The religious question is a more profound and a more vital one. The whole fabric of French life and tradition is so closely inter woven with the Catholic Church that men who put no credence in the divine origin of that Church find their easiest temporal explanation for its existence in the action and nature of the French people. Its high centralization, its military defense throughout a thousand years, its rigid conception of dogma, its deductive philosophy, are Gallic, not Italian.
Wherever this conception of religion exists, its counterpiece and converse is rationalism. Rationalism had completely dominated the thinking part of the nation and the leaders of its action in the 18th century; indeed it is only since the middle of the 19th that the arguments against that position have gathered strength among the more cultivated classes of the coun try. Coincident with the maximum of this rationalistic wave, the French Revolution quar reled in its first year with the political organi zation of the clergy; next the Revolution be came identified with all the patriotism and all the energies of the people in the course of a long war, and by the time of the Restoration, a great body of French thought and French energy was definitely cut off from and antago nistic to the national religion. The quarrel be tween the two still endures. The attitude of many a French statesman toward the Catholic Church in France is not one of neutrality, but one of active enmity proceeding from a con viction that the Catholic Church is not only the permanent enemy of human happiness and liberty, but also of the particular state which it is his function to guide. Conversely, more
than one cleric, though of French extraction, has learned to regard the liberal institutions of his country as the necessary and permanent enemies of religion. There is no logical con nection between the two ideas : there is but a chance historic association, but that association has acquired great strength with the passage of time and with the succession of some five generations of men who have seen the quarrel continually growing, and no perceptible end to it approaching.
Such are the main combatants in this strug gle. But two other factors of importance are present, the Jew and the Huguenot. Neither of these bodies are numerous, but they happen each of them to be extremely wealthy, and this wealth with all that it connotes, of education and of power in the press, is thrown into the scale against Catholicism. It is impossible at this moment to say what the end of the strug gle will be. It is only certain that if Catholi cism is grievously wounded in France, it will have received a blow far more serious than that which it received in the 17th century. And conversely, if upon the whole the influence of the Church should henceforward grow among the French people, it will be difficult for the forces adverse to Catholicism to prevent the continued increase in political power, both of those populations which are ardently and those that are only nominally Catholic, from Ireland to the Desert. See. CHURCH AND STATE IN FRApICE (articles 10 and 11).