not solely or mainly a delight in it for its | ceives in them, not so much the variations own sake. The essential point to him was of taste from age to age, as the adventures this, that "literature has man for its sub- of the human soul in its pursuit of the ject and man for its object;" that it is ideal and the absolute. It was natural, "the echo of life," "the expression of therefore, that he should attach but a secsociety;" that it "humanizes science," ondary importance to the perfection and and reproduces, under an ideal form, the finish of his own works. They were acts, life of humanity. He saw in literature not words; the acts of the teacher, the "that indefatigable messenger who, to the preacher, the apostle. His critical and general store of truth and utility, brings in historical works are reproductions of his the true and the useful transformed into lessons and lectures, or reprints of review the image of the beautiful- the beautiful, articles, contributed, not to magazines which is, perhaps, the true in all its truth, indifferent to doctrine, like the Revue des in all its lustre, with all its radiations." Deux Mondes, but to reviews devoted, Even in the study of style, he was still on like Le Semeur, to the propagation of the search for man. "The analysis of moral and religious ideas. The greater expression," he said, “is the study of the part of his books were, as I have already human mind; rhetoric itself is a form of said, not even published during his life, psychology. This is the serious side of but after his death, often from notes taken literature; and yet so many readers come by his pupils. In their composition as to it for nothing but pleasure and amuse- well as in their language they bear the ment." Art had its value, in his eyes, as mark of the imperfect conditions under the apocalypse of life, of nature, of man. which they sprang to light. Moreover, "Art," to him, "is man himself." "The there was no time in Vinet's life during mission of art, as of christianity, is to which he gave himself entirely to literary bring us back to nature." Thus it is that work. He never forgot that his studies art is interesting to him only so far as it had in the first instance been undertaken leads to the study of man; and he teels with a view to the pastorate, and not a an indistinctive distrust for the search year passed without his preaching or writ after mere beauty of form. He sees" a ing on religious or ecclesiastical subjects. great snare" in the literary gift; he pro- With the single exception of the "Chrestests against the idea of a purely æsthetic tomathie," the books he published during culture, because to be an artist and noth- his lifetime are all either collections of ing else "requires a degree of impartiality sermons, or treatises on religious or social in which conscience can hardly acqui- ethics, or polemical theology. Even his esce." Throughout all his labors as the holidays and visits to watering-places were critic and historian of French literature, but another opportunity for giving play to we find him, with all his sensitiveness to his pastoral activity. Finally, he became the splendors of style, the wealth of im- for seven years (from 1837 to 1844) proagery, and the power and fertility of fessor of practical theology at Lausanne; genius, seeking for some other thing in the and his last two years, from 1845 to 1847, works that he appraises, above and beyond were almost entirely taken up with the their mere literary or artistic excellence. founding of a free church and a free TheoWhile some see in them the pursuit and logical Faculty. Amidst all the hurry realization of a certain artistic ideal, and and harass and difficulty of a life crowded others the product of given historical and with absorbing occupations, often with social conditions, and others, again, the heavy material anxieties and cruel trials, expression of the individual temperament with the cares of uncertain health, and and personality, Vinet watches ever for with the worry of incessant controversy, the revelation of the human soul, one and Vinet has neither the leisure nor the incliinfinitely manifold, occupied in the search nation to become an artist. He has left for truth. The thing that interests him in behind him some admirable passages, and the books is the permanent substratum of nowhere anything trite or mediocre; he moral truth contained in them. He per- abounds in clever touches, in picturesque

Theo

But

logians do well to insist on the idea that the
sacrifice of Christ was a voluntary act.
the merit of having willed the salvation of
man by His blood is no less of God. If the
Son came to suffer, the Father sent Him.
There is as much love in one as in the other.

and poetical imagery, in forcible and felici- | self they are entirely conciliated.
tous expressions; and this for the simple
reason that he thinks his thoughts in his
own way, and has a powerful mind and
strong convictions; but, except a few
fragments like that on Bourdaloue, the
Discours sur la Littérature Française,"
a few reviews and a few sermons, he The great speculative thinkers have
produced nothing that could be called been either celibates devoted to the task
finished. He had too much to say; and of thought (as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant),
he never had time to say it broadly and or men in a comfortable and prosperous
completely out. Hence his obscurities, position which left the mind at liberty, as
inadequacies, and awkwardnesses. He was the case with Hegel. Vinet had to
says himself, with perhaps an excess of struggle with poverty and illness. He had
modesty: "I am not one of those writers married for love, and his affection for the
who are born translated; somebody will noble woman he had chosen occupied a
have to translate me. And somebody will great place in his life, and was the source
translate me, if what I have written is of many joys and of many griefs. He had
worth the trouble." It is not true that he but two children, both of them invalids,
needs translating; but it is true that, to feeble in body and mind-a son, con-
understand and appreciate him, he de- demned to a precarious existence and a
mands a certain amount of effort and mediocre position, and a daughter, whom
application. But one is amply rewarded he tenderly loved, and who was taken from
for one's pains by the moral and intellec- him at the age of seventeen. Add to this
tual profit to be derived from the contact. the political and religious conflicts in
But if Vinet was not, properly speaking, which he was engaged both at Bâle and
a scholar, still less was he a philosopher. at Lausanne, and it is easy to see that the
This is not saying that he was actually conditions were not favorable to specula-
incapable of philosophic speculation; and, tive thought. Not only did he take no
as a matter of fact, his writings contain pleasure in reasoning on abstract princi-
more profound thinking and more preg-ples, but it appears that he gave but little
nant views of man and the universe than
the works of many a fashionable philoso-
phizer; but for systematic philosophy he
had neither the taste nor, apparently, the
necessary power of abstraction. His
mind, so marvellously at home in the com-
plexities, the subtleties, the transforma-
tions, the mysteries of human life, had no
craving for the naked clearness of rational
truth, no sense of the rigors of absolute
logic. The reason, in him, was dominated
by the imagination and the heart; and
this domination was rendered more impe-
rious by the constant illness to which he
was subject from his twenty-fifth year on
ward, and which kept his morak sensibili-ophy not an abstract and logical structure,
ties in perpetual tension. How resolutely
he could set aside the exigencies of rea-
son and of logic may be seen in the follow-
ing passage on the divinity of Christ and
the mystery of redemption: -

In order to feel the immensity of love and goodness that is involved in the work of re demption, it is essential not to lose sight of the fact that, to avoid striking humanity, God strikes Himself in that which is dearest to Him. If God had been represented to us as indifferent in the choice of a victim, where would be the moral side of redemption? Neither justice nor mercy is satisfied by such a course of action. But if God strikes Him

place to pure philosophy in his reading
and research; and in his writings it has
hardly any place at all. The truth is, that
under the pressure of his early beliefs, his
experience of life, and the cravings of an
affectionate nature, he had constructed a
theory of the conditions of the search for
truth which allowed him to neglect the
exercise of the pure reason, and make it
give place altogether to that of the prac
tical reason. In this also he followed the
strong bias of his nature, which, as it
found in literature not so much the reve-
lation of the beautiful as the revelation of
life and of man, so also sought in philos-

a mechanism of thought, but an explana-
tion of life in its entirety, a doctrine which
should satisfy the whole man, heart as
well as mind. He would not admit that
the intellect is the only factor in the search
for truth. "The mind which reasons and
concludes," he said, "is nothing without
the soul which divines. The intuitions of
the soul are the data on which the reason
has to work." "Love is, perhaps, the vi-
talizing principle of knowledge."
"Ger.
many has impaired the scientific purity of
science by separating it too much from
life; in the man of science himself it has
too severely isolated the scientist and the

man.

It has excluded from the domain | himself the analysis of the pure reason; of scientific effort the human heart, human while, on the other hand, he does not interests, the human conscience. Reject- attribute to the conscience, singly and by ing these, the intellect deprives itself of itself, the same virtue that Kant does. its most legitimate and indispensable aux- | With Kant the conscience is the revelailiaries; it flings aside, as it were, at tion of the moral law which every one pleasure, some of the most essential bears within him. With Vinet it is, taken elements in the solution of the problem." The essence of thought was, with Vinet, not the mere exercise of the reason, but "moral thought, the reasoning of the conscience." It is on this authority of conscience that he builds up the belief in God; it is in the consonance of Christianity with the affirmations of the conscience and the instincts of the heart that he finds the demonstration of Christian truth. As he himself so admirably puts it:

What is conscience, if there be no God? What is conscience, if it be not the Agent and Resident of God within us? If we are so unhappy as not to be able to endure the idea of God, while yet we have not renounced the idea of duty, we must of necessity, whether we like it or not, personify conscience, and confer upon it an authority over us.

Conscience is not ourselves; it is against us; therefore it is something other than ourselves. But if it is other than ourselves, what can it be but God? And if it be God, we must give it the honor due to God; we cannot reverence the sovereign less than the ambassador. If God has designed an end for us, that end cannot be outside Himself.

In point of fact, while he spoke of the conscience and the heart as the necessary coadjutors of the reason, while he urged that the search for truth must be the effort of the whole man-heart, conscience, understanding-and not of the reason alone, Vinet was really making the reason the coadjutor of the conscience, and admitting it only to a subordinate and ancillary place, its task being simply to explain and justify the creed accepted by the heart. It is on this ground that Vinet cannot, properly speaking, be called a philosopher. You hardly ever find in him a rational deduction in its pure severity; all his reasoning is blurred by the haloes of the heart and the imagination. No doubt one can, by dint of a little determination, discover in him the broad outlines of the system of Kant- -on the one hand, the pure reason, incapable of knowing anything outside itself or of judging any thing except in accordance with its own laws; and, on the other hand, the practical reason, which has power to construct the moral world and the universe out of the immediate intuitions of the conscience. But Vinet never undertakes for

by itself, only the general sentiment of obligation, the confused print of the divine hand which has been laid upon us; and we still need a fresh touch of that guiding hand to lead us to the truth. At this point Vinet's view approximates more nearly to that of Pascal; and, indeed, he understood Pascal as no one had ever understood him before. He understood how, in Pascal, doubt could co-exist with faith; since the scepticism of Pascal is nothing else but the incapacity of the reason to penetrate, without the illumination of grace, into the region of morals and religion.

The whole of the philosophy, and the whole of the apologetics of Vinet, may be summed up in the saying of Pascal: "Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas."* But while Pascal, with the hard logic of a geometrician, allows no modification of the doctrine of grace, and denies to man, apart from grace, not only the capacity of knowing and loving, but the power of obtaining even a glimpse of the truth, Vinet supposes a permanent revelation of truth within the human heart, a testimonium anime naturaliter Christiana. And thus, as in literature it was man alone that interested him, so philosophy is nothing to him but a revelation and a study of the human soul, especially on its emotional side. Reason without sentiment is an empty form. Feeling is "the generator of ideas." It is as dangerous "to substi tute ideas for feelings as to substitute words for ideas;" for the reasons to be adduced in favor of objective truth have their seat in the depths of the soul rather than in the domain of the understanding. Finally, philosophy leads back to the Ego; all philosophies are subjective. The "moral state" alone is a reality, and it is through its active energy that "there springs up in the darkness of metaphys ical mysteries the dream we name philosophy." We are not, therefore, wronging Vinet when we say that he makes but little account of philosophic speculation, and attaches a real value only to moral facts.

And if Vinet is not a philosopher, so

The heart has its reasons, of which the reason knows nothing.

neither is he a theologian. The same these points. Partly as the result of his causes which diverted him from specula- suffering and over-burdened life, partly as tive philosophy, alienated him also from the result of a certain intellectual timidity, theology, properly so called. It is, no he remained in a state of indecision, not, doubt, with an exaggeration prompted by indeed, as to the essence of his beliefs, humility that he writes to M. Lutteroth: but as to their form. In the words he "I am nothing but an amateur who, in his wrote in 1832, when declining a theolog. moments of leisure, visits the shores of ical professorship at Geneva, he seems to science as a stranger, without attempting me to give a characteristic and complete to penetrate the interior of a country in account of himself in this respect : which he does not even know the roads; but under this exaggeration there lies a strongly my own incapacity. Your letter has only made me feel more Of this incacertain truth. The scientific requirements pacity you may form, so to speak, an a priori of his intellect were as slender as the judgment, when I tell you that my studies at moral cravings of his soul were great. the Academy of Lausanne have been most He was not one of those for whom logical feeble, most insignificant that I find mysimplicity is a distinctive mark of truth. self committed to a career in which, if I have Truth and life, to him, were synonyms; tainly have not been so to myself; that in fourbeen to some extent useful to others, I cerand life is everywhere complex and mys- teen years I have not made as much advance terious, a thing felt and seen, but never to in theological learning as one single year of be demonstrated or explained. And if metaphysical and moral truth escape the that physical suffering has consumed a great good hard study might have secured for me; frigid precision of analysis, how much part of my leisure time, and that I have been more religious truth! Vinet shrank from but a poor economist of the rest. . . . You subjecting the things of faith- that is to want men who add to their virtue knowledge; say, the things of the conscience and the you want scientific theologians, equipped from heart to the scholastic formula of dog-head to heel. I am not one of these. My matic theology, to the artificial subtleties intellectual and physical forces are alike be low the mark. of exegesis. You may read the whole of But, above all, you want men his works from beginning to end without tried and faithful servants. of faith, Christians complete in every point, Ah! sir, seek being quite certain what he thought on them elsewhere. You do not realize that he the essential points of Christian doctrine. whom you summon to your Holy War is a Of course he believed in the divinity of Christian scarcely started on the heavenly Christ, in redemption, and in the inspira- way; that there are gaps in his faith and tion of the Scriptures; but it would be deeper gaps in his life; that he does not go, impossible to say precisely what was his but totters; does not speak, but lisps; does view of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of not will, but only would. predestination, or expiation, or of questions of Biblical criticism generally. He speaks of the fall of Adam, and of Satan, and of demons; but who would dare to affirm that he believed in the personality of the devil or the legend of Paradise Lost? No; he accepted en bloc the traditional phrases of Protestant dogma, but he avoided going into their meaning, and kept as far as possible to the moral side of them, leaving the intellectual difficulty enveloped in a haze of mystery. Hence some of his friends and disciples, like M. Chavannes, have been able to maintain that Vinet remained all his life attached to evangelical orthodoxy, while others show him diverging more and more from the orthodox standpoint, and rising more and more into a spiritual mysticism which finds in dogma a partial and symbolical representation of ineffable realities of the invisible world. I think that those who take this latter view are the nearer to the truth; but I think also that Vinet himself never went so far as to formulate his opinions on

It is evident that Vinet here alludes to the torments of doubt of which he speaks in a letter of February of the same year:

I

skimmed the surface of the great problem.
I have not gone deep enough. I have only
The needs of the century demand far more,
if the intellectual torments of others equal
those through which I have passed.
will try to redescend into my Tartarus. I will
seek out some one of those insolent doubts,
those fearful visions of the reason, from which
I know of only one refuge.
Have we
reached the epoch when all must be said?
Must all the secrets of unbelief be revealed?
Must we anticipate the objections which it has
not owned to itself? I cannot answer.

The state of mind described in this letter remained with Vinet, in some respects, to the end. No doubt his distress abated, and his faith became clearer and more serene; but he never succeeded in answering the objections of the reason in the name of reason itself, nor found in criticism the solution of the difficulties of criticism. He escaped them by resolutely

66 an

retiring to other ground, by entrenching | neva, from which Vinet had recoiled. himself in the moral consciousness and in But the deeper he went into that notion moral facts, and finding in the agreement of objective authority which had seemed between the cravings of conscience and to him so solid, the more irresistibly it the provisions of the Gospel a sufficient was forced upon him that the doctrine basis for belief. But he would have been of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures afraid - he who speaks of himself as cannot stand against the criticism of the ignoramus with a smattering of informa- sacred text, and that the doctrines of the tion " to accept one of those positions fall and the atonement, no longer resting "which require you to be systematically upon the incorruptible text of a written and officially convinced, believing, living; revelation, cannot endure the searching in which you represent, by virtue of your scrutiny of reason. Once launched upon office, the sum total of your public teach- this path, once driven to call in question ing. He found no difficulty in accepting the principle of authority, the idea of sin, a little later, in 1837, the chair of practical the belief in the supernatural, Schérer, theology at Lausanne - that is to say, of with his imperious need of clearness and homiletic and catechetical theology; but of logical precision, could find no foothold he never would have accepted a chair of short of the extreme consequences of his dogmatic theology or of exegesis. He doubts a universal scepticism, a recogwould not have considered himself com- nition of the relativity of all knowledge, petent to fill such a post, and he would that of moral law amongst the rest. In M. probably have shrunk from the necessity Gréard's beautiful little book on Schérer of scrutinizing and solving the problems the tragic story of this conflict of faith which had cost him such sore anguish and reason and conscience is told at and such visions of despair. length. He now turned his whole theological learning and subtlety, his whole dialectical acumen, to the task of destroying the faith which had been for fifteen years his joy and his strength; and as he had taken for his original point of de

At the very moment of Vinet's death, one of his dearest friends and companions in arms, Edmond Schérer, was undergoing that crisis of belief which Vinet had evaded by maintaining himself on the ground of practical Christianity, and giv-parture, not the individual conscience, but ing up the vain pursuit of rational Christian theory. Superficial observers have imagined that Schérer and Vinet held the same religious conceptions, because Schérer, at the time when his orthodox belief in the authority of Scripture was beginning to give way, used for once the language of Vinet, and sought a foundation for faith in "the agreement of our deepest feelings with the words of Jesus Christ." But Schérer's was a mind of a totally different type and temper from that of Vinet. He was not without the mystical instinct and inclination, but he was essentially an intellectualist. Even in the days of his greatest religious fervor, he was dominated by his scientific and critical tendencies; he was a philosopher and a theologian. He adopted the Calvinistic doctrines of the revival, because he perceived in them not only the aliment of the religious life, but a rational explanation of the universe; and he believed himself to have found in the theory of inspiration, and the dogmas of the fall and the atonement, the immovable foundations of religion and morality, the necessary bases and buttresses of the laws of conscience. He did not shrink from accepting the professorship of dogma and exegesis at the theological school of Ge

the external authority of a book and a dogma, it was inevitable that when that book was discovered to be fallible and that dogma false, the authority of conscience should be involved in their fall. It was quite otherwise with Vinet. His attitude with regard to the men and doctrines of the revival is a proof of this. He began by being very hostile to them, because he was shocked at the narrow dogmatism of the Methodist preaching, at the morose tenacity with which they denied the freedom of the soul and its noblest aspira. tions, in order to leave no room for anything but divine grace, and at the mechanical character of their conceptions of faith and conversion. Later on, he was drawn to them by what he saw of the fruits of their teaching, the ardent piety they awaked in those around them, the power of their faith. Amidst the established churches of the Swiss cantons, fast held in the slumber of traditional practices and the repetition of lifeless formulæ, the revivalists had started a religious movement of extraordinary intensity, and given to a crowd of hungry souls the boon of a personal Christianity. To Vinet this was the essential thing, an individual faith sincerely accepted, sin. cerely professed, made a principle of life.