Vinet and Scherer

IT may seem a striking coincidence to find side by side, among recent biographies, a new collection of Vinet’s letters ¹ and M. Gréard’s life of Edmond Scherer,² which, treating largely of the early part of his career, shows the distinguished French critic in his half-forgotten character of a Swiss theologian. The two books did not, however, appear simultaneously. M. de Pressensé’s volume was published long enough after M. Gréard’s for the insertion of an appendix, which is a criticism on the latter work ; and his familiarity with the documents of Swiss Protestantism had already enabled him to present in the somewhat polemical text in which these letters of Vinet’s are imbedded a tolerably full discussion of Scherer’s brief relation to, and subsequent divergence from, the theology of Vinet. The two books are hardly of equal importance, since this handful of letters, stamped as they are with Vinet’s always vivid and attractive individuality, forms but a slight addition to the mass of intimate literature which readers him already an unusually accessible figure; whereas M. Gréard’s volume on Scherer illuminates for the first time a personality more or less correctly divined by every attentive reader of Scherer’s critical work, but long kept out of sight by the necessarily impersonal character of such writing, as well as by the very variety of his interests and researches. It is the man himself, not the critic, whom we meet in this biography, a book that is personal and intimate throughout; not the study of a period, nor a volume of literary or clerical gossip, but the record of an individual struggle in the search for truth, — a record marked with the clear, impartial frankness which distinguished the experience recorded. It was not an exhilarating experience, and the book has not the requisites for popularity, but it is nevertheless a notable contribution to that department of literature which we may call thought-biography. In some respects it bears a stronger analogy to certain English biographies than to anything of the kind that we recollect in French literature, although such an intellectual drama in England is apt to take place against a more prominent background ; the universities and the establishment in that country having created a certain solidarity of thought, thus bringing individual phases into direct relation with large general movements of opinion.

Edmond Scherer was of English extraction on his mother’s side. His father, who belonged to a Swiss family resident in France since the beginning of the eighteenth century, married Miss Hubbard, the daughter of a London banker established in Paris, and became a partner in the banking-house. He died young, leaving three children. Scherer’s education also was partly English. Born in Paris in 1815, he spent some years at a French school, where he showed a disinclination to study, together with a lively appetite for reading, particularly poetry, and kept a notebook recording the transition of his opinions within two months from skepticism to deism, thence to Christianity, and later on to Pyrrhonism. In 1831 he was sent to England, where he entered the family of the Rev. Thomas Loader, a dissenting minister at Monmouth. Here he acquired a perfect knowledge of English, studied Greek, read Blackstone and Burke, and plunged with fervor into the religious life about him, filling his hours with “ theological discussions, explanations of the Bible, pious meditations.” His notebook of 1832 wound up with the words: “ December 25. Christmas Day ; conversion.” Tracts for the Times were coming out towards the close of his stay in Monmouth, and Scherer, we are told, “ fed upon them as upon a nutriment prepared expressly to meet the cravings of his imagination and his heart.” M. Gréard does not mention how the ingredient assimilated with a dissenting piety “seeking its creed in Calvinism and its inspiration in revivals,” or give any map connecting the Oxford ideas with those which seem to have surrounded and controlled Scherer at this period. The hold which the latter had upon him was so strong that he proposed entering the evangelical ministry ; but his family had other views, and it was only after completing his studies in letters and law at Paris that he was able to follow his bent by becoming, in 1836, a theological student at Strasburg.

We get a glimpse of him at the moment of his arrival there from the reminiscences of Professor Reuss, in a letter written in 1889. He recalls Scherer’s “rigid orthodoxy" and “Calvinistic inflexibility,” redeemed by “substantial learning and an indefatigable ardor for theological study, joined to rare lucidity of mind and diction.” The German thoroughness and precision of method were an inspiration to Scherer. He refers somewhere to the danger which exists from the first moment, to a theological student, in having things which have hitherto been matters of implicit belief to him made the subject of investigation. “The very ground seems to give way under his feet; in a word, it is a situation from which one goes out a conqueror only through prayer and tears.”But there is no record of his faith having been unsettled by his studies at Strasburg. The discourse pronounced at his ordination is termed by M. Gréard an “ hosanna of faith,” and contrasted by him with the state of mind betrayed by Lamennais on entering the priesthood. It might with almost equal force have been opposed to many of Vinet’s hesitating, poignant utterances.

At the time of his ordination Scherer was already happily married. He continued to live at Strasburg, immersed in theological research, preaching occasionally, but with reluctance, and declining to accept any charge. His love of exactness made him shrink from the dangers of improvisation or of obligatory speech, as Vinet shrank from them. “ He had at that time adopted as a maxim of conduct. ‘ No unnecessary speech.’ Even with his friends and in the intimacy of his own household he imposed upon himself this ascetic rule, and allowed conversations to take their course without putting in a word.” A letter from a lady in a German town where he went to preach, and was expected with enthusiasm, speaks of him as having a “glacial aspect,” and as reducing the whole company to silence by an excess of reserve, which she attributes to shyness. The same letter has an account of his preaching; “of his young face, gentle and grave, with great eyes, to which the tears come at moments;” of “ that profound feeling that he was there sent by God, and for his glory,— a feeling which communicated itself to the congregation.” But, notwithstanding the belief that he inspired in those around him in his qualifications as a preacher, Scherer felt that his gifts and his usefulness lay rather in the direction of research and of teaching. When the free school of theology at Geneva, known as the Oratory, offered him a professorship, he accepted it, with a sense of entering upon his true vocation.

He went to Geneva in 1845, the year of the political revolution in the canton of Vaud, and of the ecclesiastical difficulties in the same canton which subsequently led to the founding of the Free Church. M. de Phessensé gives a clear account of both these events, in connection with the letters of Vinet addressed to M. Henri Lutteroth, editor of Le Semeur, which are full of details of the struggle. He gives also a sketch of Vinet’s life, sufficient for the understanding of the letters, but not long enough to detain a reader already familiar with the fuller sources of information regarding their writer. It is an interesting book to read in connection with the life of Scherer, who for two years was in intimate relation with Vinet, — was, indeed, we are told by M. Gréard, the one nearest to Vinet’s heart among all that little band called by him the Enfants de Dieu.

A native of Lausanne, — he was born at Ouchy in 1797, and received his literary and theological education at the Academy of Lausanne, — Vinet had returned to that town in 1837 to fill the chair of practical theology at the academy, after some years spent in teaching in the gymnasium at Bâle. He had long hesitated to accept the position. With rare gifts and a personal influence that survives to this day, he had received many offers, collegiate, pastoral, and literary. He replied to each at first by urging his deficiency of training and of knowledge, and finally by the confession, repeated again and again in his letters, of a personal dread. It is like the cry of a wounded creature. “It is not you that I fear; it is myself,”he says in one of the letters written from Bâle, declining an offer to go to Paris, and combine preaching with literary work on Le Semeur. “ It is this heat of brain which is provoked by the subject, the place, by excitement, and which I have the misfortune to mistake momentarily for warmth of heart. There are yet other inward influences, still less pure and more dangerous, to which I should inevitably yield, and which in forcing me into a decisive attitude would chain me to the terrible and perhaps irreparable fate of spending my life in hypocrisy. ... I will not explain this word hypocrisy. Your friends and you yourself know in what sense I use it. There is one thing sure, and that is that if, to avoid this danger, I were obliged to shut myself up in a village school, and pass my life in teaching the A B C, the alternative would not be a hard one.”

To Vinet and to Scherer alike the escape from the danger of insincerity lay in a close accord between speech and thought, between conviction and life, in preferring silence and deprivation to any strain of this bond. Both were individualists, to borrow Vinet’s word; but with Vinet the impulse was to seek for equilibrium, not in the strength of a rule imposed from without, but in that of a conviction growing from within. He had not felt the fascination of religious science, but he felt keenly the struggle of the soul with life. In neither of these men, both highly endowed, full of ardor and conscientiousness, do we find for a single moment any thought of measuring his life work by its magnitude, but simply by its verity and its adaptation to his powers. There is no burden upon them to make the widest use of their talent, or to inquire if it be a paying one in the spiritual any more than the pecuniary sense. The only question is to make a right use of it. In deciding to accept a chair of practical theology in his own canton, Vinet acted from the conviction that it was the position in which it would be, on the whole, most possible to be himself.

His fears for the church went hand in hand with his personal dread. He felt that the danger which menaced it lay in a law imposed from without, in a creed formally accepted and comprehended mechanically. The established church had grown weak through its very supports. The first necessity toward a remedy for this state of things seemed to Vinet to lie in a separation of church and state. This was long the aim of his efforts, particularly during the two troubled years of which we have spoken.

He found a vigorous supporter in Scherer, who had become the editor of La Réformation au XIXe Siècle, a journal to which, as to Le Semeur, Vinet was a contributor, — giving, indeed, to each its chief inspiration. Their object was to free the church, not to establish a Free Church. “ Many dissenting churches may be formed,” wrote Vinet, “ without the principle having gained the victory. In separating ourselves individually, we are acting in support of a principle already beyond question, not of the principle which is now under consideration. . . • Even if we became dissenters for our personal satisfaction, we should be obliged, this done, to go further, and to work toward the great, revolution; in other words, to work toward the emancipation of the church to which we had ceased to belong.” Deprived of his professorship after the deposition of the Vaudois non-conformist ministers, Vinet still refused the offers made him from Paris and elsewhere ; to the reasons of conscience was joined the plea of ill health. He lived to see the organization of the Free Church in 1847, accepting it., not triumphantly, but as the truest and best measure then possible. In May of that year he died at Clarens, where his tomb is built like a shrine into the wall of the little cemetery, not far from the grave of Amiel. “ We loved him so,” wrote Scherer to Lutteroth, when the end was inevitable ; “we all felt ourselves bound to him. Our thoughts turned to him so naturally and so constantly.”

The mantle had not fallen upon Scherer, who at this epoch was leading a tranquil and happy life at Geneva, dividing his time between lecturing, study, and a small society of congenial friends and eager students, but who was soon called upon to go alone into another region of thought and to embrace a different career. We find the first traces of a change just a year after the death of Vinet. It was the study of tests which first unsettled Scherer’s faith. Some fragments of prayer and meditation, written in the early days of the conflict, to which he had prefixed the title The Visits of Jesus Christ, were found among his papers after his death. He looks back to his former faith, to the sureness of the revelation within him. “ Hast thou not already abode with me once? It was three years ago. It lasted three days. And my life was transformed, my doubts were dispersed, my struggles were forgotten, my darkness became light. Love overflowed in my heart, death inspired in me no more terrors, martyrdom would have appeared easy to me. My first thought on waking, my last on falling asleep, was of thee. . . . Come back to me, O my Saviour ! ” And later : “ Ah, lies, lies ! Truth is unity in one’s life, and I am anything but a unit. Sincerity, unity, harmony, peace, — so many correlative terms. . . . O my God, grant that I may be true ! ”

In June, 1849, he wrote a letter which was handed about among his friends, telling them that he had ceased to hold the plenary inspiration of the Bible, that he no longer believed in the truth of the things he was teaching, and that his work had become a burden to him. He did not resign his professorship till the following November. But he had already gained strength to meet the new truth fearlessly. “ My present sentiments,” he wrote, “ are not with me a matter of painful doubt, but of joyous conviction. . . . Protestantism cannot remain the bastard system that it is now ; it must go forward or it must retreat. This generation feels that it has not the truth ; it needs to clear up its beliefs; it aspires to a life at once more intellectual and more religious.”

“When the reproaches of his friends pressed him too closely,” says M. Gréard, “ he gave as the explanation, if not the excuse, of his boldness, that man does not learn only what he wishes to learn ; that he learns unceasingly, in spite of himself, from the course of events, from the spectacle of the world, from suffering ; that each addition of knowledge necessarily modifies the whole mass of the knowledge already acquired : that it is in this manner that the greatest spiritual revolutions have been accomplished ; and that Christianity itself had acted upon souls only in this way. The fact is, he did not wait till questions came to him. He went to meet them. He had no sooner solved one than another surged up in his mind. They followed upon each other, like wave upon wave. The gnawing activity of his intellect left him neither truce nor rest.”

Early in 1850 Scherer began an independent course of lectures, in which he discussed authority in religious belief. After treating the question of historical evidence, and declaring that what remained to faith, after the dogma of inspiration was withdrawn from the Scriptures, was the person of Jesus Christ, he went on : “ Faith is independent of science; it belongs to another sphere ; it is itself the truth. As for me, I shall not cease to say to others, and to repeat to myself, a sentence which should serve as our watchword : ‘ We believe in Jesus Christ; let us also believe in the truth.’ ”

The publication in April, 1850, of the letter already mentioned was followed by his expulsion from the church, and by an excited discussion in the religious press, in which he took part, replying to attacks through those organs which remained faithful to him. But for him the question was inevitably ceasing to be one of detail or of argument; the change was in the whole aspect of things.

“ The most profound revolution which can mark our life,”he writes in 1851, “ is that which takes place when the absolute escapes us, and with the absolute the fixed outlines, the special sanctuary, and the oracles of truth. It is hard to express all the agitation in the heart when we begin to recognize that our church and our system have not the monopoly of the good and the true; when we meet with men equally eminent and sincere who profess the most opposite opinions; when sin and justice become in our eyes as the infinite degrees of a ladder that mounts to the sky and descends to the lowest depths; when we discover that there is no error which has not a grain of truth, no truth which is not partial, narrow, incomplete, stained with error; when the relative thus appears to us as the form of the absolute upon earth, the absolute as an object forever aimed at, but forever inaccessible, and truth as a mirror broken into a thousand fragments, of which each one bears a reflection of the heaven, while none reflects the whole heaven. Till this moment submission has sufficed ; now investigation becomes a duty. Authority and the absolute have vanished together; and since truth is nowhere concentrated in a single depository, it is necessary henceforth to search, to feel, to choose.”

For ten years he put his whole strength into the conflict. The craving for a creed, for an object to be worshiped with mystical, personal devotion, had given way to the one need for truth, in whatever form or measure. It was the acceptation of Emerson’s words: “ Leave thy theory as Joseph his cloak in the hand of the harlot, and flee.” From 1855 to 1859 Scherer continued his cours libre at Geneva, confining himself to those portions of the New Testament which are the most spiritually helpful and the least dogmatic. He collected his most important articles on religious matters in a volume entitled Mélanges de Critique Religieuse, which appeared in 1860, on the day of his departure from Geneva for Paris, where he was at once pressed into the service of literary criticism.

The influence of Vinet had been exchanged for that of Sainte-Beuve, among whose successors no one has come nearer to equaling him in authority and general critical intelligence than Scherer. He lacked the gift of sympathy which distinguished Sainte-Beuve, the power of penetrating into, and as it were temporarily occupying, the mind of his author; his observations were made more from without. His knowledge was more extensive, including as it did an acquaintance with foreign literature rare among French critics, and a complete mastery of English and German. In 1871, when he was a member of the National Assembly, and had added political writing to his critical work, he corresponded with the Boston Review, an organ of the Trinitarian Congregationalists, and contributed two articles on the war to Lippincott’s Magazine, written in faultless English, and from 1873 to 1878 he was a correspondent of the London Daily News.

In later life he stood a little aloof from the agitations of the day, with unabated intellectual interest, but with slight intercourse with younger men or sympathy for their illusions. He seems to have regarded them sadly, like Mark Pattison, whom he resembles in a certain gritty frankness and keenness of mind. But his observations, made from a distance, and not without bitterness, were well worth meditating. He had a horror of words being used in an inflated sense, promising more than the fact could perform. “ The phrases of our humanitarians always remind me of J. J. Rousseau’s saying, that he would not hesitate to give his daughter in marriage to the hangman’s son, provided he was a good fellow. That is an excellent touchstone, and one that I adopt. I will believe in ‘ humanity ’ when all human beings consent to an abolition of distinctions in the matter of marriage.” The progress of democracy was not a source of pleasure to him ; it contained the destruction of the things which he most valued. “ We are getting Americanized. Modern society has time for two things only: the work by which it earns its bread, and the amusements which enable it to forget the work.”

A shade of regret for the lost faith lingered with him to the last. In a conversation with some friends, one of them quoted Guizot’s characterization of Lamennais as an intellectual criminal (“ ce malfaiteur intellectuel ”). Scherer sprang up, exclaiming, “ A criminal! A criminal! M. Guizot does not know what it costs ! ” and left the room. His life was shadowed by family troubles, but its latter days were peaceful. A few weeks before his death he wrote to a young author: “ The universe is a fact. It is not we who regulate it; we have only to submit. . . . However dry or bitter these truths may be, they are not without fruit. It is something to have learned that, among the questions which agitate the human race, there are some which have no solution or even sense. And the acceptance of things as they are, the habit of seeing in them the inevitable conditions of life, is a tolerable receipt for resignation. If one does not suffer less, one is less rasped by suffering; the pain is freed from bitterness, and the regrets from passion.”

Looking at the mass of intelligent and faithful literary work performed by Scherer during a period of thirty years, the position which he occupied, the sincere, strong qualities shown in his biography, one is ready to ask with M. Gréard, “Whence comes it that his influence was not in proportion to his talent, and that even now the homage paid to his memory is chiefly that of respect ? ” M. Gréard answers his question by pointing to the independence of Scherer’s thought, and to a certain intellectual isolation, which he attributes to long brooding and inward struggle, concentration upon research and meditation. We fancy that we can trace in Scherer from the first Something of this intellectual isolation ; that it belonged in part to a deficiency of sympathy and to a certain difficulty of liaison, a trait of his nature which, without precluding warm and sincere friendships, rendered him in a sense inaccessible to the freetrade intercourse of mind with mind. Scherer himself ascribed his critical faculty and historic sense to his theological training ; and of course a mind that has been given up to a single subject during all its formative years cannot fail to exhibit the results of that training. Yet we cannot help thinking that in his case the critical and historic sense were already there, underlying and directing rather than produced by the theological development. M. de Pressensé finds in Scherer’s skepticism the reverse side of the rigidity and external character of his faith, of that ardent orthodoxy which he describes as a combination of logic and mysticism. The connection is obvious, but to understand the phenomenon we must seek its explanation not in these technical terms, which classify rather than describe thought, but in biographical data. What is this logic and this mysticism, humanly speaking? Do we not find in the one something of a craving for discipline on the part of a mind which has “ felt the weight of too much liberty,” and in the other a shrinking from the solitude and shelterlessness of the open country to which the critical instinct early invited him? There was with Scherer the desire of the logical faculty for an attainable perfect science; the longing of restlessness for an imperative duty; and above all, that which underlies all struggle, the demand for unity, which is not alone an intellectual craving, but the cry of the conscience as well.

To say that Scherer’s doubts and affirmations belonged to the intellect, Vinet’s to the moral nature, is to make a statement which roughly indicates a distinction between the two men, but would be misleading if unqualified. No thinker who has had a moment’s perception of the oneness of truth deliberately divorces the moral from the intellectual aspect; no thought will hold which does not bear, however imperfectly, the stamp of the whole man. Vinet had not the theological training of Scherer, nor the same incentive to research in historical curiosity. He paid little attention to the question of documentary evidence ; the truths of detail which forced themselves on Scherer’s mind had no significance for him. He arrived at truth by intuition, seizing the spiritual kernel of the fact presented to him ; too sensitive and true of touch to miss what was most essential to his nature, too narrowly intense to preserve always his perspective and perception of relations. This intuition and spiritual perception, this power of coming close to the truth he perceived and assimilating it wholly, was what Scherer lacked. Neither was a great or original thinker: but in Vinet’s sensitive sincerity, recalling that of Frederick Robertson, there is a deep and inspiring note ; in Scherer’s accuracy of vision and statement and unflinching courage, an appeal to our interest that is sad, though genuine and bracing.