684TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING,

HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM D, THE CENTRAL HALL, WESTMINSTER, S.W.1, ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8TH, 1926, AT 4.30 P.M.

DR. JAMES W. THIRTLE, M.R.A.S., IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read, confirmed, and signed, and the HON. SECRETARY announced the election of G. Wilson Heath, Esq, F.R.G.S., as a Member; Mrs. Hilprecht, as an Associate; and Miss Agnes M. Naish as a Life Associate.

The CHAIRMAN then, in the enforced absence of Professor Roget, requested the Hon. Secretary to read the paper on "A Philosophic Exponent of Latin Culture: Alexandre Vinet, Protestant Divine and Literary Critic (1797-1847)."

A PHILOSOPHIC EXPONENT OF LATIN CULTURE : ALEXANDRE VINET, PROTESTANT DIVINE AND LITERARY CRITIC.

THIS

By PROFESSOR F. F. ROGET, of Geneva.

I.

HIS title may strike the reader as unusual. A doctor in divinity whose authority is unchallenged as a critic of literature; an expert in the subject of literature whose reputation as a divine is well-founded, widespread, and enduring ; that is a rare combination. We know no other of equal merit and conferring credit equally great. That one such example could be, and that there could be only one, will appear shortly.

If you take up Chambers's Biographical Dictionary, you will read under the name of VINET twenty-four lines as follows, altogether 200 words :

"VINET, Alex. Rodolphe (1797-1847), Swiss divine and critic, born at Ouchy near Lausanne, became in 1835 Professor of French Language and Literature at Basel, and in 1837 of Practical Theology at Lausanne. His Mémoire en faveur de la Liberté des Cultes (1826) involved him in the struggle against state interference; and in 1845, resigning his chair, he joined the Free Church of Vaud; in 1846 he was compelled to resign his professorship of French literature in Lausanne Academy. Vinet was an eloquent and evangelical preacher. His Chrestomathie française (1829), his Etudes on the literature of the nineteenth century (1849-51), his Histoire of eighteenth-century literature (1853), Moralistes des XVI et XVII siècles (1859), and Poètes du siècle de Louis XIV (1862), took high rank. Amongst the works translated into English are Christian Philosophy (1846), Vital Christianity (1846), Gospel Studies (1851), Pastoral Theology (1852), Homiletics (1853), Studies in Pascal (1859); Outlines of Philosophy and Literature (1865). See "Studies" by Scherer (1853) and Chavannes (1883); "Lives" by E. Rambert (1875), Louis Molines (1890), and Laura M. Lane (in English, 1890); and his Letters (1882 and 1890). A new and complete edition of his works is in course of publication since 1911, with notes and all useful matter-George Bridel and Co., Lausanne.”

I proceed to unfold the meaning of those words, each of which in this summary is extraordinarily precise, illustrative here, we might almost say, of design with a capital "D." Let us run our eyes along the lines.

First the name, Vinet, which like Godet, Muret, Roget, Grandet, is linguistically as French as French can be; then Swiss, that is, of a nationality which has no language of its own, but expresses itself in three tongues, each borrowed from another nationality, in each case a nationality quite foreign to Swiss nationality; then a divine, which means a trained student of the Bible and servant of God, in the Christian sense of the word, but says no more. That is quite enough to show what sort of literary critic a man so trained must be, if true to the spirit throughout. To this vocation and education Vinet was true : no question yet of belonging to this or that Church.

The next predicate makes him a critic, but does not say of what. We may well assume from what precedes that Gospel

truth is meant. That his standard of criticism will be either Protestant or Roman may further be presumed. That, as a consistent divine, he will carry that, his standard of criticism, into literature is, in all verisimilitude, the conclusion to be drawn from the information we get next.

He was born and educated and trained in divinity in Protestant, French-speaking Canton Vaud, in Switzerland, at Lausanne, where the National School of Protestant Theology dates as far back as 1526. We find next that, at the age of twenty-eight (in 1835) he was appointed Professor of French Literature and Language at Basle, a German-speaking Zwinglian community bordering on Lutheran Alsace. His spiritual vocation (divinity) and his intellectual profession (criticism) keep pace together quite wonderfully; they are reciprocal and alternative.

Two years later (1837) he returns, as Professor of Practical Theology, to the Faculty of Divinity at Lausanne. In that office his persuasion is modified. The civil notion of a State Church is no longer acceptable to his Christian conscience; he turns Evangelical. He resigned his official chair of Theology, resigned his official professorship of French literature in the Academy; this makes him an unattached divine and an unattached intellectualist. He thus reaches a unity and personality of conscience embracing both branches of his life-work, with spiritual and intellectual independence in his public functions.

Two years after this achievement his visible life came to a close (1847), but his self did not perish for so much. He was an eloquent man and a good preacher; he was a writer, and had consigned himself to paper. He had prepared at Basle and published (1829) a Treasury of French Literature, in three stout volumes, which for four generations now has educated the Swiss youth of either sex in all that is sound in French literature. This book, with its notes and introductive history of French literature, marks down or keeps out anything in French thought, poetry or prose, the acceptance of which would be a playing false to Protestant ethics, or, if paraded before the young, conducive in fact to corruption of taste and morals anywhere.

His Critical Studies of French Literature (animadverting on any implicit morality or immorality, vulgarity or distinction), were published one by one after his death, till 1862. His Studies of Christianity were made public in their sequence, till 1865. His Philosophy, a most valuable product of his religion and

human sense, is now being made available for recension and re-presentation, in a complete edition of all his critical works, which has reached its fourth volume of 560 pages octavo. There have been published in English many translations, based on the earlier editions.

II.

On the principle that the irreligion of a non-religious man is made, by the law of perversion, his religion, Vinet and Rousseau, both Protestants, are in Protestantism as the poles asunder. Rousseau is the rotted fruit fallen from the tree. Vinet is the pure sap of the vine-stock, its unfermented sweet juice. In his life-work there is an individual purpose made manifest. But the Design, or semblance of a Design, to which we pointed in the beginning is it made apparent in this? Well, there is, in the background of Vinet's life, a kind of previous adjustment to time and place, and of both to the evolution of Church, State, and Ethics (public feeling) in Europe. Let us make our meaning plain. The geographical area covered by the French language, and, If we may say so, by the French stock of men and women, is not co-extensive with the territory of France. It extends further to the north and to the east. In the north, that is, in Belgium, public feeling-social ethics-are continuous with those of France. In other words, the Roman Catholic Church has established its universal claim to mould alone the religious spirit and, conversely, the irreligious, in Belgium and in France.

But if we look east, toward Switzerland, what occurred there is a thing apart. The French-speaking parts of Switzerland which are Protestant, form a geographical whole, and have moved together in spiritual unity and in like religious ethics since 1526, without a break or interference. Moreover, the Protestant German-speaking Swiss also form a solid body in which the Zwinglian type of Protestantism has held unbroken sway through the centuries. The Lutheran Reformation did not agree with the Swiss national spirit. But both Calvinism and Zwinglianism, which are practically interchangeable, did arise and flourish there as the national form of adherence to Biblical Christianity. So the Protestant "block" in Switzerland, numbering some two million people, is consistent, self-dependent, national, and of the popular type-no hierarchy.

Protestantism, in France, does not form an aggregate. It is dispersed, sporadic, discontinuous; it has no habitation, neither

in the heart of the nation nor in the ethics of the people. And the irreligion of France-whether it be taken as fostered by the Roman Catholic Church, antagonistically, or as resisting it justly did not challenge Protestantism in the name of a higher conception and, ex hypothesi, a better one, and so has no home in Switzerland as against any of the forms in which Christianity is established there.

Now let me take the Swiss area saved for Latin Christians of Protestant complexion, as by a decree of Providence. Let us mentally remove it-geography, spirit, ethics, and all—to join it to Great Britain, and to the whole Anglo-Saxon race, to which it is kin, the ethnic feature alone excepted. What do we find? We find that, if Protestant Switzerland could be lifted up en bloc, so to say, on one huge shovel, and laid, say, on the top of Yorkshire, or Wales, or Scotland, it would fit in perfectly, disturb nothing, and undergo no disturbance. If, on the contrary, we were to place it, en bloc, on some part of the map of France, it would prove entirely heterogeneous to France, as a form of faith, as a Church, and in public ethics.

From every point of view fellowship with the British mind. would be perfect. The irreligion, even, of the Protestant-born Anglo-Saxon renegade and that of the Swiss-born are as much of one piece as the religion was one which their ancestors held in common. Everybody knows that Calvinism was parent to both Protestant religion and irreligion, as Adam was parent to Abel and to Cain.

Thence follows that Alexandre Vinet, answering the description I gave at the beginning of this demonstration, stands to France exactly in the same relation as an Englishman would, supposing that Englishman to be a Protestant divine who was at the same time an ethical critic of French literature.

Yet, strange to say, there is no such Englishman as Vinet was. Why? Because no Englishman has a Latin mind; the English soul is Anglo-Saxon. And so we get to the heart of the matter. We have before us a mind which was a Latin mind, by inheritance, by breeding and by self-culture, sitting in judgment over French literature. He edits it, as it were, critically as to its spirit and contents, but with sympathetic affinity, for the benefit of Protestant-bred people and for general enlightenment. The position is unique in the history of literature. But the vantage of the position depends entirely on the power, penetrativeness, and fairness of the man.