Such were the constant subjects of my meditation
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and my solicitude during the long pilgrimage, the account of which here follows; an account varied as the varying and errant life of the traveller, but in which a love of country, combined with more general views, will be always seen.
Nevertheless, with what a mass of controversy are not these ideas connected which now agitate the world, long absorbed in a civilisation altogether material ?
To acknowledge the divinity of Jesus Christ is undoubtedly to do much, it is more than is done by the greater number of Protestants; still this is only the commencement of Christianity. Even the pagans were willing to raise temples to Him who came to demolish all the temples of their religion. Were they Christians because they proposed to the apostles to place Christ among the number of their gods? A Christian is a member of the church of Christ. Now this exclusive church is one; it has its visible head; and it inquires about the faith of each man quite as much as about his acts, because it governs by the mind.
This church deplores the strange abuse that has been made in our days of the word Christian toleration, to the promotion of philosophical indifference. To make a dogma of toleration, and to substitute that hi mm dogma for all those which are divine, is to destroy religion under the pretext of rendering it amiable. In the eyes of the Catholic church, to practise the virtue of toleration is not to enter into any covenant or to make any compromise respecting principles, but to protest against violence, and to employ prayer, patience, gentleness and persuasion in the
XÎVAUTII01t\s PREFACE.
service of eternal truth: such is not modern toleration. That creed of indifference which became, more than a century ago, the basis of the new theology, loses its hold upon the esteem of Christians in the proportion that it robs faith of its power: true toleration — toleration confined within the limits of piety — is not the normal state of the soul, it is the remedy which a charitable religion and a wise policy oppose to diseases of the mind.
What is meant by that lately invented appellation, Neo-catholicism ? Catholicism cannot become new without ceasing to exist. New converts, tired of being pushed about by every wind of doctrine, and seeking in the sanctuary a shelter from the torment of the ideas of the age, may be called Neo-catholics, but Nco-catholicism cannot be spoken of except through a misconception of the essence of religion, for the word implies contradiction.
Nothing is less ambiguous than our faith ; it is no system of philosophy, of which each one may take or reject what he pleases : an individual is altogether a Catholic or he is no Catholic at all; there can be no almost, nor yet any new mnaner in Catholicism, Neo-catholicism is a disguised sect which must soon abjure error to return into the bosom of the church, under penalty of being otherwise condemned by a church justly impressed with the necessity of preserving the purity of faith, much more than with the ambition of increasing the number of her doubtful and equivocal children. When the world shall adopt Christianity with sincerity, it will take it as it is. The essential point is that the sacred trust remain ¡mre from alloy.
Nevertheless the Catholic church may reform it-
author's preface.xv
self as regards customs, the discipline of the clergy, and even as regards doctrine upon points which do not affect the fundamentals of faith; what indeed is its history, its life, but one perpetual reform? this legitimate and uninterrupted reform can however be only carried on under the direction of ecclesiastical -minority and according to canonical law.
The more I see of the world, its different states and tribes, the more am I convinced that truth is immutable : it was defended with barbarity by barbarous men in barbarous ages ; it will in future be defended with humanity : but its purity cannot be affected either by the prism of error with which its adversaries are dazzled, or by the crimes of its own champions.
I should like to send into Russia, all Christians who are not Catholic, to show them what our religion may be brought to when taught in a national church, when practised under the direction of a national clergy.
The spectacle of abject servility into which the sacerdotal power can fall in a land where the church is only held of the state, would make every consistent Protestant recoil. A national church or a national clergy are words which ought never to have been joined; the church is, by its very essence, superior to all national distinctions, all human associations; to abandon the church universal in order to enter into any political church, is to do worse than err in faith, — it is to abjure the faith, it is to fall back again from heaven to earth.
And yet how many sincere, how many excellent men believed, at the 'birth of Protestantism, that
xvi
author's preface.
they should be purifying their creed by adopting the new doctrines which have only served to narrow their minds I Since then, indifference, masked and extolled under the attractive name of toleration, has perpetuated error.
The circumstance which renders Russia the most singular State now to be seen in the world is that extreme barbarism, favoured by the enslavement of the church, and extreme civilisation, imported by an eclectic government from foreign lands, are there to be seen united. To understand how tranquillity, or at least immobility, can spring from the shock of elements so opposed, it will be necessary to follow the traveller into the heart of this singular country.
The mode which I employ of describing places and defining characters, appears to me, if not the most favourable to the author, at least the most likely to inspire confidence in the reader, whom I oblige to follow me, and whom I render the judge himself of the development of those ideas that may be suggested to me.
I arrived in a new country without any other prejudices, than those which no man can guard against; those which a conscientious study of its history impart. I examined objects, I observed facts and individuals, while candidly permitting daily experience to modify my opinions. Very few exclusive political notions incommoded me in this spontaneous labour, in which religion alone was my unchanging rule ; and even that rule may be rejected by the reader without the recital of facts and the moral consequences that flow from them being discarded, or confounded with the reprobation that I shall meet with from those whose creeds do not agree with mine.
author's preface.xvii
I may be accused of having prejudices, but I shall never be reproached with intentionally disguising the truth.
The descriptions of Avhat I saw were made upon the spot, the recitals of what I heard each day were committed to paper on the same evening. Thus, my conversations with the Emperor, given word for word in the ensuing chapters, cannot fail to possess a species of interest: that of exactitude. They will also serve, I hope, to render this prince, so differently viewed among us and throughout Europe, better known.
The chapters that follow were not all destined for the public. Several of the early ones were written as purely confidential letters. Fatigued with writing, but not with travelling, I resolved, this time, to observe without any methodical plan, and to keep my descriptions for my friends. The reasons that decided me to publish the whole will be seen in the course of the work.