Reviews.

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 December 1883, Page 10

Reviews.

The Religions Revolution of the Nineteenth Century : From the French, by Edgar Quinet. London : Trubner & Co., 1881.

Edgar Quinet may rightly be termed the Apostle of modern Politico-religious thought in France. The work is " an explanation and a defence of the principles and policy of the French Government with reference 'to the Roman Church in France." Quinet was one of the victims of the Coup d' Etat of 51, and was for nineteen years an exile from France. It has been said that The principle of Liberty and the Importance of the Individual were the two leading ideas of Quinet's philosophy. Recognising that " the foster-mother of all the tyrannies in Western Europe, was the Roman Catholic Church," he devoted his talents to the solution of the problem, how this great power for evil was to be overcome. Quinet advises the same means of destruction as the Church employed against the Pagans, and justifies the exercise of the whole of the Power of the State in crushing a religion which seeks to undermine and destroy the principles of civil liberty on which the State should rest. Reciting the interdicts of Theodosius against the Pagan worship, he would use them, with necessary changes, against the Roman Church. He maintains that the application of the lex talionis is justified from the fact that " as far as experience yet goes, there has been no time nor place in which the Catholic Church has been allowed to remain with- unfettered hands by the cradle of Liberty, but what in a short time Liberty has been found stifled in its swaddling-clothes." He applies the Catholic law therefore to the Catholic Church. What Quinet recommended, has been faithfully carried out in the expulsion of the religious orders from France, and his philosophy is animating the dominant school of French statesman to-day as well as the special school of Gambetta. His doctrine is that if Catholicism be not crushed in countries where it is the religion of the masses, it will extinguish Liberty. Nor can education destroy a baneful religion when that religion has command of the education. To understand the meaning of the hostility of French and Italian statesman towards the Romish Church, one cannot do better than read this little work, so full of epigrammatic force and eloquence. Quinet died in 1875.