Christianity has now been subjected to this test for nineteen centuries: it is subject to it at this moment, it will continue ever to be so. I need not say that I do not propose to retrace here the narrative of the manner in which it has supported and surmounted that test; that would be to write the History of Christianity. I confine myself, on the contrary, to a single small part of this history, the most modest part, the least pretending: and shall endeavour to bare a little to the view what Christianity, when it has been put into practice, what Christian Faith, after it has become Christian Life, has in the different situations of man's life accomplished, and is every day accomplishing, for the ennoblement of his nature, and the furtherance of his ultimate destiny.
Three words, "_Rights of Man_" inscribed upon the banners of the French Revolution, constituted its force; the rights of man as man, rights by this title alone, by virtue alone of his humanity. Three other words, _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_, have served as a commentary upon the three former. It is in the name of these two maxims that the French Revolution is making the tour of the world; they are the sources of the good and the evil, the movements in advance as well as the ruinous calamities of our time and of an unknown future.
Whilst all of true and good that these two maxims contain is Christian and was proclaimed by Christianity, all that they have of false and fatal is condemned and expressly repudiated by Christianity. Not only in this terrible confusion does Christianity proclaim in principle the part that is good, and condemn in principle the part that is evil; but Christianity alone, in point of fact, has the necessary authority and moral force to suppress the evil without at the same time causing the good also to perish.
It is a subject to us, in these days, of pride, and of a pride that is just, that we have at last begun to consider man himself, the individual man, his existence, and his personal liberty, his rights, and the guarantees of his rights, as the essential objects of social institutions. We have at last emerged from the rut of pagan antiquity, glorious at once and rude, where the individual, made wholly subordinate, was sacrificed to the state, where man was regarded simply as citizen, and thousands of human creatures were degraded and treated as cyphers in favour of a single class. Men are no longer numbered as Jews and Gentiles, Romans and Barbarians, freemen and slaves. Christianity first not only proclaimed but put into practice this important truth. The right of every man, as man, the worth of the human soul, and of the human person, irrespectively of his situation in life, constitute the starting-point, the fundamental idea, the dominant precept of the Christian religion. { 198} It was, in effect, in religious society, in the rising Christian Church, that this principle was first proclaimed, and first put into practice; Christianity treated the relation of man to God as the chief concern of man's life, and religious liberty as the chief of human liberties; it was in the presence of God that Christians admitted the equal importance of every soul; as it was amongst Christians themselves that they greeted each other as brethren, and that fraternity engendered charity. But although sprung from a source so elevated, and applied at first upon a stage so small, the Christian idea was not on that account less potent, or less fruitful; in spite of obstacles and reverses it maintained itself, and diffused itself through centuries and over distant countries; it made constant efforts to penetrate civil society. At the epochs of the history of Christendom which are most to be deplored, in the midst of the oppressions and the iniquities which have brought desolation upon it, daring voices have never been wanting: at one time it was the voice of the Christian Church itself directed against the masters of the earth; at another a voice issuing from the bosom of the Church itself, full of generous protestations against the disorders and acts of violence which were taking place in its own bosom. { 199} Jesus, God and man, having raised man before God, man never afterwards entirely humiliated and degraded himself before any human tyranny. In the presence of the greatest inequalities of earthly power, the appellation, _brethren_, never ceased to be echoed in Christian Society; and even at this day, after all the progress which equality has made in civil society, it is only in religious societies and in Christian Churches that men hear themselves greeted as _brethren_.