Oh, joy! the vile desires of sensual passion were annulled (as she had
wished) in the full possession of each other's soul, and happiness, as
happiness ever does, made me feel better and more pious than I had ever
been. God and my love were so mingled in my heart, that my adoration of
her became a perpetual adoration of the Supreme Being who had created
her. During the day, when we loitered on the sloping hills or on the
borders of the lake, or sat on the root of some tree in a sunny lawn,
to rest, to gaze, and to admire, our conversation would often, from the
natural overflowing of two full hearts, tend towards that fathomless
abyss of all thought,--the Infinite! and towards Him who alone can fill
infinite space,--God! When I pronounced this last word, with the
heartfelt gratitude which reveals so much in one single accent, I was
surprised to see her averted looks, or remark on her brow and in the
corners of her mouth a trace of sad and painful incredulity, which
seemed to me in contradiction with our enthusiasm. One day, I asked
her, timidly, the reason. "It is that that word gives me pain," she
answered. "And how," said I, "how can the word that comprehends all
life, all love, and all goodness give pain to the most perfect of God's
creations?" "Alas!" she said with the tone of a despairing soul, "that
word represents the idea of a Being, whose existence I have
passionately desired might not be a dream; and yet that Being," she
added in a low and mournful tone, "in my eyes, and in those of the
sages whose lessons I have received, is but the most marvellous and
unreal delusion of our thoughts." "What!" said I, "your teachers do not
believe there is a God? But you, who love, how can you disbelieve? Does
not every throb of our hearts proclaim Him?" "Oh," she answered
hastily, "do not interpret as folly the wisdom of those men who have
uplifted for me the veils of philosophy, and have caused the broad day
of reason and of science to shine before my eyes, instead of the pale
and glimmering lamp with which Superstition lights the voluntary
darkness, that she wilfully casts around her childish divinity. It is
in the God of your mother and my nurse that I no longer believe, and
not the God of Nature and of Science. I believe in a Being who is the
Principle and Cause, spring and end of all other beings, or rather, who
is himself the eternity, form, and law of all those beings, visible or
invisible, intelligent or unintelligent, animate or inanimate, quick or
dead, of which is composed the only real name of this Being of beings,
the Infinite. But the idea of the incommensurable greatness, the
sovereign fatality, the inflexible and absolute necessity of all the
acts of this Being, whom you call God and we term Law, excludes from
our thoughts all precise intelligibility, exact denomination,
reasonable imagining, personal manifestation, revelation, or
incarnation, and the idea of any possible relation between that Being
and ourselves, even of homage and of prayer. Wherefore should the
Consequence pray to the Cause?
"It is a cruel thought," she added; "for how many blessings, prayers,
and tears I should have poured out at His feet since I have loved you!
But," she resumed, "I surprise and pain you; pray forgive me. Is not
truth the first of virtues, if virtue there be? On this single point we
cannot agree; let us never speak of it. You have been brought up by a
pious mother, in the midst of a Christian family, and have inhaled with
your first breath the holy credulity of your home. You have been led by
the hand into the temples; you have been shown images, mysteries, and
altars; you have been taught prayers and told, God is here, who listens
and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to
inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your
childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this
God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not
departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see
has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which
fascinated you on your entrance into life; you have retained two
weaknesses of intelligence,--mystery and prayer. There is no mystery"
she said, in a more solemn tone; "there is only reason, which dispels
all mystery! It is man, crafty or credulous man, who invented
mystery,--God made reason! And prayer does not exist," she continued
mournfully, "for an inflexible law will not relent, and a necessary law
cannot be changed.
"The ancients, with that profound wisdom which was often hidden beneath
their popular ignorance, knew that full well," she added; "for they
prayed to all the gods of their invention, but they never implored the
supreme law,--Destiny."
She was silent. "It appears to me," I said after a long pause, "that
the teachers who have instilled their wisdom into you have too much
subordinated the feeling to the reasoning Being, in their theory of the
relation of God to man; in a word, they have overlooked the heart in
man,--the heart which is the organ of love, as intelligence is the
organ of thought. The imaginings of man in respect of God may be
puerile and mistaken, but his instincts, which are his unwritten law,
must be sometimes right; if not, Nature would have lied in creating
him. You do not think Nature a lie," I said smiling,--"you, who said
just now that truth was perhaps the only virtue? Now, whatever may have
been the intention of God in giving those two instincts, mystery and
prayer, whether he meant thereby to show that he was the
incomprehensible God, and that his name was Mystery; or that he desired
that all creatures should give him honor and praise, and that prayer
should be the universal incense of nature,--it is most certain that
man, when he thinks on God, feels within him two instincts, mystery and
adoration. Reason's province," I pursued, "is to enlighten and disperse
mystery, more and more every day, but never to dispel it entirely.
Prayer is the natural desire of the heart to pour forth unceasingly its
supplications, efficacious or not, heard or unheard, as a precious
perfume on the feet of God. What matters it if the perfume fall to the
ground, or whether it anoint the feet of God? It is always a tribute of
weakness, humility, and adoration.
"But who can say that it is ever lost?" I added in the tone of one
whose hopes triumph over his doubts; "who can say that prayer, the
mysterious communication with invisible Omnipotence, is not in reality
the greatest of all the natural or supernatural powers of man? Who can
say that the supreme and immortal Will has not ordained from all
eternity that prayer should be continually inspired and heard, and that
man should thus, by his invocations, participate in the ordering of his
own destiny? Who knows whether God, in his love, and perpetual blessing
on the beings which emanate from him, has not established this bond
with them, as the invisible chain which links the thoughts of all
worlds to his? Who knows but that, in his majestic solitude which he
peoples alone, he has willed that this living murmur, this continual
communing with nature, should ascend and descend continually in all
space from him to all the beings that he vivifies and loves, and from
those beings to him? At all events, prayer is the highest privilege of
man, since it allows him to speak to God. If God were deaf to our
prayers, we should still pray; for if in his majesty he would not hear
us, still prayer would dignify man."
I saw that my reasonings touched without convincing her, and that the
springs of her soul, which science had dried up, had not yet flowed
towards God. But love was to soften her religion as it had softened her
heart; the delights and anguish of passion were soon to bring forth
adoration and prayer, those two perfumes of the souls that burn and
languish. The one is full of rapture; the other full of tears,--both
are divine!