638 Chapter XXVI
It is hard to believe that some of the most insistently professing church people, at
the close of the eighteenth century, saw any more meaning in the Incarnation or
Crucifixion than did Maximilien Robespierre or the Theophilanthropists. At St.
Paul’s cathedral in London, at Holy Communion at Easter in 1800, only six per-
sons presented themselves as communicants.^51 “Of all the pretences,” said Thomas
Erskine in 1797, “by which the abused zeal of the people of England has been
hurried on to a blind support of ministers, this alarm for the Christian religion is
the most impudent and preposterous.... Before this discovery of the present min-
isters, who had ever heard of the Christianity of the French court and its sur-
rounding nobles?”^52
The organized and responsible church or churches, since the days of the Roman
Empire, had always called for civil peace, obedience to law, and acceptance of the
civil authorities. The peculiarity now was that they continued to do so with so little
compunction. Idealizing stability at a time when society had in fact become un-
stable, they had not yet digested the new idea of social change, and largely ignored
the unsettling aspects of Christianity which had been well known in earlier times.
The price paid was that, for over a century, much of the most significant moral
development in European civilization, with its changing sense of justice and hu-
manity, went on outside the pale of institutional religion.
Some ideas that seem recognizably Christian were more frequently expressed by
persons who did not call themselves Christians, or were in fact called atheists by
their enemies. There are more Biblical echoes in Thomas Paine than in Edmund
Burke, appeals to Genesis and St. Paul to argue for human equality and the unity
of mankind, to prove that “every child born into the world must be considered as
deriving its existence from God.”^53 The idea that Jesus had been a good sans-
culotte was common enough in France in 1793. The situations and the style of
language often appear comical, but what seems incongruous in one set of circum-
stances is less so in another. Filippo Buonarroti, for example, when he was French
representative at Oneglia in 1794, delivered a harangue on the occasion of the
Worship of the Supreme Being. It was a long outpouring of Robespierrist and
Rousseauist religious feeling. It included an apostrophe to Jesus Christ:
“Philosopher- Founder of Christianity, the day of fulfilment of your wishes is not
far removed. Your doctrine, disfigured by tyrants, is ours. The time has now come
when, following your prediction, science and nature will join all men into a single
flock. Brothers and friends, let us give thanks to the Eternal; the Revolution, new
proof of his existence, is his work.”^54 There are similar overtones in the writings of
the radical German republican, Rebmann. When the Dutch, who as already noted
were the first to do so, adopted “liberty, equality, fraternity” as a national motto,
friends ceased publication of their somewhat playful Anti- Jacobin in July 1798, another and entirely
different group used the same title in publishing a journal more intentionally religious, The Anti-
Jacobin Review and Magazine, which appeared monthly from 1798 to 1821, changing its title in 1810
to Anti- Jacobin Review and True Churchman’s Magazine, and adding Protestant Advocate in 1816.
51 H. Davies, Worship and Theology in England... 1690–1850 (Princeton, 1961), 280.
52 T. Erskine, A View of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France (33rd ed., Lon-
don, 1797), 55. At least thirty- five editions in 1797.
53 Rights of Man, Everyman ed., 42.
54 A. Saitta, Filippo Buonarroti, 2 vols. (Rome, 1950), I, 255.