The three daughters of the Bible.

— Under this title, Mr. Hippolyte Rodrigues n published a work in which he foresees the fusion of the three great religions descended from the Bible. n One of the writers of the newspaper Le Pays makes the following reflections about it, in the issue of December 10, 1866:

“What are the three daughters of the Bible? The first is Jewish, the second is Catholic, the third is Mohammedan.

“It is at once understood that this is an important book and that Mr. Hippolyte Rodrigues’s work especially interests serious minds, who take pleasure in moral and philosophical meditations on human destiny.

“The author believes in an approaching fusion of the three great religions, which he calls the three daughters of the Bible, and works to bring about this result, in which he sees an immense progress. It is from this fusion that the new religion will emerge, which he considers as destined to be the definitive religion of Humanity.

“I do not wish here to enter with Mr. Hippolyte Rodrigues into an untimely polemic on the religious question, which has been stirring for so many years in the depths of consciences and in the bowels of society. I shall permit myself, however, one reflection. He wishes the new belief to be accepted by reasoning. Until today there has been nothing but faith that has founded and maintained religions, for this supreme reason: when one reasons, one no longer believes, and when a people, an epoch, has ceased to believe, one soon sees the existing religion crumble, but one does not see a new religion arise.” A. de Cesena.

— This tendency, which is becoming general, to foresee the unification of cults, like everything connected with the fusion of peoples, with the diminishing of the barriers that separate them morally and commercially, is also one of the characteristic signs of the times. We will not judge Mr. Rodrigues’s work, since we do not know it; nor is there any reason to examine, at the moment, the circumstances by which the result he hopes for may be attained, and which he considers, quite rightly, as a progress. We wish only to present some observations on the above article. The author labors under a great error in saying that “when one reasons one no longer believes.” We say, on the contrary, that when one reasons out one’s belief, one believes more firmly, because one understands. It is by virtue of this principle that we have said: Unshakable faith is only that which can look reason in the face, in all epochs of Humanity.

The error of most religions is to have erected, as an absolute dogma, the principle of blind faith, and to have, in favor of this principle, which annihilates the action of intelligence, made people accept, for a time, beliefs that the later progress of Science came to contradict. From this there resulted, in a great number of people, the prejudice that all religious belief is incapable of withstanding free examination, confounding, in a general reprobation, what were only particular cases. This manner of judging things is no more rational than if one were to condemn an entire poem because it contains some incorrect verses, but it is more comfortable for those who wish to believe in nothing, because, by rejecting everything, they consider themselves free to examine nothing. The author commits another capital error in saying: “When a people, an epoch, has ceased to believe, one soon sees the existing religion crumble, but one does not see a new religion arise.” Where has he seen in History a people, an epoch, without religion?

Most religions arose in remote times, when scientific knowledge was very limited or nil. They erected as beliefs erroneous notions, which only time could rectify. Unfortunately, all were founded upon the principle of immutability, and as almost all confounded, in a single code, the civil law and the religious law, it resulted that, at a given moment, the human mind having advanced while religions remained stationary, the latter were no longer found equal to the new ideas. Then they fall by the force of things, as fall the laws, the social customs, the political systems that can no longer correspond to the new needs. But as religious beliefs are instinctive in man and constitute, for the heart and for the mind, a need as imperious as civil legislation for the social order, they are not annihilated: they are transformed. The transition is never effected abruptly, but by the temporary mixture of the old ideas and the new ideas; it is, at first, a mixed faith, which partakes of the one and of the other; little by little the old belief is extinguished, the new grows, until the substitution is complete. At times the transformation is only partial; then it is sects that separate from the mother-religion, modifying some points of detail. It was thus that Christianity succeeded Paganism, that Islamism succeeded Arab fetishism, that Protestantism and the Greek religion separated from Catholicism. Everywhere one sees peoples leave one belief only to take up another, appropriate to their moral and intellectual advancement; but nowhere is there a break in continuity. It is true that today one sees absolute incredulity pass itself off as a doctrine and be professed by some philosophical sects; but their representatives, who constitute an infinitesimal minority in the intelligent population, err in thinking themselves an entire people, an entire epoch and, because they no longer want religion, they imagine that their personal opinion is the measure of the religious times, when it is only a partial transition to another order of ideas.

[1]

[Hippolyte Rodrigues.]

[2] [Les trois filles de la Bible - Google books, by Hippolyte Rodrigues.]