When once this thesis has been relegated to the rank of a
fiction Protestantism crumbles away. There is nothing for it but to
retire up on natural religion, or the religion of the moral
consciousness. M.M. Reville, Conquerel, Fontanes, Buisson, [Footnote:
The name of M. Albert Reville, the French Protestant theologian, is more
or less familiar in England, especially since his delivery of the
Hibbert lectures in 1884. Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 1876, the
well-known champion of liberal ideas in the French Protestant Church,
was suspended from his pastoral functions by the Consistory of Paris, on
account of his review of M. Renan's "Vie de Jesus" in 1864.
Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a liberal Protestant, originally a professor
at Lausanne, was raised to the important function of Director of Primary
Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879. He was denounced by Bishop Dupanloup,
in the National Assembly of 1871, as the author of certain liberal
pamphlets on the dangers connected with Scripture-teaching in schools,
and, for the time, lost his employment under the Ministry of Education.]
accept this logical outcome. They are the advance-guard of Protestantism
and the laggards of free thought.
Their mistake is not seeing that all institutions rest upon a legal
fiction, and that every living thing involves a logical absurdity.
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