small fanatical sects take the place of the monasteries.[1] These are the battle-fields which enable Christian morality to hold its own, with that character of sublimity which to-day still fascinates many minds and gives it sufficient lustre to beget in the community a few pale imitations.
When one considers a less accentuated state of the Christian ethic, one is struck by seeing to what extent it depends on strife. Le Play, who was an excellent Catholic, often contrasted (to the great scandal of his co-religionists) the solidity of the religious convictions he met with in countries of mixed religions, with the spirit of inactivity which prevails in the countries exclusively submitted to the influence of Rome. Among the Protestant peoples, the more vigorously the Established Church is assailed by dissident sects the greater the moral fervour developed. We thus see that conviction is founded on the competition of communions, each of which regards itself as the army of truth fighting the armies of evil. In such conditions it is possible to find sublimity; but when religious warfare is much weakened, probabilism, mechanical rites having a certain resemblance to magic, take the first place.
We can point out quite similar phenomena in the history of modern Liberal ideas. For a long while our fathers regarded from an almost religious point of view the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which seems to us nowadays only a colourless collection of abstract and confused formulas, without any great practical bearing. This was due to the fact that formidable struggles had been undertaken on account of the institutions which originated in this document; the clerical party asserted that it would demonstrate the fundamental error of Liberalism; everywhere it organised fighting societies intended to enforce its authority on the people and on the Government; it boasted that it would be able to destroy
- ↑ Renan, loc. cit. p. 627.
