with the
precedents and formulas of vanity, who wrote to the Marquis Louvois as
plain monsieur, but receiving no answer, next addressed him under the
title of monseigneur, still, however, without effect, the unlucky
monsieur continuing to rankle in the minister's heart. He finally
directed his letter "to my God, my God Louvois"; commencing it by the
words, "my God, my Creator." Does not all this sufficiently prove that
the Romans were magnanimous and modest, and that we are frivolous and
vain?

"How d'ye do, my dear friend?" said a duke and peer to a gentleman. "At
your service, my dear friend," replied he; and from that instant his
"dear friend" became his implacable enemy. A grandee of Portugal was
once conversing with a Spanish hidalgo and addressing him every moment
in the terms, "your excellency." The Castilian as frequently replied,
"your courtesy" (_vuestra merced_), a title bestowed on those who have
none by right. The irritated Portuguese in return retorted "your
courtesy" on the Spaniard, who then called the Portuguese "your
excellency." The Portuguese, at length wearied out, demanded, "How is it
that you always call me your courtesy, when I call you your excellency,
and your excellency when I call you your courtesy?" "The reason is,"
says the Castilian with a bow, "that all titles are equal to me,
provided that there is nothing equal between you and me."

The vanity of titles was not introduced into our northern climes of
Europe till the Romans had become acquainted with Asiatic magnificence.
The greater part of the sovereigns of Asia were, and still are, cousins
german of the sun and the moon; their subjects dare not make any
pretension to such high affinity; and many a provincial governor, who
styles himself "nutmeg of consolation" and "rose of delight" would be
empaled alive if he were to claim the slightest relationship to the sun
and moon.

Constantine was, I think, the first Roman emperor who overwhelmed
Christian humility in a page of pompous titles. It is true that before
his time the emperors bore the title of god, but the term implied
nothing similar to what we understand by it. Divus Augustus, Divus
Trajanus, meant St. Augustus, St. Trajan. It was thought only
conformable to the dignity of the Roman Empire that the soul of its
chief should, after his death, ascend to heaven; and it frequently even
happened that the title of saint, of god, was granted to the emperor by
a sort of anticipated inheritance. Nearly for the same reason the first
patriarchs of the Christian church were all called "your holiness." They
were thus named to remind them of what in fact they ought to be.

Men sometimes take upon themselves very humble titles, provided they can
obtain from others very honorable ones. Many an abbé who calls himself
brother exacts from his monks the title of monseigneur. The pope styles
himself "servant of the servants of God." An honest priest of Holstein
once addressed a letter "to Pius IV., servant of the servants of God."
He afterwards went to Rome to urge his suit, and the inquisition put him
in prison to teach him how to address letters.

Formerly the emperor alone had the title of majesty. Other sovereigns
were called your highness, your serenity, your grace. Louis XI. was the
first in France who was generally called majesty, a title certainly not
less suitable to the dignity of a powerful hereditary kingdom than to an
elective principality. But long after him the term highness was applied
to kings of France; and some letters to Henry III. are still extant in
which he is addressed by that title. The states of Orleans objected to
Queen Catherine de Medici being called majesty. But this last
denomination gradually prevailed. The name is indifferent; it is the
power alone that is not so.

The German chancery, ever unchangeable in its stately formalities, has
pretended down to our own times that no kings have a right to a higher
title than serenity. At the celebrated treaty of Westphalia, in which
France and Sweden dictated the law to the holy Roman Empire, the
emperor's plenipotentiaries continually presented Latin memorials, in
which "his most sacred imperial majesty" negotiated with the "most
serene kings of France and Sweden"; while, on the other hand, the French
and Swedes fail not to declare that their "sacred majesties of France
and Sweden" had many subjects of complaint against the "most serene
emperor." Since that period, however, the great sovereigns have, in
regard to rank, been considered as equals, and he alone who beats his
neighbor is adjudged to have the pre-eminence.

Philip II. was the first majesty in Spain, for the serenity of Charles
V. was converted into majesty only on account of the empire. The
children of Philip II. were the first highnesses; and afterwards they
were royal highnesses. The duke of Orleans, brother of Louis XIII., did
not take up the title of royal highness till 1631; then the prince of
Condé claimed that the most serene highness, which the Dukes de Vendôme
did not venture to assume. The duke of Savoy, at that time royal
highness, afterwards substituted majesty. The grand duke of Florence
did the same, excepting as to majesty; and finally the czar, who was
known in Europe only as the grand duke, declared himself emperor, and
was recognized as such.

Formerly there were only two marquises in Germany, two in France and two
in Italy. The marquis of Brandenburg has become a king, and a great
king. But at present our Italian and French marquises are of a somewhat
different species.

If an Italian citizen has the honor of giving a dinner to the legate of
his province, and the legate, when drinking, says to him, "Monsieur le
marquis, to your good health," he suddenly becomes a marquis, he and his
heirs after him, forever. If the inhabitant of any province of France,
whose whole estate consists of a quarter part of a little decayed
castle-ward, goes to Paris, makes something of a fortune, or carries the
air of having made one, he is styled in the deeds and legal instruments
in which he is concerned "high and mighty seigneur, marquis and count,"
and his son will be denominated by his notary "very high and very mighty
seigneur," and as this frivolous ambition is in no way injurious to
government or civil society, it is permitted to take its course. Some
French lords boast of employing German barons in their stables; some
German lords say they have French marquises in their kitchens; it is not
a long time since a foreigner at Naples made his coachman a duke. Custom
in these cases has more power than royal authority. If you are but
little known at Paris, you may there be a count or a marquis as long as
you please; if you are connected with the law of finance, though the
king should confer on you a real marquisate, you will not, therefore, be
monsieur le marquis. The celebrated Samuel Bernard was, in truth, more a
count than five hundred such as we often see not possessing four acres
of land. The king had converted his estate of Coubert into a fine
county; yet if on any occasion he had ordered himself to be announced as
Count Bernard, etc., he would have excited bursts of laughter. In
England it is different; if the king confers the title of earl or baron
on a merchant, all classes address him with the designation suitable to
it without the slightest hesitation. By persons of the highest birth, by
the king himself, he is called my lord. It is the same in Italy; there
is a register kept there of monsignori. The pope himself addresses them
under that title; his physician is monsignor, and no one objects.

In France the title of monseigneur or my lord is a very serious
business. Before the time of Cardinal Richelieu a bishop was only "a
most reverend father in God."

Before the year 1635 bishops did not only not assume the title of
monseigneur themselves, but they did not even give it to cardinals.
These two customs were introduced by a bishop of Chartres, who, in full
canonicals of lawn and purple, went to call Cardinal Richelieu
monseigneur, on which occasion Louis XIII. observed that "Chartrain
would not mind saluting the cardinal _au derrière_."

It is only since that period that bishops have mutually applied to each
other the title of monseigneur.

The public made no objection to this application of it; but, as it was a
new title, not conferred on bishops by kings, they continued to be
called sieurs in edicts, declarations, ordinances and all official
documents; and when the council wrote to a bishop they gave him no
higher title than monsieur.

The dukes and peers have encountered more difficulty in acquiring
possession of the title of monseigneur. The _grande noblesse_, and what
is called the grand robe, decidedly refuse them that distinction. The
highest gratification of human pride consists in a man's receiving
titles of honor from those who conceive themselves his equals; but to
attain this is exceedingly difficult; pride always finds pride to
contend with.

When the dukes insisted on receiving the title of monseigneur from the
class of gentlemen, the presidents of the parliaments required the same
from advocates and proctors. A certain president actually refused to be
bled because his surgeon asked: "In which arm will you be bled,
monsieur?" An old counsellor treated this matter somewhat more gayly. A
pleader was saying to him, "Monseigneur, monsieur, your secretary"....
He stopped him short: "You have uttered three blunders," says he, "in
as many words. I am not monseigneur; my secretary is not monsieur; he is
my clerk."

To put an end to this grand conflict of vanity it will eventually be
found necessary to give the title of monseigneur to every individual in
the nation; as women, who were formerly content with mademoiselle, are
now to be called madame. In Spain, when a mendicant meets a brother
beggar, he thus accosts him: "Has your courtesy taken chocolate?" This
politeness of language elevates the mind and keeps up the dignity of the
species. Cæsar and Pompey were called in the senate Cæsar and Pompey.
But these men knew nothing of life. They ended their letters with
_vale_--adieu. We, who possess more exalted notions, were sixty years
ago "affectionate servants"; then "very humble and very obedient"; and
now we "have the honor to be" so. I really grieve for posterity, which
will find it extremely difficult to add to these very beautiful
formulas. The Duke d'Épernon, the first of Gascons in pride, though far
from being the first of statesmen, wrote on his deathbed to Cardinal
Richelieu and ended his letter with: "Your very humble and very
obedient." Recollecting, however, that the cardinal had used only the
phrase "very affectionate," he despatched an express to bring back the
letter (for it had been actually sent off), began it anew, signed "very
affectionate," and died in the bed of honor.

We have made many of these observations elsewhere. It is well, however,
to repeat them, were it only to correct some pompous peacocks, who would
strut away their lives in contemptibly displaying their plumes and their
pride.




CERTAIN--CERTAINTY.


I am certain; I have friends; my fortune is secure; my relations will
never abandon me; I shall have justice done me; my work is good, it will
be well received; what is owing to me will be paid; my friend will be
faithful, he has sworn it; the minister will advance me--he has, by the
way, promised it--all these are words which a man who has lived a short
time in the world erases from his dictionary.

When the judges condemned L'Anglade, Le Brun, Calas, Sirven, Martin,
Montbailli, and so many others, since acknowledged to have been
innocent, they were certain, or they ought to have been certain, that
all these unhappy men were guilty; yet they were deceived. There are two
ways of being deceived; by false judgment and self-blindness--that of
erring like a man of genius, and that of deciding like a fool.

The judges deceived themselves like men of genius in the affair of
L'Anglade; they were blinded by dazzling appearances and did not
sufficiently examine the probabilities on the other side. Their wisdom
made them believe it certain that L'Anglade had committed a theft, which
he certainly had not committed; and on this miserable _uncertain_
certainty of the human mind, a gentleman was put to the ordinary and
extraordinary question; subsequent thrown, without succor, into a
dungeon and condemned to the galleys, where he died. His wife was shut
up in another dungeon, with her daughter, aged seven years, who
afterwards married a counsellor of the same parliament which had
condemned her father to the galleys and her mother to banishment.

It is clear that the judges would not have pronounced this sentence had
they been really certain. However, even at the time this sentence was
passed several persons knew that the theft had been committed by a
priest named Gagnat, associated with a highwayman, and the innocence of
L'Anglade was not recognized till after his death.

They were in the same manner certain when, by a sentence in the first
instance, they condemned to the wheel the innocent Le Brun, who, by an
arrêt pronounced on his appeal, was broken on the rack, and died under
the torture.

The examples of Calas and Sirven are well known, that of Martin is less
so. He was an honest agriculturist near Bar in Lorraine. A villain stole
his dress and in this dress murdered a traveller whom he knew to have
money and whose route he had watched. Martin was accused, his dress was
a witness against him; the judges regarded this evidence as a certainty.
Not the past conduct of the prisoner, a numerous family whom he had
brought up virtuously, neither the little money found on him, nor the
extreme probability of his innocence--nothing could save him. The
subaltern judge made a merit of his rigor. He condemned the innocent
victim to be broken on the wheel, and, by an unhappy fatality the
sentence was executed to the full extent. The senior Martin is broken
alive, calling God to witness his innocence to his last breath; his
family is dispersed, his little property is confiscated, and scarcely
are his broken members exposed on the great road when the assassin who
had committed the murder and theft is put in prison for another crime,
and confesses on the rack, to which he is condemned in his turn, that he
only was guilty of the crime for which Martin had suffered torture and
death.

Montbailli, who slept with his wife, was accused with having, in concert
with her, killed his mother, who had evidently died of apoplexy. The
council of Arras condemned Montbailli to expire on the rack, and his
wife to be burnt. Their innocence was discovered, but not until
Montbailli had been tortured. Let us cease advertence to these
melancholy adventures, which make us groan at the human condition; but
let us continue to lament the pretended certainty of judges, when they
pass such sentences.

There is no certainty, except when it is physically or morally
impossible that the thing can be otherwise. What! is a strict
demonstration necessary to enable us to assert that the surface of a
sphere is equal to four times the area of its great circle; and is not
one required to warrant taking away the life of a citizen by a
disgraceful punishment?

If such is the misfortune of humanity that judges must be contented with
extreme probabilities, they should at least consult the age, the rank,
the conduct of the accused--the interest which he could have in
committing the crime, and the interest of his enemies to destroy him.
Every judge should say to himself: Will not posterity, will not entire
Europe condemn my sentence? Shall I sleep tranquilly with my hands
tainted with innocent blood? Let us pass from this horrible picture to
other examples of a certainty which leads directly to error.

Why art thou loaded with chains, fanatical and unhappy Santon? Why hast
thou added a large iron ring on thy miserable scourge? It is because I
am certain of being one day placed in the first heaven, by the side of
our great prophet. Alas, my friend, come with me to the neighborhood of
Mount Athos and thou wilt see three thousand mendicants who are as
certain that thou wilt go to the gulf which is under the narrow bridge,
as that they will all go to the first heaven!

Stop, miserable Malabar widow, believe not the fool who persuades you
that you shall be reunited to your husband in all the delights of
another world, if you burn yourself on his funeral pile! No, I persist
in burning myself because I am certain of living in felicity with my
husband; my brahmin told me so.

Let us attend to less frightful certainties, and which have a little
more appearance of truth. What is the age of your friend Christopher?
Twenty-eight years. I have seen his marriage contract, and his baptismal
register; I knew him in his infancy; he is twenty-eight--I am certain of
it.

Scarcely have I heard the answer of this man, so sure of what he said,
and of twenty others who confirmed the same thing, when I learn that for
secret reasons, and by a singular circumstance the baptismal register of
Christopher has been antedated. Those to whom I had spoken as yet know
nothing of it, yet they have still the same certainty of that which is
not.

If you had asked the whole earth before the time of Copernicus: has the
sun risen? has it set to-day? all men would have answered: We are quite
certain of it. They were certain and they were in error.

Witchcraft, divinations, and possessions were for a long time the most
certain things in the world in the eyes of society. What an innumerable
crowd of people who have seen all these fine things and who have been
certain of them! At present this certainty is a little shaken.

A young man who is beginning to study geometry comes to me; he is only
at the definition of triangles. Are you not certain, said I to him, that
the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles? He
answered that not only was he not certain of it, but that he had not the
slightest idea of the proposition. I demonstrated it to him. He then
became very certain of it, and will remain so all his life. This is a
certainty very different from the others; they were only probabilities
and these probabilities, when examined, have turned out errors, but
mathematical certainty is immutable and eternal.

I exist, I think, I feel grief--is all that as certain as a geometrical
truth? Yes, skeptical as I am, I avow it. Why? It is that these truths
are proved by the same principle that it is impossible for a thing to
exist and not exist at the same time. I cannot at the same time feel and
not feel. A triangle cannot at the same time contain a hundred and
eighty degrees, which are the sum of two right angles, and not contain
them. The physical certainty of my existence, of my identity, is of the
same value as mathematical certainty, although it is of a different
kind.

It is not the same with the certainty founded on appearances, or on the
unanimous testimony of mankind.

But how, you will say to me, are you not certain that Pekin exists? Have
you not merchandise from Pekin? People of different countries and
different opinions have vehemently written against one another while
preaching the truth at Pekin; then are you not assured of the existence
of this town? I answer that it is extremely probable that there may be a
city of Pekin but I would not wager my life that such a town exists, and
I would at any time wager my life that the three angles of a triangle
are equal to two right angles.

In the "_Dictionnaire Encyclopédique_" a very pleasant thing appears. It
is there maintained that a man ought to be as certain that Marshal Saxe
rose from the dead, if all Paris tells him so, as he is sure that
Marshal Saxe gained the battle of Fontenoy, upon the same testimony.
Pray observe the beauty of this reasoning: as I believe all Paris when
it tells me a thing morally possible, I ought to believe all Paris when
it tells me a thing morally and physically impossible. Apparently the
author of this article has a disposition to be risible; as to ourselves
who have only undertaken this little dictionary to ask a few questions,
we are very far from possessing this very extensive certainty.




CHAIN OF CREATED BEINGS.


The gradation of beings rising from the lowest to the Great Supreme--the
scale of infinity--is an idea that fills us with admiration, but when
steadily regarded this phantom disappears, as apparitions were wont to
vanish at the crowing of the cock.

The imagination is pleased with the imperceptible transition from brute
matter to organized matter, from plants to zoophytes, from zoophytes to
animals, from animals to men, from men to genii, from these genii, clad
in a light aërial body, to immaterial substances of a thousand different
orders, rising from beauty to perfection, up to God Himself. This
hierarchy is very pleasing to young men who look upon it as upon the
pope and cardinals, followed by the archbishops and bishops, after whom
are the vicars, curates and priests, the deacons and subdeacons, then
come the monks, and the capuchins bring up the rear.

But there is, perhaps, a somewhat greater distance between God and His
most perfect creatures than between the holy father and the dean of the
sacred college. The dean may become pope, but can the most perfect genii
created by the Supreme Being become God? Is there not infinity between
them?

Nor does this chain, this pretended gradation, any more exist in
vegetables and animals; the proof is that some species of plants and
animals have been entirely destroyed. We have no murex. The Jews were
forbidden to eat griffin and ixion, these two species, whatever Bochart
may say, have probably disappeared from the earth. Where, then, is the
chain?

Supposing that we had not lost some species, it is evident that they may
be destroyed. Lions and rhinoceroses are becoming very scarce, and if
the rest of the nations had imitated the English, there would not now
have been a wolf left. It is probable that there have been races of men
who are no longer to be found. Why should they not have existed as well
as the whites, the blacks, the Kaffirs, to whom nature has given an
apron of their own skin, hanging from the belly to the middle of the
thigh; the Samoyeds, whose women have nipples of a beautiful jet.

Is there not a manifest void between the ape and man? Is it not easy to
imagine a two-legged animal without feathers having intelligence without
our shape or the use of speech--one which we could tame, which would
answer our signs, and serve us? And again, between this species and man,
cannot we imagine others?

Beyond man, divine Plato, you place in heaven a string of celestial
substances, in some of which we believe because the faith so teaches us.
But what reason had you to believe in them? It does not appear that you
had spoken with the genius of Socrates, and though Heres, good man, rose
again on purpose to tell you the secrets of the other world, he told you
nothing of these substances. In the sensible universe the pretended
chain is no less interrupted.

What gradation, I pray you, is there among the planets? The moon is
forty times smaller than our globe. Travelling from the moon through
space, you find Venus, about as large as the earth. From thence you go
to Mercury, which revolves in an ellipsis very different from the
circular orbit of Venus; it is twenty-seven times smaller than the
earth, the sun is a million times larger, and Mars is five times
smaller. The latter goes his round in two years, his neighbor Jupiter in
twelve, and Saturn in thirty; yet Saturn, the most distant of all, is
not so large as Jupiter. Where is the pretended gradation?

And then, how, in so many empty spaces, do you extend a chain
connecting the whole? There can certainly be no other than that which
Newton discovered--that which makes all the globes of the planetary
world gravitate one towards another in the immense void.

Oh, much admired Plato! I fear that you have told us nothing but fables,
that you have spoken to us only as a sophist! Oh, Plato! you have done
more mischief than you are aware of. How so? you will ask. I will not
tell you.




CHAIN OR GENERATION OF EVENTS.


The present, we say, is pregnant with the future; events are linked one
with another by an invincible fatality. This is the fate which, in
Homer, is superior to Jupiter himself. The master of gods and men
expressly declares that he cannot prevent his son Sarpedon from dying at
the time appointed. Sarpedon was born at the moment when it was
necessary that he should be born, and could not be born at any other; he
could not die elsewhere than before Troy; he could not be buried
elsewhere than in Lycia; his body must, in the appointed time, produce
vegetables, which must change into the substance of some of the Lycians;
his heirs must establish a new order of things in his states; that new
order must influence neighboring kingdoms; thence must result a new
arrangement in war and in peace with the neighbors of Lycia. So that,
from link to link, the destiny of the whole earth depended on the
elopement of Helen, which had a necessary connection with the marriage
of Hecuba, which, ascending to higher events, was connected with the
origin of things.

Had any one of these occurrences been ordered otherwise, the result
would have been a different universe. Now, it was not possible for the
actual universe not to exist; therefore it was not possible for Jupiter,
Jove as he was, to save the life of his son. We are told that this
doctrine of necessity and fatality has been invented in our own times by
Leibnitz, under the name of sufficing reason. It is, however, of great
antiquity. It is no recent discovery that there is no effect without a
cause and that often the smallest cause produces the greatest effects.

Lord Bolingbroke acknowledges that he was indebted to the petty quarrels
between the duchess of Marlborough and Mrs. Masham for an opportunity of
concluding the private treaty between Queen Anne and Louis XIV. This
treaty led to the peace of Utrecht; the peace of Utrecht secured the
throne of Spain to Philip V.; Philip took Naples and Sicily from the
house of Austria. Thus the Spanish prince, who is now king of Naples,
evidently owes his kingdom to Mrs. Masham; he would not have had it, nor
even have been born, if the duchess of Marlborough had been more
complaisant towards the queen of England; his existence at Naples
depended on one folly more or less at the court of London.

Examine the situations of every people upon earth; they are in like
manner founded on a train of occurrences seemingly without connection,
but all connected. In this immense machine all is wheel, pulley, cord,
or spring. It is the same in physical order. A wind blowing from the
southern seas and the remotest parts of Africa brings with it a portion
of the African atmosphere, which, falling in showers in the valleys of
the Alps, fertilizes our lands; on the other hand our north wind carries
our vapors among the negroes; we do good to Guinea, and Guinea to us.
The chain extends from one end of the universe to the other.

But the truth of this principle seems to me to be strangely abused; for
it is thence concluded that there is no atom, however small, the
movement of which has not influenced the actual arrangement of the whole
world; that the most trivial accident, whether among men or animals, is
an essential link in the great chain of destiny.

Let us understand one another. Every effect evidently has its cause,
ascending from cause to cause, into the abyss of eternity; but every
cause has not its effect, going down to the end of ages. I grant that
all events are produced one by another; if the past was pregnant with
the present, the present is pregnant with the future; everything is
begotten, but everything does not beget. It is a genealogical tree;
every house, we know, ascends to Adam, but many of the family have died
without issue.

The events of this world form a genealogical tree. It is indisputable
that the inhabitants of Spain and Gaul are descended from Gomer, and the
Russians from his younger brother Magog, for in how many great books is
this genealogy to be found! It cannot then be denied that the grand
Turk, who is also descended from Magog, is obliged to him for the good
beating given him in 1769 by the Empress Catherine II. This occurrence
is evidently linked with other great events; but whether Magog spat to
the right or to the left near Mount Caucasus--made two or three circles
in a well--or whether he lay on his right side or his left, I do not see
that it could have much influence on present affairs.

It must be remembered, because it is proved by Newton, that nature is
not a plenum, and that motion is not communicated by collision until it
has made the tour of the universe. Throw a body of a certain density
into water, you easily calculate that at the end of such a time the
movement of this body, and that which it has given to the water, will
cease; the motion will be lost and rest will be restored. So the motion
produced by Magog in spitting into a well cannot have influenced what is
now passing in Moldavia and Wallachia. Present events, then, are not the
offspring of all past events, they have their direct lines, but with a
thousand small collateral fines they have nothing to do. Once more be it
observed that every being has a parent but every one has not an
offspring.




CHANGES THAT HAVE OCCURRED IN THE GLOBE.


When we have seen with our own eyes a mountain advancing into a
plain--that is, an immense rock detached from that mountain, and
covering the fields, an entire castle buried in the earth, or a
swallowed-up river bursting from below, indubitable marks of an immense
mass of water having once inundated a country now inhabited, and so many
traces of other revolutions, we are even more disposed to believe in the
great changes that have altered the face of the world than a Parisian
lady who knows that the square in which her house stands was formerly a
cultivated field, but a lady of Naples who has seen the ruins of
Herculaneum underground is still less enthralled by the prejudice which
leads us to believe that everything has always been as it now is.

Was there a great burning of the world in the time of Phaethon? Nothing
is more likely, but this catastrophe was no more caused by the ambition
of Phaethon or the anger of Jupiter the Thunderer than at Lisbon, in
1755, the Divine vengeance was drawn down, the subterraneous fires
kindled, and half the city destroyed by the fires so often lighted there
by the inquisition--besides, we know that Mequinez, Tetuan and
considerable hordes of Arabs have been treated even worse than Lisbon,
though they had no inquisition. The island of St. Domingo, entirely
devastated not long ago, had no more displeased the Great Being than
the island of Corsica; all is subject to eternal physical laws.

Sulphur, bitumen, nitre, and iron, enclosed within the bowels of the
earth have overturned many a city, opened many a gulf, and we are
constantly liable to these accidents attached to the way in which this
globe is put together, just as, in many countries during winter, we are
exposed to the attacks of famishing wolves and tigers. If fire, which
Heraclitus believed to be the principle of all, has altered the face of
a part of the earth, Thales's first principle, water, has operated as
great changes.

One-half of America is still inundated by the ancient overflowings of
the Maranon, Rio de la Plata, the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, and all
the rivers perpetually swelled by the eternal snows of the highest
mountains in the world, stretching from one end of that continent to the
other. These accumulated floods have almost everywhere produced vast
marshes. The neighboring lands have become uninhabitable, and the earth,
which the hands of man should have made fruitful, has produced only
pestilence.

The same thing happened in China and in Egypt: a multitude of ages were
necessary to dig canals and dry the lands. Add to these lengthened
disasters the irruptions of the sea, the lands it has invaded and
deserted, the islands it has detached from the continent and you will
find that from east to west, from Japan to Mount Atlas, it has
devastated more than eighty thousand square leagues.

The swallowing up of the island Atlantis from the ocean may, with as
much reason, be considered historical, as fabulous. The shallowness of
the Atlantic as far as the Canaries might be taken as a proof of this
great event and the Canaries themselves for fragments of the island
Atlantis.

Plato tells us in his "_Timæus_," that the Egyptian priests, among whom
he had travelled, had in their possession ancient registers which
certified that island's going under water. Plato says that this
catastrophe happened nine thousand years before his time. No one will
believe this chronology on Plato's word only, but neither can any one
adduce against it any physical proof, nor even a historical testimony
from any profane writer.

Pliny, in his third book, says that from time immemorial the people of
the southern coasts of Spain believed that the sea had forced a passage
between Calpe and Abila: _"Indigenæ columnas Herculis vocant, creduntque
per fossas exclusa antea admisisse maria, et rerum naturæ mutasse
faciem."_

An attentive traveller may convince himself by his own eyes that the
Cyclades and the Sporades were once part of the continent of Greece, and
especially that Sicily was once joined to Apulia. The two volcanos of
Etna and Vesuvius having the same basis in the sea, the little gulf of
Charybdis, the only deep part of that sea, the perfect resemblance of
the two soils are incontrovertible testimonies. The floods of Deucalion
and Ogyges are well known, and the fables founded upon this truth are
still more the talk of all the West.

The ancients have mentioned several deluges in Asia. The one spoken of
by Berosus happened (as he tells us) in Chaldæa, about four thousand
three, or four hundred years before the Christian era, and Asia was as
much inundated with fables about this deluge as it was by the
overflowings of the Tigris and Euphrates, and all the rivers that fall
into the Euxine.

It is true that such overflowings cannot cover the country with more
than a few feet of water, but the consequent sterility, the washing away
of houses, and the destruction of cattle are losses which it requires
nearly a century to repair. We know how much they have cost Holland,
more than the half of which has been lost since the year 1050. She is
still obliged to maintain a daily conflict with the ever-threatening
ocean. She has never employed so many soldiers in resisting her enemies
as she employs laborers in continually defending her against the
assaults of a sea always ready to swallow her.

The road from Egypt to Phœnicia, along the borders of Lake Serbo, was
once quite practicable, but it has long ceased to be so; it is now
nothing but a quicksand, moistened by stagnant water. In short, a great
portion of the earth would be no other than a vast poisonous marsh
inhabited by monsters, but for the assiduous labor of the human race.

We shall not here speak of the universal deluge of Noah. Let it suffice
to read the Holy Scriptures with submission. Noah's flood was an
incomprehensible miracle supernaturally worked by the justice and
goodness of an ineffable Providence whose will it was to destroy the
whole guilty human race and form a new and innocent race. If the new
race was more wicked than the former, and became more criminal from age
to age, from reformation to reformation, this is but another effect of
the same Providence, of which it is impossible for us to fathom the
depths, the inconceivable mysteries transmitted to the nations of the
West for many ages, in the Latin translation of the Septuagint. We shall
never enter these awful sanctuaries; our questions will be limited to
simple nature.




CHARACTER.

[From the Greek word signifying _Impression_, _Engraving_.--It is what
nature has engraved in us.]


Can we change our character? Yes, if we change our body. A man born
turbulent, violent, and inflexible, may, through falling in his old age
into an apoplexy, become like a silly, weak, timid, puling child. His
body is no longer the same, but so long as his nerves, his blood, and
his marrow remain in the same state his disposition will not change any
more than the instinct of a wolf or a polecat. The English author of
"The Dispensary," a poem much superior to the Italian "_Capitoli_" and
perhaps even to Boileau's "_Lutrin_", has, as it seems to me, well
observed.

     How matter, by the varied shape of pores,
     Or idiots frames, or solemn senators.

The character is formed of our ideas and our feelings. Now it is quite
clear that we neither give ourselves feelings nor ideas, therefore our
character cannot depend on ourselves. If it did so depend, every one
would be perfect. We cannot give ourselves tastes, nor talents, why,
then, should we give ourselves qualities? When we do not reflect we
think we are masters of all: when we reflect we find that we are masters
of nothing.

If you would absolutely change a man's character purge him with diluents
till he is dead. Charles XII., in his illness on the way to Bender, was
no longer the same man; he was as tractable as a child. If I have a wry
nose and cat's eyes I can hide them behind a mask, and can I do more
with the character that nature has given me?

A man born violent and passionate presents himself before Francis I.,
king of France, to complain of a trespass. The countenance of the
prince, the respectful behavior of the courtiers, the very place he is
in make a powerful impression upon this man. He mechanically casts down
his eyes, his rude voice is softened, he presents his petition with
humility, you would think him as mild as (at that moment at least) the
courtiers appear to be, among whom he is often disconcerted, but if
Francis I. knows anything of physiognomy, he will easily discover in his
eye, though downcast, glistening with a sullen fire, in the extended
muscles of his face, in his fast-closed lips, that this man is not so
mild as he is forced to appear. The same man follows him to Pavia, is
taken prisoner along with him and thrown into the same dungeon at
Madrid. The majesty of Francis I. no longer awes him as before, he
becomes familiar with the object of his reverence. One day, pulling on
the king's boots, and happening to pull them on ill, the king, soured by
misfortune, grows angry, on which our man of courtesy wishes his majesty
at the devil and throws his boots out the window.

Sixtus V. was by nature petulant, obstinate, haughty, impetuous,
vindictive, arrogant. This character, however, seems to have been
softened by the trials of his novitiate. But see him beginning to
acquire some influence in his order; he flies into a passion against a
guardian and knocks him down. Behold him an inquisitor at Venice, he
exercises his office with insolence. Behold him cardinal; he is
possessed _della rabbia papale_; this rage triumphs over his natural
propensities; he buries his person and his character in obscurity and
counterfeits humility and infirmity. He is elected pope, and the spring
which policy had held back now acts with all the force of its
long-restrained elasticity; he is the proudest and most despotic of
sovereigns.

     _Naturam expellas furea, tamen usque recurret._
     Howe'er expelled, nature will still return.

Religion and morality curb the strength of the disposition, but they
cannot destroy it. The drunkard in a cloister, reduced to a quarter of a
pint of cider each meal will never more get drunk, but he will always be
fond of wine.

Age weakens the character; it is as an old tree producing only a few
degenerate fruits, but always of the same nature, which is covered with
knots and moss and becomes worm-eaten, but is ever the same, whether oak
or pear tree. If we could change our character we could give ourselves
one and become the master of nature. Can we give ourselves anything? do
not we receive everything? To strive to animate the indolent man with
persevering activity, to freeze with apathy the boiling blood of the
impetuous, to inspire a taste for poetry into him who has neither taste
nor ear were as futile as to attempt to give sight to one born blind. We
perfect, we ameliorate, we conceal what nature has placed in us, but we
place nothing there ourselves.

An agriculturist is told: "You have too many fish in this pond; they
will not thrive, here are too many cattle in your meadows; they will
want grass and grow lean." After this exhortation the pikes come and eat
one-half this man's carps, the wolves one-half of his sheep, and the
rest fatten. And will you applaud his economy? This countryman is
yourself; one of your passions devours the rest and you think you have
gained a triumph. Do we not almost all resemble the old general of
ninety, who, having found some young officers behaving in a rather
disorderly manner with some young women, said to them in anger:
"Gentlemen, is this the example that I set you?"




CHARITY.

CHARITABLE AND BENEFICENT INSTITUTIONS, ALMS-HOUSES, HOSPITALS, ETC.


Cicero frequently speaks of universal charity, _charitas humani
generis_; but it does not appear that the policy or the beneficence of
the Romans ever induced them to establish charitable institutions, in
which the indigent and the sick might be relieved at the expense of the
public. There was a receptacle for strangers at the port of Ostia,
called Xenodokium, St. Jerome renders this justice to the Romans.
Almshouses seem to have been unknown in ancient Rome. A more noble usage
prevailed--that of supplying the people with corn. There were in Rome
three hundred and twenty-seven public granaries. This constant
liberality precluded any need of alms-houses. They were strangers to
necessity.

Neither was there any occasion among the Romans for founding charities.
None exposed their own children. Those of slaves were taken care of by
their masters. Childbirth was not deemed disgraceful to the daughters of
citizens. The poorest families, maintained by the republic and
afterwards by the emperors, saw the subsistence of their children
secured.

The expression, "charitable establishment," _maison de charité_, implies
a state of indigence among modern nations which the form of our
governments has not been able to preclude.

The word "hospital," which recalls that of hospitality, reminds us of a
virtue in high estimation among the Greeks, now no longer existing; but
it also expresses a virtue far superior. There is a mighty difference
between lodging, maintaining, and providing in sickness for all
afflicted applicants whatever, and entertaining in your own house two or
three travellers by whom you might claim a right to be entertained in
return. Hospitality, after all, was but an exchange. Hospitals are
monuments of beneficence.

It is true that the Greeks were acquainted with charitable institutions
under the name of _Xenodokia_, for strangers, _Nosocomeia_, for the
sick, and _Ptokia_, for the indigent. In Diogenes Laertius, concerning
Bion, we find this passage: "He suffered much from the indigence of
those who were charged with the care of the sick."

Hospitality among friends was called _Idioxenia_, and among strangers
_Proxenia_. Hence, the person who received and entertained strangers in
his house, in the name of the whole city, was called _Proxenos_. But
this institution appears to have been exceedingly rare. At the present
day there is scarcely a city in Europe without its hospitals. The Turks
have them even for beasts, which seems to be carrying charity rather too
far, it would be better to forget the beasts and think more about men.

This prodigious multitude of charitable establishments clearly proves a
truth deserving of all our attention--that man is not so depraved as he
is stated to be, and that, notwithstanding all his absurd opinions,
notwithstanding all the horrors of war which transform him into a
ferocious beast, we have reason to consider him as a creature naturally
well disposed and kind, and who, like other animals, becomes vicious
only in proportion as he is stung by provocation.

The misfortune is that he is provoked too often.

Modern Rome has almost as many charitable institutions as ancient Rome
had triumphal arches and other monuments of conquest. The most
considerable of them all is a bank which lends money at two per cent.
upon pledge, and sells the property if the borrower does not redeem it
by an appointed time. This establishment is called the _Archiospedale_,
or chief hospital. It is said always to contain within its walls nearly
two thousand sick, which would be about the fiftieth part of the
population of Rome for this one house alone, without including the
children brought up, and the pilgrims lodged there. Where are the
computations which do not require abatement?

Has it not been actually published at Rome that the hospital of the
Trinity had lodged and maintained for three days four hundred and forty
thousand five hundred male and twenty-five thousand female pilgrims at
the jubilee in 1600? Has not Misson himself told us that the hospital of
the Annunciation at Naples possesses a rental of two millions in our
money? (About four hundred thousand dollars.)

However, to return, perhaps a charitable establishment for pilgrims who
are generally mere vagabonds, is rather an encouragement to idleness
than an act of humanity. It is, however, a decisive evidence of humanity
that Rome contains fifty charitable establishments including all
descriptions. These beneficent institutions are quite as useful and
respectable as the riches of some monasteries and chapels are useless
and ridiculous.

To dispense food, clothing, medicine, and aid of every kind, to our
brethren, is truly meritorious, but what need can a saint have of gold
and diamonds? What benefit results to mankind from "our Lady of Loretto"
possessing more gorgeous treasures than the Turkish sultan? Loretto is a
house of vanity, and not of charity. London, reckoning its charity
schools, has as many beneficent establishments as Rome.

The most beautiful monument of beneficence ever erected is the Hôtel des
Invalides, founded by Louis XIV.

Of all hospitals, that in which the greatest number of indigent sick are
daily received is the Hôtel Dieu of Paris. It frequently contains four
or five thousand inmates at a time. It is at once the receptacle of all
the dreadful ills to which mankind are subject and the temple of true
virtue, which consists in relieving them.

It is impossible to avoid frequently drawing a contrast between a fête
at Versailles or an opera at Paris, in which all the pleasures and all
the splendors of life are combined with the most exquisite art, and a
Hôtel Dieu, where all that is painful, all that is loathsome, and even
death itself are accumulated in one mass of horror. Such is the
composition of great cities! By an admirable policy pleasures and luxury
are rendered subservient to misery and pain. The theatres of Paris pay
on an average the yearly sum of a hundred thousand crowns to the
hospital. It often happens in these charitable institutions that the
inconveniences counterbalance the advantages. One proof of the abuses
attached to them is that patients dread the very idea of being removed
to them.

The Hôtel Dieu, for example, was formerly well situated, in the middle
of the city, near the bishop's palace. The situation now is very bad,
for the city has become overgrown; four or five patients are crowded
into every bed, the victim of scurvy communicates it to his neighbor and
in return receives from him smallpox, and a pestilential atmosphere
spreads incurable disease and death, not only through the building
destined to restore men to healthful life but through a great part of
the city which surrounds it.

M. de Chamousset, one of the most valuable and active of citizens, has
computed, from accurate authorities, that in the Hôtel Dieu, a fourth
part of the patients die, an eighth in the hospital of Charity, a ninth
in the London hospitals, and a thirtieth in those of Versailles. In the
great and celebrated hospital of Lyons, which has long been one of the
best conducted in Europe, the average mortality has been found to be
only one-fifteenth. It has been often proposed to divide the Hôtel Dieu
of Paris into smaller establishments better situated, more airy, and
salubrious, but money has been wanting to carry the plan into execution.

     _Curtae nescio quid semper abest rei._

Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to
be destroyed, but when the object is to preserve them it is no longer
so. Yet the Hôtel Dieu of Paris has a revenue amounting to more than a
million (forty thousand pounds), and every day increasing, and the
Parisians have rivalled each other in their endowments of it.

We cannot help remarking in this place that Germain Brice, in his
"Description of Paris," speaking of some legacies bequeathed by the
first president, Bellievre, to the hall of the Hôtel Dieu, named St.
Charles, says: "Every one ought to read the beautiful inscription,
engraved in letters of gold on a grand marble tablet, and composed by
Oliver Patru, one of the choicest spirits of his time, some of whose
pleadings are extant and in very high esteem.

"Whoever thou art that enterest this sacred place thou wilt almost
everywhere behold traces of the charity of the great Pomponne. The gold
and silver tapestry and the exquisite furniture which formerly adorned
his apartments are now, by a happy metamorphosis, made to minister to
the necessities of the sick. That divine man, who was the ornament and
delight of his age, even in his conflict with death, considered how he
might relieve the afflicted. The blood of Bellievre was manifested in
every action of his life. The glory of his embassies is full well
known," etc.

The useful Chamousset did better than Germain Brice, or than Oliver
Patru, "one of the choicest spirits of his time." He offered to
undertake at his own expense, backed by a responsible company, the
following contract:

The administrators of the Hôtel Dieu estimated the cost of every
patient, whether killed or cured, at fifty livres. M. Chamousset and the
company offered to undertake the business, on receiving fifty livres on
recovery only. The deaths were to be thrown out of the account, of which
the expenses were to be borne by himself.

The proposal was so very advantageous that it was not accepted. It was
feared that he would not be able to accomplish it. Every abuse attempted
to be reformed is the patrimony of those who have more influence than
the reformers.

A circumstance no less singular is that the Hôtel Dieu alone has the
privilege of selling meat in Lent, for its own advantage and it loses
money thereby. M. Chamousset proposed to enter into a contract by which
the establishment would gain; his offer was rejected and the butcher,
who was thought to have suggested it to him, was dismissed.

     _Ainsi chez les humains, par un abus fatal,_
     _Le bien le plus parfait est la source du mal._

     Thus serious ill, if tainted by abuse,
     The noblest works of man will oft produce.




CHARLES IX.


Charles IX., king of France, was, we are told, a good poet. It is quite
certain that while he lived his verses were admired. Brantôme does not,
indeed, tell us that this king was the best poet in Europe, but he
assures us that "he made very genteel quatrains impromptu, without
thinking (for he had seen several of them), and when it was wet or
gloomy weather, or very hot, he would send for the poets into his
cabinet and pass his time there with them."

Had he always passed his time thus, and, above all, had he made good
verses, we should not have had a St. Bartholomew, he would not have
fired with a carbine through his window upon his own subjects, as if
they had been a covey of partridges. Is it not impossible for a good
poet to be a barbarian? I am persuaded it is.

These lines, addressed in his name to Ronsard, have been attributed to
him:

     _La lyre, qui ravit par de si doux accords,_
     _Te soumets les esprits dont je n'ai que les corps;_
     _Le maître elle t'en rend, et te fait introduire_
     _Où le plus fier tyran ne peut avoir d'empire._

     The lyre's delightful softly swelling lay
     Subdues the mind, I but the body sway;
     Make thee its master, thy sweet art can bind
     What haughty tyrants cannot rule--the mind.

These lines are good. But are they his? Are they not his preceptor's?
Here are some of his royal imaginings, which are somewhat different:

     _Il faut suivre ton roi qui t'aime par sur tous_
     _Pour les vers qui de toi coulent braves et doux;_
     _Et crois, si tu ne viens me trouver à Pontoise,_
     _Qu'entre nous adviendra une très-grande noise._

     Know, thou must follow close thy king, who oft
     Hath heard, and loves thee for, thy verse so soft;
     Unless thou come and meet me at Pontoise,
     Believe me, I shall make no little noise.

These are worthy the author of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Cæsar's
lines on Terence are written with rather more spirit and taste; they
breathe Roman urbanity. In those of Francis I. and Charles IX. we find
the barbarism of the Celts. Would to God that Charles IX. had written
more verses, even though bad ones! For constant application to the fine
arts softens the manners and dispels ferocity:

     _Emollit mores, nec sinit esse feros._

Besides, the French languages scarcely began to take any form until long
after Charles IX. See such of Francis I.'s letters as have been
preserved: "_Tout est perdu hors l'honneur_"--"All is lost save
honor"--was worthy of a chevalier. But the following is neither in the
style of Cicero nor in that of Cæsar:

[Illustration]

"_Tout a fleure ynsi que je me volois mettre o lit est arrivé Laval qui
m'a aporté la serteneté du lévement du siege."_

"All was going so well that, when I was going to bed Laval arrived, and
brought me the certainty of the siege being raised."

We have letters from the hand of Louis XIII., which are no better
written. It is not required of a king to write letters like Pliny, or
verses like Virgil; but no one can be excused from expressing himself
with propriety in his own tongue. Every prince that writes like a lady's
maid has been ill educated.




CHINA.


SECTION I.

We have frequently observed elsewhere, how rash and injudicious it is to
controvert with any nation, such as the Chinese, its authentic
pretensions. There is no house in Europe, the antiquity of which is so
well proved as that of the Empire of China. Let us figure to ourselves a
learned Maronite of Mount Athos questioning the nobility of the
Morozini, the Tiepolo, and other ancient houses of Venice; of the
princes of Germany, of the Montmorencys, the Chatillons, or the
Talleyrands, of France, under the pretence that they are not mentioned
in St. Thomas, or St. Bonaventure. We must impeach either his sense or
his sincerity.

Many of the learned of our northern climes have felt confounded at the
antiquity claimed by the Chinese. The question, however, is not one of
learning. Leaving all the Chinese literati, all the mandarins, all the
emperors, to acknowledge Fo-hi as one of the first who gave laws to
China, about two thousand five hundred years before our vulgar era;
admit that there must be people before there are kings. Allow that a
long period of time is necessary before a numerous people, having
discovered the necessary arts of life, unite in the choice of a common
governor. But if you do not make these admissions, it is not of the
slightest consequence. Whether you agree with us or not, we shall always
believe that two and two make four.

In a western province, formerly called Celtica, the love of singularity
and paradox has been carried so far as to induce some to assert that the
Chinese were only an Egyptian, or rather perhaps a Phœnician colony.
It was attempted to prove, in the same way as a thousand other things
have been proved, that a king of Egypt, called Menes by the Greeks, was
the Chinese King Yu; and that Atoes was Ki, by the change of certain
letters. In addition to which, the following is a specimen of the
reasoning applied to the subject:

The Egyptians sometimes lighted torches at night. The Chinese light
lanterns: the Chinese are, therefore, evidently a colony from Egypt. The
Jesuit Parennin who had, at the time, resided five and twenty years in
China, and was master both of its language and its sciences, has
rejected all these fancies with a happy mixture of elegance and
sarcasm. All the missionaries, and all the Chinese, on receiving the
intelligence that a country in the extremity of the west was developing
a new formation of the Chinese Empire, treated it with a contemptuous
ridicule. Father Parennin replied with somewhat more seriousness: "Your
Egyptians," said he, "when going to people China, must evidently have
passed through India." Was India at that time peopled or not? If it was,
would it permit a foreign army to pass through it? If it was not, would
not the Egyptians have stopped in India? Would they have continued their
journey through barren deserts, and over almost impracticable mountains,
till they reached China, in order to form colonies there, when they
might so easily have established them on the fertile banks of the Indus
or the Ganges?

The compilers of a universal history, printed in England, have also
shown a disposition to divest the Chinese of their antiquity, because
the Jesuits were the first who made the world acquainted with China.
This is unquestionably a very satisfactory reason for saying to a whole
nation--"You are liars."

It appears to me a very important reflection, which may be made on the
testimony given by Confucius, to the antiquity of his nation; and which
is, that Confucius had no interest in falsehood: he did not pretend to
be a prophet; he claimed no inspiration: he taught no new religion; he
used no delusions; flattered not the emperor under whom he lived: he
did not even mention him. In short, he is the only founder of
institutions among mankind who was not followed by a train of women. I
knew a philosopher who had no other portrait than that of Confucius in
his study. At the bottom of it were written the following lines:

     Without assumption he explored the mind,
     Unveiled the light of reason to mankind;
     Spoke as a sage, and never as a seer,
     Yet, strange to say, his country held him dear.

I have read his books with attention; I have made extracts from them; I
have found in them nothing but the purest morality, without the
slightest tinge of charlatanism. He lived six hundred years before our
vulgar era. His works were commented on by the most learned men of the
nation. If he had falsified, if he had introduced a false chronology, if
he had written of emperors who never existed, would not some one have
been found, in a learned nation, who would have reformed his chronology?
One Chinese only has chosen to contradict him, and he met with universal
execration.

Were it worth our while, we might here compare the great wall of China
with the monuments of other nations, which have never even approached
it; and remark, that, in comparison with this extensive work, the
pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses. We might dwell on
the thirty-two eclipses calculated in the ancient chronology of China,
twenty-eight of which have been verified by the mathematicians of
Europe. We might show, that the respect entertained by the Chinese for
their ancestors is an evidence that such ancestors have existed; and
repeat the observation, so often made, that this reverential respect has
in so small degree impeded, among this people, the progress of natural
philosophy, geometry, and astronomy.

It is sufficiently known, that they are, at the present day, what we all
were three hundred years ago, very ignorant reasoners. The most learned
Chinese is like one of the learned of Europe in the fifteenth century,
in possession of his Aristotle. But it is possible to be a very bad
natural philosopher, and at the same time an excellent moralist. It is,
in fact, in morality, in political economy, in agriculture, in the
necessary arts of life, that the Chinese have made such advances towards
perfection. All the rest they have been taught by us: in these we might
well submit to become their disciples.

_Of the Expulsion of the Missionaries from China._

Humanly speaking, independently of the service which the Jesuits might
confer on the Christian religion, are they not to be regarded as an
ill-fated class of men, in having travelled from so remote a distance to
introduce trouble and discord into one of the most extended and
best-governed kingdoms of the world? And does not their conduct involve
a dreadful abuse of the liberality and indulgence shown by the
Orientals, more particularly after the torrents of blood shed, through
their means, in the empire of Japan? A scene of horror, to prevent the
consequence of which the government believed it absolutely indispensable
to shut their ports against all foreigners.

The Jesuits had obtained permission of the emperor of China, Cam-hi, to
teach the Catholic religion. They made use of it, to instil into the
small portion of the people under their direction, that it was incumbent
on them to serve no other master than him who was the viceregent of God
on earth, and who dwelt in Italy on the banks of a small river called
the Tiber; that every other religious opinion, every other worship, was
an abomination in the sight of God, and whoever did not believe the
Jesuits would be punished by Him to all eternity; that their emperor and
benefactor, Cam-hi, who could not even pronounce the name of Christ, as
the Chinese language possesses not the letter "r," would suffer eternal
damnation; that the Emperor Yontchin would experience, without mercy,
the same fate; that all the ancestors, both of Chinese and Tartars,
would incur a similar penalty; that their descendants would undergo it
also, as well as the rest of the world; and that the reverend fathers,
the Jesuits, felt a sincere and paternal commiseration for the damnation
of so many souls.

They, at length, succeeded in making converts of three princes of the
Tartar race. In the meantime, the Emperor Cam-hi died, towards the close
of the year 1722. He bequeathed the empire to his fourth son, who has
been so celebrated through the whole world for the justice and the
wisdom of his government, for the affection entertained for him by his
subjects, and for the expulsion of the Jesuits.

They began by baptizing the three princes, and many persons of their
household. These neophytes had the misfortune to displease the emperor
on some points which merely respected military duty. About this very
period the indignation of the whole empire against the missionaries
broke out into a flame. All the governors of provinces, all the Colaos,
presented memorials against them. The accusations against them were
urged so far that the three princes, who had become disciples of the
Jesuits, were put into irons.

It is clear that they were not treated with this severity simply for
having been baptized, since the Jesuits themselves acknowledge in their
letters, that _they_ experienced no violence, and that they were even
admitted to an audience of the emperor, who honored them with some
presents. It is evident, therefore, that the Emperor Yonchin was no
persecutor; and, if the princes were confined in a prison on the borders
of Tartary, while those who had converted them were treated so
liberally, it is a decided proof that they were state prisoners, and not
martyrs.

The emperor, soon after this, yielded to the supplications of all his
people. They petitioned that the Jesuits might be sent away, as their
abolition has been since prayed for in France and other countries. All
the tribunals of China urged their being immediately sent to Macao,
which is considered as a place without the limits of the empire, and the
possession of which has always been left to the Portuguese, with a
Chinese garrison.

Yonchin had the humanity to consult the tribunals and governors, whether
any danger could result from conveying all the Jesuits to the province
of Canton. While awaiting the reply, he ordered three of them to be
introduced to his presence, and addressed them in the following words,
which Father Parennin, with great ingenuousness, records: "Your
Europeans, in the province of Fo-Kien, intended to abolish our laws, and
disturbed our people. The tribunals have denounced them before me. It is
my positive duty to provide against such disorders: the good of the
empire requires it.... What would you say were I to send over to your
country a company of bonzes and lamas to preach their law? How would you
receive them?... If you deceived my father, hope not also to deceive
me.... You wish to make the Chinese Christians: your law, I well know,
requires this of you. But in case you should succeed, what should we
become? the subjects of your kings. Christians believe none but you: in
a time of confusion they would listen to no voice but yours. I know
that, at present, there is nothing to fear; but on the arrival of a
thousand, or perhaps ten thousand vessels, great disturbances might
ensue.

"China, on the north, joins the kingdom of Russia, which is by no means
contemptible; to the south it has the Europeans, and their kingdoms,
which are still more considerable; and to the west, the princes of
Tartary, with whom we have been at war eight years.... Laurence Lange,
companion of Prince Ismailoff, ambassador from the czar, requested that
the Russians might have permission to establish factories in each of the
provinces. The permission was confined to Pekin, and within the limits
of Calcas. In like manner I permit you to remain here and at Canton as
long as you avoid giving any cause of complaint. Should you give any, I
will not suffer you to remain either here or at Canton."

In the other provinces their houses and churches were levelled to the
ground. At length the clamor against them redoubled. The charges most
strenuously insisted upon against them were, that they weakened the
respect of children for their parents, by not paying the honors due to
ancestors; that they indecently brought together young men and women in
retired places, which they called churches; that they made girls kneel
before them, and enclosed them with their legs, and conversed with them,
while in this posture, in undertones. To Chinese delicacy, nothing
appeared more revolting than this. Their emperor, Yonchin, even
condescended to inform the Jesuits of this fact; after which he sent
away the greater part of the missionaries to Macao, but with all that
polite attention which perhaps the Chinese alone are capable of
displaying.

Some Jesuits, possessed of mathematical science, were retained at
Pekin; and among others, that same Parennin whom we have mentioned; and
who, being a perfect master both of the Chinese and of the Tartar
language, had been frequently employed as an interpreter. Many of the
Jesuits concealed themselves in the distant provinces; others even in
Canton itself; and the affair was connived at.

At length, after the death of the Emperor Yonchin, his son and
successor, Kien-Lung, completed the satisfaction of the nation by
compelling all the missionaries who were in concealment throughout his
empire to remove to Macao: a solemn edict prevented them from ever
returning. If any appear, they are civilly requested to carry their
talents somewhere else. There is nothing of severity, nothing of
persecution. I have been told that, in 1760, a Jesuit having gone from
Rome to Canton, and been informed against by a Dutch factor, the Colao
governor of Canton had him sent away, presenting him at the same time
with a piece of silk, some provisions, and money.

_Of the pretended Atheism of China._

The charge of Atheism, alleged by our theologians of the west, against
the Chinese government at the other end of the world, has been
frequently examined, and is, it must be admitted, the meanest excess of
our follies and pedantic inconsistencies. It was sometimes pretended, in
one of our learned faculties, that the Chinese tribunals or parliaments
were idolatrous; sometimes that they acknowledged no divinity whatever:
and these reasoners occasionally pushed their logic so far as to
maintain that the Chinese were, at the same time, atheists and
idolaters.

In the month of October, 1700, the Sorbonne declared every proposition
which maintained that the emperor and the Colaos believed in God to be
heretical. Bulky volumes were composed in order to demonstrate,
conformably to the system of theological demonstration, that the Chinese
adored nothing but the material heaven.

     _Nil praeter nubes et coeli numen adorant._
     They worship clouds and firmament alone.

But if they did adore the material heaven, that was their God. They
resembled the Persians, who are said to have adored the sun: they
resembled the ancient Arabians, who adored the stars: they were neither
worshippers of idols nor atheists. But a learned doctor, when it is an
object to denounce from his tripod any proposition as heretical or
obnoxious, does not distinguish with much clearness.

Those contemptible creatures who, in 1700, created such a disturbance
about the material heaven of the Chinese, did not know that, in 1689,
the Chinese, having made peace with the Russians at Nicptchou, which
divides the two empires, erected, in September of the same year, a
marble monument, on which the following memorable words were engraved in
the Chinese and Latin languages:

"Should any ever determine to rekindle the flames of war, we pray the
sovereign reign of all things, who knows the heart, to punish their
perfidy," etc.

A very small portion of modern history is sufficient to put an end to
these ridiculous disputes: but those who believe that the duty of man
consists in writing commentaries on St. Thomas, or Scotus, cannot
condescend to inform themselves of what is going on among the great
empires of the world.


SECTION II.

We travel to China to obtain clay for porcelain, as if we had none
ourselves; stuffs, as if we were destitute of stuffs; and a small herb
to be infused in water, as if we had no simples in our own countries. In
return for these benefits, we are desirous of converting the Chinese. It
is a very commendable zeal; but we must avoid controverting their
antiquity, and also calling them idolaters. Should we think it well of a
capuchin, if, after having been hospitably entertained at the château of
the Montmorencys, he endeavored to persuade them that they were new
nobility, like the king's secretaries; or accused them of idolatry,
because he found two or three statues of constables, for whom they
cherished the most profound respect?

The celebrated Wolf, professor of mathematics in the university of
Halle, once delivered an excellent discourse in praise of the Chinese
philosophy. He praised that ancient species of the human race,
differing, as it does, in respect to the beard, the eyes, the nose, the
ears, and even the reasoning powers themselves; he praised the Chinese,
I say, for their adoration of a supreme God, and their love of virtue.
He did that justice to the emperors of China, to the tribunals, and to
the literati. The justice done to the bonzes was of a different kind.

It is necessary to observe, that this Professor Wolf had attracted
around him a thousand pupils of all nations. In the same university
there was also a professor of theology, who attracted no one. This man,
maddened at the thought of freezing to death in his own deserted hall,
formed the design, which undoubtedly was only right and reasonable, of
destroying the mathematical professor. He scrupled not, according to the
practice of persons like himself, to accuse him of not believing in God.

Some European writers, who had never been in China, had pretended that
the government of Pekin was atheistical. Wolf had praised the
philosophers of Pekin; therefore Wolf was an atheist. Envy and hatred
seldom construct the best syllogisms. This argument of Lange, supported
by a party and by a protector, was considered conclusive by the
sovereign of the country, who despatched a formal dilemma to the
mathematician. This dilemma gave him the option of quitting Halle in
twenty-four hours, or of being hanged; and as Wolf was a very accurate
reasoner, he did not fail to quit. His withdrawing deprived the king of
two or three hundred thousand crowns a year, which were brought into
the kingdom in consequence of the wealth of this philosopher's
disciples.

This case should convince sovereigns that they should not be over ready
to listen to calumny, and sacrifice a great man to the madness of a
fool. But let us return to China.

Why should we concern ourselves, we who live at the extremity of the
west--why should we dispute with abuse and fury, whether there were
fourteen princes or not before Fo-hi, emperor of China, and whether the
said Fo-hi lived three thousand, or two thousand nine hundred years
before our vulgar era? I should like to see two Irishmen quarrelling at
Dublin, about who was the owner, in the twelfth century, of the estate I
am now in possession of. Is it not clear, that they should refer to me,
who possess the documents and titles relating to it? To my mind, the
case is the same with respect to the first emperors of China, and the
tribunals of that country are the proper resort upon the subject.

Dispute as long as you please about the fourteen princes who reigned
before Fo-hi, your very interesting dispute cannot possibly fail to
prove that China was at that period populous, and that laws were in
force there. I now ask you, whether a people's being collected together,
under laws and kings, involves not the idea of very considerable
antiquity? Reflect how long a time is requisite, before by a singular
concurrence of circumstances, the iron is discovered in the mine,
before it is applied to purposes of agriculture, before the invention of
the shuttle, and all the arts of life.

Some who multiply mankind by a dash of the pen, have produced very
curious calculations. The Jesuit Petau, by a very singular computation,
gives the world, two hundred and twenty-five years after the deluge, one
hundred times as many inhabitants as can be easily conceived to exist on
it at present. The Cumberlands and Whistons have formed calculations
equally ridiculous; had these worthies only consulted the registers of
our colonies in America, they would have been perfectly astonished, and
would have perceived not only how slowly mankind increase in number, but
that frequently instead of increasing they actually diminish.

Let us then, who are merely of yesterday, descendants of the Celts, who
have only just finished clearing the forests of our savage territories,
suffer the Chinese and Indians to enjoy in peace their fine climate and
their antiquity. Let us, especially, cease calling the emperor of China,
and the souba of the Deccan, idolaters. There is no necessity for being
a zealot in estimating Chinese merit. The constitution of their empire
is the only one entirely established upon paternal authority; the only
one in which the governor of a province is punished, if, on quitting his
station, he does not receive the acclamations of the people; the only
one which has instituted rewards for virtue, while, everywhere else, the
sole object of the laws is the punishment of crime; the only one which
has caused its laws to be adopted by its conquerors, while we are still
subject to the customs of the Burgundians, the Franks, and the Goths, by
whom we were conquered. Yet, we must confess, that the common people,
guided by the bonzes, are equally knavish with our own; that everything
is sold enormously dear to foreigners, as among ourselves; that, with
respect to the sciences, the Chinese are just where we were two hundred
years ago; that, like us, they labor under a thousand ridiculous
prejudices; and that they believe in talismans and judicial astrology,
as we long did ourselves.

We must admit also, that they were astonished at our thermometer, at our
method of freezing fluids by means of saltpetre, and at all the
experiments of Torricelli and Otto von Guericke; as we were also, on
seeing for the first time those curious processes. We add, that their
physicians do not cure mortal diseases any more than our own; and that
minor diseases, both here and in China, are cured by nature alone. All
this, however, does not interfere with the fact, that the Chinese, for
four thousand years, when we were unable even to read, knew everything
essentially useful of which we boast at the present day.

I must again repeat, the religion of their learned is admirable, and
free from superstitions, from absurd legends, from dogmas insulting both
to reason and nature, to which the bonzes give a thousand different
meanings, because they really often have none. The most simple worship
has appeared to them the best, for a series of forty centuries. They
are, what we conceive Seth, Enoch, and Noah to have been; they are
contented to adore one God in communion with the sages of the world,
while Europe is divided between Thomas and Bonaventure, between Calvin
and Luther, between Jansenius and Molina.




CHRISTIANITY.

_Establishment of Christianity, in its Civil and Political
State.--Section I._


God forbid that we should dare to mix the sacred with the profane! We
seek not to fathom the depths of the ways of Providence. We are men, and
we address men only.

When Antony, and after him Augustus, had given Judæa to the Arabian,
Herod--their creature and their tributary--that prince, a stranger among
the Jews, became the most powerful of all kings. He had ports on the
Mediterranean--Ptolemais and Ascalon; he built towns; he erected a
temple to Apollo at Rhodes, and one to Augustus in Cæsarea; he rebuilt
that of Jerusalem from the foundation, and converted it into a strong
citadel. Under his rule, Palestine enjoyed profound peace. In short,
barbarous as he was to his family, and tyrannical towards his people,
whose substance he consumed in the execution of his projects, he was
looked upon as a Messiah. He worshipped only Cæsar, and he was also
worshipped by the Herodians.

The sect of the Jews had long been spread in Europe and Asia; but its
tenets were entirely unknown. No one knew anything of the Jewish books,
although we are told that some of them had already been translated into
Greek, in Alexandria. The Jews were known only as the Armenians are now
known to the Turks and Persians, as brokers and traders. Further, a Turk
never takes the trouble to inquire, whether an Armenian is a Eutychian,
a Jacobite, one of St. John's Christians, or an Arian. The theism of
China, and the much to be respected books of Confucius, were still less
known to the nations of the west, than the Jewish rites.

The Arabians, who furnished the Romans with the precious commodities of
India, had no more idea of the theology of the Brahmins than our sailors
who go to Pondicherry or Madras. The Indian women had from time
immemorial enjoyed the privilege of burning themselves on the bodies of
their husbands; yet these astonishing sacrifices, which are still
practised, were as unknown to the Jews as the customs of America. Their
books, which speak of Gog and Magog, never mention India.

The ancient religion of Zoroaster was celebrated; but not therefore the
more understood in the Roman Empire. It was only known, in general, that
the magi admitted a resurrection, a hell, and a paradise; which doctrine
must at that time have made its way to the Jews bordering on Chaldæa;
since, in Herod's time, Palestine was divided between the Pharisees,
who began to believe the dogma of the resurrection, and the Sadducees,
who regarded it only with contempt.

Alexandria, the most commercial city in the whole world, was peopled
with Egyptians, who worshipped Serapis, and consecrated cats; with
Greeks, who philosophized; with Romans, who ruled; and with Jews, who
amassed wealth. All these people were eagerly engaged in money-getting,
immersed in pleasure, infuriate with fanaticism, making and unmaking
religious sects, especially during the external tranquillity which they
enjoyed when Augustus had shut the temple of Janus.

The Jews were divided into three principal factions. Of these, the
Samaritans called themselves the most ancient, because Samaria (then
Sebaste) had subsisted, while Jerusalem, with its temple, was destroyed
under the Babylonian kings. But these Samaritans were a mixture of the
people of Persia with those of Palestine.

The second, and most powerful faction, was that of the Hierosolymites.
These Jews, properly so called, detested the Samaritans, and were
detested by them. Their interests were all opposite. They wished that no
sacrifices should be offered but in the temple of Jerusalem. Such a
restriction would have brought a deal of money into their city; and, for
this very reason, the Samaritans would sacrifice nowhere but at home. A
small people, in a small town, may have but one temple; but when a
people have extended themselves over a country seventy leagues long, by
twenty-three wide, as the Jews had done--when their territory is almost
as large and populous as Languedoc or Normandy, it would be absurd to
have but one church. What would the good people of Montpellier say, if
they could attend mass nowhere but at Toulouse?

The third faction were the Hellenic Jews, consisting chiefly of such as
were engaged in trade or handicraft in Egypt and Greece. These had the
same interests with the Samaritans. Onias, the son of a high priest,
wishing to be a high priest like his father, obtained permission from
Ptolemy Philometor, king of Egypt, and in particular from the king's
wife, Cleopatra, to build a Jewish temple near Bubastis. He assured
Queen Cleopatra that Isaiah had foretold that the Lord should one day
have a temple on that spot; and Cleopatra, to whom he made a handsome
present, sent him word that, since Isaiah had said it, it must be. This
temple was called the Onion; and if Onias was not a great sacrificer, he
commanded a troop of militia. It was built one hundred and sixty years
before the Christian era. The Jews of Jerusalem always held this Onion
in abhorrence, as they did the translation called the Septuagint. They
even instituted an expiatory feast for these two pretended sacrileges.
The rabbis of the Onion, mingling with the Greeks, became more learned
(in their way) than the rabbis of Jerusalem and Samaria; and the three
factions began to dispute on controversial questions, which necessarily
make men subtle, false, and unsocial.

The Egyptian Jews, in order to equal the austerity of the Essenes, and
the Judates of Palestine, established, some time before the birth of
Christianity, the sect of the Therapeutæ, who, like them, devoted
themselves to a sort of monastic life, and to mortifications. These
different societies were imitations of the old Egyptian, Persian,
Thracian, and Greek mysteries, which had filled the earth, from the
Euphrates and the Nile to the Tiber. At first, such as were initiated
into these fraternities were few in number, and were looked upon as
privileged men; but in the time of Augustus, their number was very
considerable; so that nothing but religion was talked of, from Syria to
Mount Atlas and the German Ocean.

Amidst all these sects and worships, the school of Plato had established
itself, not in Greece alone, but also in Rome, and especially in Egypt.
Plato had been considered as having drawn his doctrine from the
Egyptians, who thought that, in turning Plato's ideas to account, his
word, and the sort of trinity discoverable in some of his works, they
were but claiming their own.

This philosophic spirit, spread at that time over all the known
countries of the west, seems to have emitted, in the neighborhood of
Palestine, at least a few sparks of the spirit of reasoning. It is
certain that, in Herod's time, there were disputes on the attributes of
the divinity, on the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of
the body. The Jews relate, that Queen Cleopatra asked them whether we
were to rise again dressed or naked?

The Jews, then, were reasoners in their way. The exaggerating Josephus
was, for a soldier, very learned. Such being the case with a military
man, there must have been many a learned man in civil life. His
contemporary, Philo, would have had reputation, even among the Greeks.
St. Paul's master, Gamaliel, was a great controversialist. The authors
of the "_Mishna_" were polymathists.

The Jewish populace discoursed on religion. As, at the present day, in
Switzerland, at Geneva, in Germany, in England, and especially in the
Cévennes, we find even the meanest of the inhabitants dealing in
controversy. Nay, more; men from the dregs of the people have founded
sects: as Fox, in England; Münzer, in Germany; and the first reformers
in France. Indeed, Mahomet himself, setting apart his great courage, was
nothing more than a camel-driver.

Add to these preliminaries that, in Herod's time, it was imagined, as is
elsewhere remarked, that the world was soon to be at an end. In those
days, prepared by divine providence, it pleased the eternal Father to
send His Son upon earth--an adorable and incomprehensible mystery, which
we presume not to approach.

We only say, that if Jesus preached a pure morality; if He announced the
kingdom of heaven as the reward of the just; if He had disciples
attached to His person and His virtues; if those very virtues drew upon
Him the persecutions of the priests; if, through calumny, He was put to
a shameful death; His doctrine, constantly preached by His disciples,
would necessarily have a great effect in the world. Once more let me
repeat it--I speak only after the manner of this world, setting the
multitude of miracles and prophecies entirely aside. I maintain it, that
Christianity was more likely to proceed by His death, than if He had not
been persecuted. You are astonished that His disciples made other
disciples. I should have been much more astonished, if they had not
brought over a great many to their party. Seventy individuals, convinced
of the innocence of their leader, the purity of His manners, and the
barbarity of His judges, must influence many a feeling heart.

St. Paul, alone, became (for whatever reason) the enemy of his master
Gamaliel, must have had it in his power to bring Jesus a thousand
adherents, even supposing Jesus to have been only a worthy and oppressed
man. Paul was learned, eloquent, vehement, indefatigable, skilled in the
Greek tongue, and seconded by zealots much more interested than himself
in defending their Master's reputation. St. Luke was an Alexandrian
Greek, and a man of letters, for he was a physician.

The first chapter of John displays a Platonic sublimity, which must have
been gratifying to the Platonists of Alexandria. And indeed there was
even formed in that city a school founded by Luke, or by Mark (either
the evangelist or some other), and perpetuated by Athenagoras, Pantænus,
Origen, and Clement--all learned and eloquent. This school once
established, it was impossible for Christianity not to make rapid
progress.

Greece, Syria, and Egypt, were the scenes of those celebrated ancient
mysteries, which enchanted the minds of the people. The Christians, too,
had their mysteries, in which men would eagerly seek to be initiated;
and if at first only through curiosity, this curiosity soon became
persuasion. The idea of the approaching end of all things was especially
calculated to induce the new disciples to despise the transitory goods
of this life, which were so soon to perish with them. The example of the
Therapeutæ was an incitement to a solitary and mortified life. All these
things, then, powerfully concurred in the establishment of the Christian
religion.

The different flocks of this great rising society could not, it is true,
agree among themselves. Fifty-four societies had fifty-four different
gospels; all secret, like their mysteries; all unknown to the Gentiles,
who never saw our four canonical gospels until the end of two hundred
and fifty years. These various flocks, though divided, acknowledged the
same pastor. Ebionites, opposed to St. Paul; Nazarenes, disciples of
Hymeneos, Alexandres, and Hermogenes; Carpocratians, Basilidians,
Valentinians, Marcionites, Sabellians, Gnostics, Montanists--a hundred
sects, rising one against another, and casting mutual reproaches, were
nevertheless all united in Jesus; all called upon Jesus; all made Jesus
the great object of their thoughts, and reward of their travails.

The Roman Empire, in which all these societies were formed, at first
paid no attention to them. They were known at Rome only by the general
name of Jews, about whom the government gave itself no concern. The Jews
had, by their money, acquired the right of trading. In the reign of
Tiberius four thousand of them were driven out of Rome; in that of Nero
the people charged them and the new demi-Christian Jews with the burning
of Rome.

They were again expelled in the reign of Claudius, but their money
always procured them re-admission; they were quiet and despised. The
Christians of Rome were not so numerous as those of Greece, Alexandria
and Syria. The Romans in the earlier ages had neither fathers of the
church nor heresiarchs. The farther they were from the birthplace of
Christianity, the fewer doctors and writers were to be found among them.
The church was Greek; so much so, that every mystery, every rite, every
tenet, was expressed in the Greek tongue.

All Christians, whether Greek, Syrian, Roman, or Egyptian, were
considered as half Jewish. This was another reason for concealing their
books from the Gentiles, that they might remain united and
impenetrable. Their secret was more inviolably kept than that of the
mysteries of Isis or of Ceres; they were a republic apart--a state
within the state. They had no temples, no altars, no sacrifice, no
public ceremony. They elected their secret superiors by a majority of
voices. These superiors, under the title of ancients, priests, bishops,
or deacons, managed the common purse, took care of the sick and pacified
quarrels. Among them it was a shame and a crime to plead before the
tribunals or to enlist in the armed force; and for a hundred years there
was not a single Christian in the armies of the empire.

Thus, retired in the midst of the world and unknown even when they
appeared, they escaped the tyranny of the proconsuls and prætors and
were free amid the public slavery. It is not known who wrote the famous
book entitled "_Τῶν Ἀποστόλων Διδαχαί_" (the Apostolical Constitutions),
as it is unknown who were the authors of the fifty rejected gospels, of
the Acts of St. Peter, of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, and of
so many other writings of the first Christians; but it is likely that
the "Constitutions" are of the second century. Though falsely attributed
to the apostles, they are very valuable. They show us what were the
duties of a bishop chosen by the Christians, how they were to reverence
him, and what tribute they were to pay him. The bishop could have but
one wife, who was to take good care of his household: "_Μιᾶς ἂνδρα
γεγενόμενον γυναικὸς μονογάμου κάλόν τοῦ ὶδίου προεστότα_."

Rich Christians were exhorted to adopt the children of poor ones.
Collections were made for the widows and orphans; but the money of
sinners was rejected; and, nominally, an innkeeper was not permitted to
give his mite. It is said that they were regarded as cheats; for which
reason very few tavern-keepers were Christians. This also prevented the
Christians from frequenting the taverns; thus completing their
separation from the society of the Gentiles.

The dignity of deaconess being attainable by the women, they were the
more attached to the Christian fraternity. They were consecrated; the
bishop anointing them on the forehead, as of old the Jewish kings were
anointed. By how many indissoluble ties were the Christians bound
together!

The persecutions, which were never more than transitory, did but serve
to redouble their zeal and inflame their fervor; so that, under
Diocletian, one-third of the empire was Christian. Such were a few of
the human causes that contributed to the progress of Christianity. If to
these we add the divine causes, which are to the former as infinity to
unity, there is only one thing which can surprise us; that a religion so
true did not at once extend itself over the two hemispheres, not
excepting the most savage islet.

God Himself came down from heaven and died to redeem mankind and
extirpate sin forever from the face of the earth; and yet he left the
greater part of mankind a prey to error, to crime, and to the devil.
This, to our weak intellects, appears a fatal contradiction. But it is
not for us to question Providence; our duty is to humble ourselves in
the dust before it.


SECTION II.

Several learned men have testified their surprise at not finding in the
historian, Flavius Josephus, any mention of Jesus Christ; for all men of
true learning are now agreed that the short passage relative to him in
that history has been interpolated. The father of Flavius Josephus must,
however, have been witness to all the miracles of Jesus. Josephus was of
the sacerdotal race and akin to Herod's wife, Mariamne. He gives us long
details of all that prince's actions, yet says not a word of the life or
death of Jesus; nor does this historian, who disguises none of Herod's
cruelties, say one word of the general massacre of the infants ordered
by him on hearing that there was born a king of the Jews. The Greek
calendar estimates the number of children murdered on this occasion at
fourteen thousand. This is, of all actions of all tyrants, the most
horrible. There is no example of it in the history of the whole world.

Yet the best writer the Jews have ever had, the only one esteemed by the
Greeks and Romans, makes no mention of an event so singular and so
frightful, he says nothing of the appearance of a new star in the east
after the birth of our Saviour--a brilliant phenomenon, which could not
escape the knowledge of a historian so enlightened as Josephus. He is
also silent respecting the darkness which, on our Saviour's death,
covered the whole earth for three hours at midday--the great number of
graves that opened at that moment, and the multitude of the just that
rose again.

The learned are constantly evincing their surprise that no Roman
historian speaks of these prodigies, happening in the empire of
Tiberius, under the eyes of a Roman governor and a Roman garrison, who
must have sent to the emperor and the senate a detailed account of the
most miraculous event that mankind had ever heard of. Rome itself must
have been plunged for three hours in impenetrable darkness; such a
prodigy would have had a place in the annals of Rome, and in those of
every nation. But it was not God's will that these divine things should
be written down by their profane hands.

The same persons also find some difficulties in the gospel history. They
remark that, in Matthew, Jesus Christ tells the scribes and pharisees
that all the innocent blood that has been shed upon earth, from that of
Abel the Just down to that of Zachary, son of Barac, whom they slew
between the temple and the altar, shall be upon their heads.

There is not (say they) in the Hebrew history any Zachary slain in the
temple before the coming of the Messiah, nor in His time, but in the
history of the siege of Jerusalem, by Josephus, there is a Zachary, son
of Barac, slain by the faction of the Zelotes. This is in the
nineteenth chapter of the fourth book. Hence they suspect that the
gospel according to St. Matthew was written after the taking of
Jerusalem by Titus. But every doubt, every objection of this kind,
vanishes when it is considered how great a difference there must be
between books divinely inspired and the books of men. It was God's
pleasure to envelop alike in awful obscurity His birth, His life, and
His death. His ways are in all things different from ours.

The learned have also been much tormented by the difference between the
two genealogies of Jesus Christ. St. Matthew makes Joseph the son of
Jacob, Jacob of Matthan, Matthan of Eleazar. St. Luke, on the contrary,
says that Joseph was the son of Heli, Heli of Matthat, Matthat of Levi,
Levi of Melchi, etc. They will not reconcile the fifty-six progenitors
up to Abraham, given to Jesus by Luke, with the forty-two other
forefathers up to the same Abraham, given him by Matthew; and they are
quite staggered by Matthew's giving only forty-one generations, while he
speaks of forty-two. They start other difficulties about Jesus being the
son, not of Joseph, but of Mary. They moreover raise some doubts
respecting our Saviour's miracles, quoting St. Augustine. St. Hilary,
and others, who have given to the accounts of these miracles a mystic or
allegorical sense; as, for example, to the fig tree cursed and blasted
for not having borne figs when it was not the fig season; the devils
sent into the bodies of swine in a country where no swine were kept; the
water changed into wine at the end of a feast, when the guests were
already too much heated. But all these learned critics are confounded by
the faith, which is but the purer for their cavils. The sole design of
this article is to follow the historical thread and give a precise idea
of the facts about which there is no dispute.

First, then, Jesus was born under the Mosaic law; He was circumcised
according to that law; He fulfilled all its precepts; He kept all its
feasts; He did not reveal the mystery of His incarnation; He never told
the Jews He was born of a virgin; He received John's blessing in the
waters of the Jordan, a ceremony to which various of the Jews submitted;
but He never baptized any one; He never spoke of the seven sacraments;
He instituted no ecclesiastical hierarchy during His life. He concealed
from His contemporaries that He was the Son of God, begotten from all
eternity, consubstantial with His Father; and that the Holy Ghost
proceeded from the Father and the Son. He did not say that His person
was composed of two natures and two wills. He left these mysteries to be
announced to men in the course of time by those who were to be
enlightened by the Holy Ghost. So long as He lived, He departed in
nothing from the law of His fathers. In the eyes of men He was no more
than a just man, pleasing to God, persecuted by the envious and
condemned to death by prejudiced magistrates. He left His holy church,
established by Him, to do all the rest.

Let us consider the state of religion in the Roman Empire at that
period. Mysteries and expiations were in credit almost throughout the
earth. The emperors, the great, and the philosophers, had, it is true,
no faith in these mysteries; but the people, who, in religious matters,
give the law to the great, imposed on them the necessity of conforming
in appearance to their worship. To succeed in chaining the multitude you
must seem to wear the same fetters. Cicero himself was initiated in the
Eleusinian mysteries. The knowledge of only one God was the principal
tenet inculcated in these mysteries and magnificent festivals. It is
undeniable that the prayers and hymns handed down to us as belonging to
these mysteries are the most pious and most admirable of the relics of
paganism. The Christians, who likewise adored only one God, had thereby
greater facility in converting some of the Gentiles. Some of the
philosophers of Plato's sect became Christians; hence in the three first
centuries the fathers of the church were all Platonists.

The inconsiderate zeal of some of them in no way detracts from the
fundamental truths. St. Justin, one of the primitive fathers, has been
reproached with having said, in his commentary on Isaiah, that the
saints should enjoy, during a reign of a thousand years on earth, every
sensual pleasure. He has been charged with criminality in saying, in
his "Apology for Christianity," that God, having made the earth, left it
in the care of the angels, who, having fallen in love with the women,
begot children, which are the devils.

Lactantius, with other fathers, has been condemned for having supposed
oracles of the sibyls. He asserted that the sibyl Erythrea made four
Greek lines, which rendered literally are:

     With five loaves and two fishes
     He shall feed five thousand men in the desert;
     And, gathering up the fragments that remain,
     With them he shall fill twelve baskets.

The primitive Christians have been reproached with inventing some
acrostic verses on the name Jesus Christ and attributing them to an
ancient sibyl. They have also been reproached with forging letters from
Jesus Christ to the king of Edessa, dated at a time when there was no
king in Edessa; with having forged letters of Mary, letters of Seneca to
Paul, false gospels, false miracles, and a thousand other impostures.

We have, moreover, the history or gospel of the nativity and marriage of
the Virgin Mary; wherein we are told that she was brought to the temple
at three years old and walked up the stairs by herself. It is related
that a dove came down from heaven to give notice that it was Joseph who
was to espouse Mary. We have the protogospel of James, brother of Jesus
by Joseph's first wife. It is there said that when Joseph complained of
Mary's having become pregnant in his absence, the priests made each of
them drink the water of jealousy, and both were declared innocent.

We have the gospel of the Infancy, attributed to St. Thomas. According
to this gospel, Jesus, at five years of age, amused himself, like other
children of the same age, with moulding clay, and making it, among other
things, into the form of little birds. He was reproved for this, on
which he gave life to the birds, and they flew away. Another time, a
little boy having beaten him, was struck dead on the spot. We have also
another gospel of the Infancy in Arabic, which is much more serious.

We have a gospel of Nicodemus. This one seems more worthy of attention,
for we find in it the names of those who accused Jesus before Pilate.
They were the principal men of the synagogue--Ananias, Caiaphas, Sommas,
Damat, Gamaliel, Judah, Nephthalim. In this history there are some
things that are easy to reconcile with the received gospels, and others
which are not elsewhere to be found. We here find that the woman cured
of a flux was called Veronica. We also find all that Jesus did in hell
when He descended thither. Then we have the two letters supposed to have
been written by Pilate to Tiberius concerning the execution of Jesus;
but their bad Latin plainly shows that they are spurious. To such a
length was this false zeal carried that various letters were circulated
attributed to Jesus Christ. The letter is still preserved which he is
said to have written to Abgarus, king of Edessa; but, as already
remarked, there had at that time ceased to be a king of Edessa.

Fifty gospels were fabricated and were afterwards declared apocryphal.
St. Luke himself tells us that many persons had composed gospels. It has
been believed that there was one called the Eternal Gospel, concerning
which it is said in the Apocalypse, chap, xiv., "And I saw another angel
fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel.".... In the
thirteenth century the Cordeliers, abusing these words, composed an
"eternal gospel," by which the reign of the Holy Ghost was to be
substituted for that of Jesus Christ. But never in the early ages of the
church did any book appear with this title. Letters of the Virgin were
likewise invented, written to Ignatius the martyr, to the people of
Messina, and others.

Abdias, who immediately succeeded the apostles, wrote their history,
with which he mixed up such absurd fables that in time these histories
became wholly discredited, although they had at first a great
reputation. To Abdias we are indebted for the account of the contest
between St. Peter and Simon the magician. There was at Rome, in reality,
a very skilful mechanic named Simon, who not only made things fly across
the stage, as we still see done, but moreover revived in his own person
the prodigy attributed to Dædalus. He made himself wings; he flew; and,
like Icarus, he fell. So say Pliny and Suetonius.

Abdias, who was in Asia and wrote in Hebrew, tells us that Peter and
Simon met at Rome in the reign of Nero. A young man, nearly related to
the emperor, died, and the whole court begged that Simon would raise him
to life. St. Peter presented himself to perform the same operation.
Simon employed all the powers of his art, and he seemed to have
succeeded, for the dead man moved his head. "This is not enough," cries
Peter; "the dead man must speak; let Simon leave the bedside and we
shall see whether the young man is alive." Simon went aside and the
deceased no longer stirred, but Peter brought him to life with a single
word.

Simon went and complained to the emperor that a miserable Galilean had
taken upon himself to work greater wonders than he. Simon was confronted
with Peter and they made a trial of skill. "Tell me," said Simon to
Peter, "what I am thinking of?" "If," returned Peter, "the emperor will
give me a barley loaf, thou shalt find whether or not I know what thou
hast in thy heart." A loaf was given him; Simon immediately caused two
large dogs to appear and they wanted to devour it. Peter threw them the
loaf, and while they were eating it he said: "Well, did I not know thy
thoughts? thou wouldst have had thy dogs devour me."

After this first sitting it was proposed that Simon and Peter should
make a flying-match, and try which could raise himself highest in the
air. Simon tried first; Peter made the sign of the cross and down came
Simon and broke his legs. This story was imitated from that which we
find in the "_Sepher toldos Jeschut_," where it is said that Jesus
Himself flew, and that Judas, who would have done the same, fell
headlong. Nero, vexed that Peter had broken his favorite, Simon's, legs,
had him crucified with his head downwards. Hence the notion of St.
Peter's residence at Rome, the manner of his execution and his
sepulchre.

The same Abdias established the belief that St. Thomas went and preached
Christianity in India to King Gondafer, and that he went thither as an
architect. The number of books of this sort, written in the early ages
of Christianity, is prodigious.

St. Jerome, and even St. Augustine, tell us that the letters of Seneca
and St. Paul are quite authentic. In the first of these letters Seneca
hopes his brother Paul is well: "_Bene te valere, frater, cupio_." Paul
does not write quite so good Latin as Seneca: "I received your letters
yesterday," says he, "with joy."--"_Litteras tuas hilaris
accepi_".--"And I would have answered them immediately had I had the
presence of the young man whom I would have sent with them."--"_Si
præsentiam juvenis habuissem_." Unfortunately these letters, in which
one would look for instruction, are nothing more than compliments.

All these falsehoods, forged by ill-informed and mistakenly-zealous
Christians, were in no degree prejudicial to the truth of Christianity;
they obstructed not its progress; on the contrary, they show us that the
Christian society was daily increasing and that each member was desirous
of hastening its growth.

The Acts of the Apostles do not tell us that the apostles agreed on a
symbol. Indeed, if they had put together the symbol (the creed, as we
now call it), St. Luke could not in his history have omitted this
essential basis of the Christian religion. The substance of the creed is
scattered through the gospels; but the articles were not collected until
long after.

In short, our creed is, indisputably, the belief of the apostles; but it
was not written by them. Rufinus, a priest of Aquileia, is the first who
mentions it; and a homily attributed to St. Augustine is the first
record of the supposed way in which this creed was made; Peter saying,
when they were assembled, "I believe in God the Father Almighty"--Andrew,
"and in Jesus Christ"--James, "who was conceived by the Holy Ghost"; and
so of the rest.

This formula was called in Greek _symbolos_; and in Latin _collatio_.
Only it must be observed that the Greek version has it: "I believe in
God the Father, maker of heaven and earth." In the Latin, _maker_,
_former_, is rendered by "_creatorem_". But afterwards, in translating
the symbol of the First Council of Nice, it was rendered by
"_factorem_".

Constantine assembled at Nice, opposite Constantinople, the first
ecumenical council, over which Ozius presided. The great question
touching the divinity of Jesus Christ, which so much agitated the
church, was there decided. One party held the opinion of Origen, who
says in his sixth chapter against Celsus, "We offer our prayers to God
through Christ, who holds the middle place between natures created and
uncreated; who leads us to the grace of His Father and presents our
prayers to the great God in quality of our high priest." These
disputants also rest upon many passages of St. Paul, some of which they
quote. They depend particularly upon these words of Jesus Christ: "My
Father is greater than I"; and they regard Jesus as the first-born of
the creation; as a pure emanation of the Supreme Being, but not
precisely as God.

The other side, who were orthodox, produced passages more conformable to
the eternal divinity of Jesus; as, for example, the following: "My
Father and I are one"; words which their opponents interpret as
signifying: "My Father and I have the same object, the same intention; I
have no other will than that of My Father." Alexander, bishop of
Alexandria, and after him Athanasius, were at the head of the orthodox;
and Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, with seventeen other bishops, the
priest Arius, and many more priests, led the party opposed to them. The
quarrel was at first exceedingly bitter, as St. Alexander treated his
opponents as so many anti-christs.

At last, after much disputation, the Holy Ghost decided in the council,
by the mouths of two hundred and ninety-nine bishops, against eighteen,
as follows: "Jesus is the only Son of God; begotten of the Father; light
of light; very God of very God; of one substance with the Father. We
believe also in the Holy Ghost," etc. Such was the decision of the
council; and we perceive by this fact how the bishops carried it over
the simple priests. Two thousand persons of the latter class were of the
opinion of Arius, according to the account of two patriarchs of
Alexandria, who have written the annals of Alexandria in Arabic. Arius
was exiled by Constantine, as was Athanasius soon after, when Arius was
recalled to Constantinople. Upon this event St. Macarius prayed so
vehemently to God to terminate the life of Arius before he could enter
the cathedral, that God heard his prayer--Arius dying on his way to
church in 330. The Emperor Constantine ended his life in 337. He placed
his will in the hands of an Arian priest and died in the arms of the
Arian leader, Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia, not receiving baptism until
on his deathbed, and leaving a triumphant, but divided church. The
partisans of Athanasius and of Eusebius carried on a cruel war; and what
is called Arianism was for a long time established in all the provinces
of the empire.

Julian the philosopher, surnamed the apostate, wished to stifle their
divisions, but could not succeed. The second general council was held at
Constantinople in 1381. It was there laid down that the Council of Nice
had not decided quite correctly in regard to the Holy Ghost; and it
added to the Nicene creed that "the Holy Ghost was the giver of life and
proceeded from the Father, and with the Father and Son is to be
worshipped and glorified." It was not until towards the ninth century
that the Latin church decreed that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the
Father and the Son.

In the year 431, the third council-general, held at Ephesus, decided
that Jesus had "two natures and one person." Nestorius, bishop of
Constantinople, who maintained that the Virgin Mary should be entitled
Mother of Christ, was called _Judas_ by the council; and the "two
natures" were again confirmed by the council of Chalcedon.

I pass lightly over the following centuries, which are sufficiently
known. Unhappily, all these disputes led to wars, and the church was
uniformly obliged to combat. God, in order to exercise the patience of
the faithful, also allowed the Greek and Latin churches to separate in
the ninth century. He likewise permitted in the east no less than
twenty-nine horrible schisms with the see of Rome.

If there be about six hundred millions of men upon earth, as certain
learned persons pretend, the holy Roman Catholic church possesses
scarcely sixteen millions of them--about a twenty-sixth part of the
inhabitants of the known world.




CHRISTMAS.


Every one knows that this is the feast of the nativity of Jesus. The
most ancient feast kept in the church, after those of Easter and
Pentecost, was that of the baptism of Jesus. There were only these three
feasts, until St. Chrysostom delivered his homily on Pentecost. We here
make no account of the feasts of the martyrs, which were of a very
inferior order. That of the baptism of Jesus was named the Epiphany, an
imitation of the Greeks, who gave that name to the feasts which they
held to commemorate the appearance or manifestation of the gods upon
earth--since it was not until after his baptism that Jesus began to
preach the gospel.

We know not whether, about the end of the fourth century, this feast was
solemnized in the Isle of Cyprus on the 6th of November; but St.
Epiphanius maintained that Jesus was born on that day. St. Clement of
Alexandria tells us that the Basilidians held this feast on the 15th of
the month _tybi_, while others held it on the 15th of the same month;
that is, it was kept by some on the 10th of January, and by others on
the 6th; the latter opinion is the one now adopted. As for the nativity,
as neither the day nor the month nor the year of it was known, it was
not celebrated.

According to the remarks which we find appended to the works of the same
father, they who have been the most curious in their researches
concerning the day on which Jesus was born, some said that it was on
the 25th of the Egyptian month _pachon_, answering to the 20th of May;
others that it was the 24th or 25th of _pharmuthi_, corresponding to the
19th and 20th of April. The learned M. de Beausobre says that these
latter were the days of St. Valentine. Be this as it may, Egypt and the
East kept the feast of the birth of Jesus on the 6th of January, the
same day as that of His baptism; without it being known (at least with
certainty) when, or for what reason, this custom commenced.

The opinion and practice of the western nations were quite different
from those of the east. The centuriators of Magdeburg repeat a passage
in Theophilus of Cæsarea, which makes the churches of Gaul say: "Since
the birth of Christ is celebrated on the 25th of December, on whatever
day of the week it may fall, so also should the resurrection of Jesus be
celebrated on the 25th of March, whatever day of the week it may be, the
Lord having risen again on that day."

If this be true, it must be acknowledged that the bishops of Gaul were
very prudent and very reasonable. Being persuaded, as all the ancients
were, that Jesus had been crucified on the 23d of March, and had risen
again on the 25th, they commemorated His death on the 23d and His
resurrection on the 25th, without paying any regard to the observance of
the full moon, which was originally a Jewish ceremony, and without
confining themselves to the Sunday. Had the church imitated them, she
would have avoided the long and scandalous disputes which nearly
separated the East from the West, and were not terminated until the
First Council of Nice.

Some of the learned conjecture that the Romans chose the winter solstice
for holding the birth of Jesus, because the sun then begins again to
approach our hemisphere. In Julius Cæsar's time the civil and political
solstice was fixed for the 25th of December. This at Rome was a festival
in celebration of the returning sun. Pliny tells us that it was called
_bruma_; and, like Servius, places it on the 8th of the calends of
January. This association might have some connection with the choice of
the day, but it was not the origin of it. A passage in Josephus
(evidently forged), three or four errors of the ancients, and a very
mystical explanation of a saying of St. John the Baptist, determined
this choice, as Joseph Scaliger is about to inform us.

It pleased the ancients (says that learned critic) to suppose--first,
that Zacharias was sovereign sacrificer when Jesus was born. But nothing
is more untrue; it is no longer believed by any one, at least among
those of any information.

Secondly--the ancients supposed that Zacharias was in the holy of
holies, offering incense, when the angel appeared to him and announced
the birth of a son.

Thirdly--as the sovereign sacrificer entered the temple but once a year,
on the day of expiation, which was the 10th of the Jewish month
_rifri_, partly answering to the month of September, the ancients
supposed that it was the 27th; and that _afterwards_, on the 23d or
24th, Zacharias having returned home after the feast, Elizabeth, his
wife, conceived John the Baptist; when the feast of the conception of
that saint was fixed for those days. As women ordinarily go with child
for two hundred and seventy or two hundred and seventy-four days, it
followed that the nativity of John was fixed for the 24th of June. Such
was the origin of St. John's day, and of Christmas day, which was
regulated by it.

Fourthly--it was supposed that there were six entire months between the
conception of John the Baptist and that of Jesus; although the angel
simply tells Mary that Elizabeth was then in the sixth month of her
pregnancy; consequently the conception of Jesus was fixed for the 25th
of March; and from these various suppositions it was concluded that
Jesus must have been born on the 25th of December, precisely nine months
after his conception.

There are many wonderful things in these arrangements. It is not one of
the least worthy of admiration, that the four cardinal points of the
year--the equinoxes and the solstices, as they were then fixed--were
marked by the conceptions and births of John the Baptist and Jesus. But
it is yet more marvellous and worthy of remark, that the solstice when
Jesus was born is that at which the days begin to increase; while that
on which John the Baptist came into the world was the period at which
they begin to shorten. The holy forerunner had intimated this in a very
mystical manner, when speaking of Jesus, in these words: "He must grow,
and I must become less."

Prudentius alludes to this in a hymn on the nativity of our Lord. Yet
St. Leo says that in his time there were persons in Rome who said the
feast was venerable, not so much on account of the birth of Jesus as of
the return, and, as they expressed it, the new birth of the sun. St.
Epiphanius assures us it was fully established that Jesus was born on
the 6th of January; but St. Clement of Alexandria, much more ancient and
more learned than he, fixes the birth on the 18th of November, of the
twenty-eighth year of Augustus. This is deduced, according to the Jesuit
Petau's remark on St. Epiphanius, from these words of St. Clement: "The
whole time from the birth of Jesus Christ to the death of Commodus was a
hundred and ninety-four years, one month and thirteen days." Now
Commodus died, according to Petau, on the last of December, in the year
192 of our era; therefore, according to St. Clement, Jesus was born one
month and thirteen days before the last of December; consequently, on
the 18th of November, in the twenty-eighth year of the reign of
Augustus. Concerning which it must be observed that St. Clement dates
the reign of Augustus only from the death of Antony and the capture of
Alexandria, because it was not until then that Augustus was left the
sole master of the empire. Thus we are no more assured of the year of
this birth than we are of the month or the day. Though St. Luke
declares, "that He had perfect understanding of all things from the very
first," he clearly shows that he did not know the exact age of Jesus
when He says that, when baptized, He "began to be about thirty years
old." Indeed, this evangelist makes Jesus born in the year of the
numbering which, according to him, was made by Cyrenus or Cyrenius,
governor of Syria; while, according to Tertullian, it was made by
Sentius Saturninus. But Saturninus had quitted the province in the last
year of Herod, and, as Tacitus informs us, was succeeded by Quintilius
Varus; and Publius Sulpicius Quirinus or Quirinius, of whom it would
seem St. Luke means to speak, did not succeed Quintilius Varus until
about ten years after Herod's death, when Archelaus, king of Judæa, was
banished by Augustus, as Josephus tells us in his "Jewish Antiquities."

It is true that Tertullian, and St. Justin before him, referred the
pagans and the heretics of their time to the public archives containing
the registers of this pretended numbering; but Tertullian likewise
referred to the public archives for the account of the darkness at
noonday at the time of the passion of Jesus, as will be seen in the
article on "Eclipse"; where we have remarked the want of exactness in
these two fathers, and in similar authorities, in our observations on a
statue which St. Justin--who assures us that he saw it at Rome--says
was dedicated to Simon the magician, but which was in reality dedicated
to a god of the ancient Sabines.

These uncertainties, however, will excite no astonishment when it is
recollected that Jesus was unknown to His disciples until He had
received baptism from John. It is expressly, "beginning with the baptism
of Jesus," that Peter will have the successor of Judas testify
concerning Jesus; and, according to the same Acts, Peter thereby
understands the whole time that Jesus had lived with them.




CHRONOLOGY.


The world has long disputed about ancient chronology; but has there ever
been any? Every considerable people must necessarily possess and
preserve authentic, well-attested registers. But how few people were
acquainted with the art of writing? and, among the small number of men
who cultivated this very rare art, are any to be found who took the
trouble to mark two dates with exactness?

We have, indeed, in very recent times the astronomical observations of
the Chinese and the Chaldæans. They only go back about two thousand
years, more or less, beyond our era. But when the early annals of a
nation confine themselves simply to communicating the information that
there was an eclipse in the reign of a certain prince, we learn,
certainly, that such a prince existed, but not what he performed.

Moreover, the Chinese reckon the year in which an emperor dies as still
constituting a part of his reign, until the end of it; even though he
should die the first day of the year, his successor dates the year
following his death with the name of his predecessor. It is not possible
to show more respect for ancestors; nor is it possible to compute time
in a manner more injudicious in comparison with modern nations.

We may add that the Chinese do not commence their sexagenary cycle, into
which they have introduced arrangement, till the reign of the Emperor
Iao, two thousand three hundred and fifty-seven years before our vulgar
era. Profound obscurity hangs over the whole period of time which
precedes that epoch.

Men are generally contented with an approximation--with the "pretty
nearly" in every case. For example, before the invention of watches,
people could learn the time of day or night only approximately. In
building, the stones were pretty nearly hewn to a certain shape, the
timber pretty nearly squared, and the limbs of the statue pretty nearly
chipped to a proper finish; a man was only pretty nearly acquainted with
his nearest neighbors; and, notwithstanding the perfection we have
ourselves attained, such is the state of things at present throughout
the greater part of the world.

Let us not then be astonished that there is nowhere to be found a
correct ancient chronology.

That which we have of the Chinese is of considerable value, when
compared with the chronological labors of other nations. We have none of
the Indians, nor of the Persians, and scarcely any of the ancient
Egyptians. All our systems formed on the history of these people are as
contradictory as our systems of metaphysics.

The Greek Olympiads do not commence till seven hundred and twenty-eight
years before our era of reckoning. Until we arrive at them, we perceive
only a few torches to lighten the darkness, such as the era of
Nabonassar, the war between Lacedæmon and Messene; even those epochs
themselves are subjects of dispute.

Livy took care not to state in what year Romulus began his pretended
reign. The Romans, who well knew the uncertainty of that epoch, would
have ridiculed him had he undertaken to decide it. It is proved that the
duration of two hundred and forty years ascribed to the seven first
kings of Rome is a very false calculation. The first four centuries of
Rome are absolutely destitute of chronology.

If four centuries of the most memorable empire the world ever saw
comprise only an undigested mass of events, mixed up with fables, and
almost without a date, what must be the case with small nations, shut up
in an obscure corner of the earth, that have never made any figure in
the world, notwithstanding all their attempts to compensate, by prodigy
and imposture, for their deficiency in real power and cultivation?

_Of the Vanity of Systems, Particularly in Chronology._

The Abbé Condillac performed a most important service to the human mind
when he displayed the false points of all systems. If we may ever hope
that we shall one day find the road to truth, it can only be after we
have detected all those which lead to error. It is at least a
consolation to be at rest, to be no longer seeking, when we perceive
that so many philosophers have sought in vain.

Chronology is a collection of bladders of wind. All who thought to pass
over it as solid ground have been immersed. We have, at the present
time, twenty-four systems, not one of which is true.

The Babylonians said, "We reckon four hundred and seventy-three thousand
years of astronomical observations." A Parisian, addressing him, says,
"Your account is correct; your years consisted each of a solar day; they
amount to twelve hundred and ninety-seven of ours, from the time of
Atlas, the great astronomer, king of Africa, till the arrival of
Alexander at Babylon."

But, whatever our Parisian may say, no people in the world have ever
confounded a day with a year; and the people of Babylon still less than
any other. This Parisian stranger should have contented himself with
merely observing to the Chaldæans: "You are exaggerators, and our
ancestors were ignorant. Nations are exposed to too many revolutions to
permit their keeping a series of four thousand seven hundred and
thirty-six centuries of astronomical calculations. And, with respect to
Atlas, king of the Moors, no one knows at what time he lived. Pythagoras
might pretend to have been a cock, just as reasonably as you may boast
of such a series of observations."

The great point of ridicule in all fantastic chronologies is the
arrangement of all the great events of a man's life in precise order of
time, without ascertaining that the man himself ever existed. Lenglet
repeats after others, in his chronological compilation of universal
history, that precisely in the time of Abraham, and six years after the
death of Sarah, who was little known to the Greeks, Jupiter, at the age
of sixty-two, began to reign in Thessaly; that his reign lasted sixty
years; that he married his sister Juno; that he was obliged to cede the
maritime coasts to his brother Neptune; and that the Titans made war
against him. But was there ever a Jupiter? It never occurred to him that
with this question he should have begun.




CHURCH.

_Summary of the History of the Christian Church._


We shall not extend our views into the depths of theology. God preserve
us from such presumption. Humble faith alone is enough for us. We never
assume any other part than that of mere historians.

In the years that immediately followed Jesus Christ, who was at once God
and man, there existed among the Hebrews nine religious schools or
societies--Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenians, Judahites, Therapeutæ,
Rechabites, Herodians, the disciples of John, and the disciples of
Jesus, named the "brethren," the "Galileans," the "believers," who did
not assume the name of Christians till about the sixteenth year of our
era, at Antioch; being directed to its adoption by God himself, in ways
unknown to men. The Pharisees believed in the metempsychosis. The
Sadducees denied the immortality of the soul, and the existence of
spirits, yet believed in the Pentateuch.

Pliny, the naturalist--relying, evidently, on the authority of Flavius
Josephus--calls the Essenians "_gens æterna in qua nemo nascitur_"--"a
perpetual family, in which no one is ever born"--because the Essenians
very rarely married. The description has been since applied to our
monks.

It is difficult to decide whether the Essenians or the Judahites are
spoken of by Josephus in the following passage: "They despise the evils
of the world; their constancy enables them to triumph over torments; in
an honorable cause, they prefer death to life. They have undergone fire
and sword, and submitted to having their very bones crushed, rather
than utter a syllable against their legislator, or eat forbidden food."

It would seem, from the words of Josephus, that the foregoing portrait
applies to the Judahites, and not to the Essenians. "Judas was the
author of a new sect, completely different from the other three;" that
is, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the Essenians. "They are," he goes
on, "Jews by nation; they live in harmony with one another, and consider
pleasure to be a vice." The natural meaning of this language would
induce us to think that he is speaking of the Judahites.

However that may be, these Judahites were known before the disciples of
Christ began to possess consideration and consequence in the world. Some
weak people have supposed them to be heretics, who adored Judas
Iscariot.

The Therapeutæ were a society different from the Essenians and the
Judahites. They resembled the Gymnosophists and Brahmins of India. "They
possess," says Philo, "a principle of divine love which excites in them
an enthusiasm like that of the Bacchantes and the Corybantes, and which
forms them to that state of contemplation to which they aspire. This
sect originated in Alexandria, which was entirely filled with Jews, and
prevailed greatly throughout Egypt." The Rechabites still continued as a
sect. They vowed never to drink wine; and it is, possibly, from their
example that Mahomet forbade that liquor to his followers.

The Herodians regarded Herod, the first of that name, as a Messiah, a
messenger from God, who had rebuilt the temple. It is clear that the
Jews at Rome celebrated a festival in honor of him, in the reign of
Nero, as appears from the lines of Persius: "_Herodis venere dies_,"
etc. (Sat. v. 180.)

     "King Herod's feast, when each Judaæan vile,
      Trims up his lamp with tallow or with oil."

The disciples of John the Baptist had spread themselves a little in
Egypt, but principally in Syria, Arabia, and towards the Persian gulf.
They are recognized, at the present day, under the name of the
Christians of St. John. There were some also in Asia Minor. It is
mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (chap, xix.) that Paul met with
many of them at Ephesus. "Have you received," he asked them, "the holy
spirit?" They answered him. "We have not heard even that there is a holy
spirit." "What baptism, then," says he, "have you received?" They
answered him, "The baptism of John."

In the meantime the true Christians, as is well known, were laying the
foundation of the only true religion.' He who contributed most to
strengthen this rising society, was Paul, who had himself persecuted it
with the greatest violence. He was born at Tarsus in Cilicia, and was
educated under one of the most celebrated professors among the
Pharisees--Gamaliel, a disciple of Hillel. The Jews pretend that he
quarrelled with Gamaliel, who refused to let him have his daughter in
marriage. Some traces of this anecdote are to be found in the sequel to
the "Acts of St. Thekla." These acts relate that he had a large
forehead, a bald head, united eye-brows, an aquiline nose, a short and
clumsy figure, and crooked legs. Lucian, in his dialogue
"_Philopatres_," seems to give a very similar portrait of him. It has
been doubted whether he was a Roman citizen, for at that time the title
was not given to any Jew; they had been expelled from Rome by Tiberius;
and Tarsus did not become a Roman colony till nearly a hundred years
afterwards, under Caracalla; as Cellarius remarks in his "Geography"
(book iii.), and Grotius in his "Commentary on the Acts," to whom alone
we need refer.

God, who came down upon earth to be an example in it of humanity and
poverty, gave to his church the most feeble infancy, and conducted it in
a state of humiliation similar to that in which he had himself chosen to
be born. All the first believers were obscure persons. They labored with
their hands. The apostle St. Paul himself acknowledges that he gained
his livelihood by making tents. St. Peter raised from the dead Dorcas, a
sempstress, who made clothes for the "brethren." The assembly of
believers met at Joppa, at the house of a tanner called Simon, as
appears from the ninth chapter of the "Acts of the Apostles."

The believers spread themselves secretly in Greece: and some of them
went from Greece to Rome, among the Jews, who were permitted by the
Romans to have a synagogue. They did not, at first, separate themselves
from the Jews. They practised circumcision; and, as we have elsewhere
remarked, the first fifteen obscure bishops of Jerusalem were all
circumcised, or at least were all of the Jewish nation.

When the apostle Paul took with him Timothy, who was the son of a
heathen father, he circumcised him himself, in the small city of Lystra.
But Titus, his other disciple, could not be induced to submit to
circumcision. The brethren, or the disciples of Jesus, continued united
with the Jews until the time when St. Paul experienced a persecution at
Jerusalem, on account of his having introduced strangers into the
temple. He was accused by the Jews of endeavoring to destroy the law of
Moses by that of Jesus Christ. It was with a view to his clearing
himself from this accusation that the apostle St. James proposed to the
apostle Paul that he should shave his head, and go and purify himself in
the temple, with four Jews, who had made a vow of being shaved. "Take
them with you," says James to him (Acts of the Apostles xxi.), "purify
yourself with them, and let the whole world know that what has been
reported concerning you is false, and that you continue to obey the law
of Moses." Thus, then, Paul, who had been at first the most summary
persecutor of the holy society established by Jesus--Paul, who
afterwards endeavored to govern that rising society--Paul the
Christian, Judaizes, "that the world may know that he is calumniated
when he is charged with no longer following the law of Moses."

St. Paul was equally charged with impiety and heresy, and the
persecution against him lasted a long time; but it is perfectly clear,
from the nature of the charges, that he had travelled to Jerusalem in
order to fulfil the rites of Judaism.

He addressed to Faustus these words: "I have never offended against the
Jewish law, nor against the temple." (Acts xxv.) The apostles announced
Jesus Christ as a just man wickedly persecuted, a prophet of God, a son
of God, sent to the Jews for the reformation of manners.

"Circumcision," says the apostle Paul, "is good, if you observe the law;
but if you violate the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. If
any uncircumcised person keep the law, he will be as if circumcised. The
true Jew is one that is so inwardly."

When this apostle speaks of Jesus Christ in his epistles, he does not
reveal the ineffable mystery of his consubstantiality with God. "We are
delivered by him," says he, "from the wrath of God. The gift of God hath
been shed upon us by the grace bestowed on one man, who is Jesus
Christ.... Death reigned through the sin of one man; the just shall
reign in life by one man, who is Jesus Christ." (Romans v.)

And, in the eighth chapter: "We are heirs of God, and joint-heirs of
Christ;" and in the sixteenth chapter: "To God, who is the only wise, be
honor and glory through Jesus Christ... You are Jesus Christ's, and
Jesus Christ is God's." (1 Cor. chap. iii.)

And, in 1 Cor. xv. 27: "Everything is made subject to him, undoubtedly,
excepting God, who made all things subject to him."

Some difficulty has been found in explaining the following part of the
Epistle of the Philippians: "Do nothing through vain glory. Let each
humbly think others better than himself. Be of the same mind with Jesus
Christ, _who, being in the likeness of God, assumed not to equal himself
to God_." This passage appears exceedingly well investigated and
elucidated in a letter, still extant, of the churches of Vienna and
Lyons, written in the year 117, and which is a valuable monument of
antiquity. In this letter the modesty of some believers is praised.
"They did not wish," says the letter, "to assume the lofty title of
martyrs, in consequence of certain tribulations; after the example of
Jesus Christ, who, being in the likeness of God, did not assume the
quality of being equal to God." Origen, also, in his commentary on John,
says: "The greatness of Jesus shines out more splendidly in consequence
of his self-humiliation than if he had assumed equality with God." In
fact, the opposite interpretation would be a solecism. What sense would
there be in this exhortation: "Think others superior to yourselves;
imitate Jesus, who did not think it an _assumption_ to be equal to God?"
It would be an obvious contradiction; it would be putting an example of
full pretension for an example of modesty; it would be an offence
against logic.

Thus did the wisdom of the apostles establish the rising church. That
wisdom did not change its character in consequence of the dispute which
took place between the apostles Peter, James, and John, on one side, and
Paul on the other. This contest occurred at Antioch. The apostle
Peter--formerly Cephas, or Simon Bar Jona--ate with the converted
Gentiles, and among them did not observe the ceremonies of the law and
the distinction of meats. He and Barnabas, and the other disciples, ate
indifferently of pork, of animals which had been strangled, or which had
cloven feet, or which did not chew the cud; but many Jewish Christians
having arrived, St. Peter joined with them in abstinence from forbidden
meats, and in the ceremonies of the Mosaic law.

This conduct appeared very prudent; he wished to avoid giving offence to
the Jewish Christians, his companions; but St. Paul attacked him on the
subject with considerable severity. "I withstood him," says he, "to his
face, because he was blamable." (Gal. chap. ii.)

This quarrel appears most extraordinary on the part of St. Paul. Having
been at first a persecutor, he might have been expected to have acted
with moderation; especially as he had gone to Jerusalem to sacrifice in
the temple, had circumcised his disciple Timothy, and strictly complied
with the Jewish rites, for which very compliance he now reproached
Cephas. St. Jerome imagines that this quarrel between Paul and Cephas
was a pretended one. He says, in his first homily (vol. iii.) that they
acted like two advocates, who had worked themselves up to an appearance
of great zeal and exasperation against each other, to gain credit with
their respective clients. He says that Peter--Cephas--being appointed to
preach to the Jews, and Paul to the Gentiles, they assumed the
appearance of quarrelling--Paul to gain the Gentiles, and Peter to gain
the Jews. But St. Augustine is by no means of the same opinion. "I
grieve," says he, in his epistle to Jerome, "that so great a man should
be the patron of a lie."--(_patronum mendacii_).

This dispute between St. Jerome and St. Augustine ought not to diminish
our veneration for them, and still less for St. Paul and St. Peter. As
to what remains, if Peter was destined for the Jews, who were, after
their conversion, likely to Judaize, and Paul for strangers, it appears
probable that Peter never went to Rome. The Acts of the Apostles makes
no mention of Peter's journey to Italy.

However that may be, it was about the sixtieth year of our era that
Christians began to separate from the Jewish communion; and it was this
which drew upon them so many quarrels and persecutions from the various
synagogues of Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Asia. They were accused of
impiety and atheism by their Jewish brethren, who excommunicated them in
their synagogues three times every Sabbath-day. But in the midst of
their persecutions God always supported them.

By degrees many churches were formed, and the separation between Jews
and Christians was complete before the close of the first century. This
separation was unknown to the Roman government. Neither the senate nor
the emperors of Rome interested themselves in those quarrels of a small
flock of mankind, which God had hitherto guided in obscurity, and which
he exalted by insensible gradations.

Christianity became established in Greece and at Alexandria. The
Christians had there to contend with a new set of Jews, who, in
consequence of intercourse with the Greeks, had become philosophers.
This was the sect of _gnosis_, or gnostics. Among them were some of the
new converts to Christianity. All these sects, at that time, enjoyed
complete liberty to dogmatize, discourse, and write, whenever the Jewish
courtiers, settled at Rome and Alexandria, did not bring any charge
against them before the magistrates. But, under Domitian, Christianity
began to give some umbrage to the government.

The zeal of some Christians, which was not according to knowledge, did
not prevent the Church from making that progress which God destined from
the beginning. The Christians, at first, celebrated their mysteries in
sequestered houses, and in caves, and during the night. Hence, according
to Minucius Felix, the title given them of _lucifugaces._ Philo calls
them Gesséens. The names most frequently applied to them by the
heathens, during the first four centuries, were "Galileans" and
"Nazarenes"; but that of "Christians" has prevailed above all others.
Neither the hierarchy, nor the services of the church, were established
all at once; the apostolic times were different from those which
followed.

The mass now celebrated at matins was the supper performed in the
evening; these usages changed in proportion as the church strengthened.
A more numerous society required more regulations, and the prudence of
the pastors accommodated itself to times and places. St. Jerome and
Eusebius relate that when the churches received a regular form, five
different orders might be soon perceived to exist in them--superintendents,
_episcopoi_, whence originate the bishops; elders of the society,
_presbyteroi_, priests, _diaconoi_, servants or deacons; _pistoi_,
believers, the initiated--that is, the baptized, who participated in the
suppers of the agape, or love-feasts; the _catechumens_, who were
awaiting baptism; and the _energumens_, who awaited their being
exorcised of demons. In these five orders, no one had garments different
from the others, no one was bound to celibacy; witness Tertullian's
book, dedicated to his wife; and witness also the example of the
apostles. No paintings or sculptures were to be found in their
assemblies during the first two centuries; no altars; and, most
certainly,

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