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In vain would you build Grecian temples, ever so elegant and well-lighted, for the purpose of assembling the good people of St. Louis and Queen Blanche, and making them adore a metaphysical God; they would still regret those Notre Dames of Rheims and Paris,-those venerable cathedrals, overgrown with moss, full of generations of the dead and the ashes of their forefathers; they would still regret the tombs of those heroes, the Montmorencys, on which they loved to kneel during mass; to say nothing of the sacred fonts to which they were carried at their birth. The reason is that all these things are essentially interwoven with their manners; that a monument is not venerable, unless a long history of the past be, as it were, inscribed beneath its vaulted canopy, black with age. For this reason, also, there is nothing marvellous in a temple whose erection we have witnessed, whose echoes and whose domes were formed before our eyes. God is the eternal law; his origin, and whatever relates to his worship, ought to be enveloped in the night of time.

You could not enter a Gothic church without feeling a kind of awe and a vague sentiment of the Divinity. You were all at once carried back to those times when a fraternity of cenobites, after having meditated in the woods of their monasteries, met to prostrate themselves before the altar and to chant the praises of the Lord, amid the tranquillity and the silence of night. Ancient France seemed to revive altogether; you beheld all those singular costumes, all that nation so different from what it is at present; you were reminded of its revolutions, its productions, and its arts. The more remote were these times the more magical they appeared, the more they inspired ideas which always end with a reflection on the nothingness of man and the rapidity of life.

The Gothic style, notwithstanding its barbarous proportions, possesses a beauty peculiar to itself.1

1 Gothic architecture, as well as the sculpture in the same style, is supposed to have been derived from the Arabs. Its affinity to the monuments of Egypt would rather lead us to imagine that it was transmitted to us by the first Christians of the East; but we are more inclined to refer its origin

to nature.

The forests were the first temples of the Divinity, and in them men acquired the first idea of architecture. This art must, therefore, have varied according to climates. The Greeks turned the elegant Corinthian column, with its capital of foliage, after the model of the palm-tree.1 The enormous pillars of the ancient Egyptian style represent the massive sycamore, the oriental fig, the banana, and most of the gigantic trees of Africa and Asia.

The forests of Gaul were, in their turn, introduced into the temples of our ancestors, and those celebrated woods of oaks thus maintained their sacred character. Those ceilings sculptured into foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the secret passages, the low doorways, -in a word, every thing in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood; every thing excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity.

The two lofty towers erected at the entrance of the edifice overtop the elms and yew-trees of the churchyard, and produce the most picturesque effect on the azure of heaven. Sometimes their twin heads are illumined by the first rays of dawn; at others they appear crowned with a capital of clouds or magnified in a foggy atmosphere. The birds themselves seem to make a mistake in regard to them, and to take them for the trees of the forest; they hover over their summits, and perch upon their pinnacles. But, lo confused noises suddenly issue from the top of these towers and scare away the affrighted birds. The Christian architect, not content with building forests, has been

1 Vitruvius gives a different account of the invention of the Corinthian capital; but this does not confute the general principle that architecture originated in the woods. We are only astonished that there should not be more variety in the column, after the varieties of trees. We have a conception, for example, of a column that might be termed Palmist, and be a natural representation of the palm-tree. An orb of foliage slightly bowed and sculptured on the top of a light shaft of marble would, in our opinion, produce a very pleasing effect in a portico.

desirous to retain their murmurs; and, by means of the organ and of bells, he has attached to the Gothic temple the very winds and thunders that roar in the recesses of the woods. Past ages, conjured up by these religious sounds, raise their venerable voices from the bosom of the stones, and are heard in every corner of the vast cathedral. The sanctuary re-echoes like the cavern of the ancient Sibyl; loud-tongued bells swing over your head, while the vaults of death under your feet are profoundly silent.

BOOK II.

PHILOSOPHY.

CHAPTER I.

ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS.

LET us now consider the effects of Christianity upon literature in general. It may be classed under these three principal heads : -philosophy, history, and eloquence.

By philosophy we here mean the study of every species of science.

It will be seen that, in defending religion, we by no means attack wisdom. Far be it from us to confound sophistical pride with the solid qualifications of the mind and heart. Genuine philosophy is the innocence of the old age of nations, when they have ceased to possess virtues by instinct, and owe such as they have to reason. This second innocence is less certain than the first, but, when it can be attained, it is more sublime.

On whatever side you view the religion of the gospel, you find that it enlarges the understanding and tends to-expand the feelings. In the sciences, its tenets are not hostile to any natural truth; its doctrine forbids not any study. Among the ancients, a philosopher was continually meeting with some divinity in his way; he was doomed by the priests of Jupiter or Apollo, under pain of death or exile, to be absurd all his life. But, as the God of the Christians has not confined himself within the narrow limits of a sun, he has left all the luminaries of heaven open to the researches of scholars: "He hath delivered the world to their consideration." The natural philosopher may weigh the air in his tube without any apprehension of offending Juno; it is not of the elements of his body, but of the virtues of his soul, that the Supreme Judge will one day require an account.

1 Ecclesiastes iii. 11.

We are aware that we shall not fail to be reminded of certain bulls of the Holy See, or certain decrees of the Sorbonne, which condemn this or that philosophical discovery; but, on the other hand, how many ordinances of the court of Rome in favor of these same discoveries might we not enumerate! What can be said in this case, except that the clergy, who are men like ourselves, have shown themselves more or less enlightened, according to the natural course of ages? If Christianity itself has never appeared in opposition to the sciences, we have a sufficient authorization for our first assertion.

Let it be observed that the Church has at all periods protected the arts, though she has sometimes discouraged abstract studies; and in this she has displayed her accustomed wisdom. In vain do men perplex their understandings; they never will fully comprehend any thing in nature, because it is not they who have said to the ocean, "Hitherto thou shalt come, and shalt go no farther, and here thou shalt break thy swelling waves. Systems will eternally succeed systems, and truth will ever remain unknown. "If nature," says Montaigne, "should one day be pleased to reveal her secrets to us, oh heavens! what errors, what mistakes, shall we find in our paltry sciences!"'a

"1

The legislators of antiquity, agreeing on this point, as in many others, with the principles of the Christian religion, discouraged philosophers and lavished honors upon artists.* All these alleged persecutions of the sciences by Christianity may, therefore, with equal justice, be laid to the charge of the ancients, in whom, however, we discover such profound wisdom. In the year of Rome 591, the senate issued a decree banishing all philosophers from the city, and six years afterward Cato lost no time in procuring the dismissal of Carneades, the Athenian ambassador, "lest," as he said, "the Roman youth, acquiring a taste for the subtleties of the Greeks, should lose the simplicity of the ancient manners." If the system of Copernicus was

1 Job xxxviii. 11.

2 Essays, book ii. ch. 12.

3 Xenoph., Hist. Græc.; Plut., Mor.; Plat., in Phæd., in Repub.

4 The Greeks carried this hatred of philosophers to a criminal height, since

they put Socrates to death.

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