_THE INDIVIDUAL._
Man thinks, he feels, and he wills: these are the three great functions
of the spiritual life. Let us inquire what, without God, would become,
first, of thought, which is the instrument of all knowledge; next; of
the conscience, which is the law of the will; then of the heart, which
is the organ of the feelings. We will begin with thought.
Let us go back to the origin of modern philosophy. The labors of
Descartes will make us acquainted, under the form clearest for us, with
a current of lofty thoughts which does honor to ancient civilization,
and which has come down to us through the writings of Plato and St.
Augustine. We have seen that Descartes deceived himself, when he thought
to separate himself altogether from tradition, and forgot the while how
intimately men's minds are bound together in a common possession of
truth. He was mistaken, because he confounded the idea, natural to the
human mind, of an infinite reason, with the full idea of the Creator; so
attributing to the efforts of his own philosophy that gift of truth
which he had received from the Christian tradition. But, having so far
recognized his error, listen now to this great man, and judge if he were
again mistaken in those thoughts of his which I am about to reproduce to
you.
Descartes strives hard to doubt of all things, persuaded that truth will
resist his efforts, and come forth triumphant from the trial. He doubts
of what he has heard in the schools: his masters may have led him into
error. He doubts of the evidence of his senses: his senses deceive him
in the visions of the night; what if he were always dreaming, and if his
waking hours were but another sleep with other dreams! He will doubt
even of the certainty of reason: what if the reason were a warped and
broken instrument? Reason is only worth what its cause may be worth. If
man is the child of chance, his thoughts may be vain. If man is the
creature of a wicked and cunning being, the light of reason may be only
an _ignis fatuus_ kindled by a malicious and mocking spirit. Here is a
soul plunged in the lowest abysses of doubt; but it is a manly soul
which seeks in doubt a trial for truth, and not a comfortable pillow on
which slothfully to repose. How does Descartes upraise himself? By a
thought known to every one, and which was already found in St.
Augustine: "_Cogito, ergo sum_. I think, therefore I am." Deceive me who
will; if I am deceived, I exist. Here is a certainty protected from all
assault: I am. But what a poor certainty is this! What does it avail me
to have rescued my existence from the abysses of universal doubt, if
above the deep waters which have swallowed up all belief floats only
this naked and mortifying truth: I am; but I exist only perhaps to be
the sport of errors without end. The first step therefore taken by the
philosopher would be a fruitless one if it were not followed by a
second. An eye is open, and says: I see; but it must have a warrant that
the light by which it sees is not a fantastic brightness. No, replies
Descartes; reason sees a true light; and this is how he proves it: I am,
I know myself; that is certain. I know myself as a limited and imperfect
being; that again is certain. I conceive then infinity and perfection;
that is not less certain; for I should not have the idea of a limit if I
did not conceive of infinity, and the word _imperfect_ would have no
meaning for me, if I could not imagine perfection, of which imperfection
is but the negation. Starting from this point, the philosopher proves by
a series of reasonings that the conception of perfection by our minds
demonstrates the real existence of that perfection: God is. He adds,
that the existence of God is more certain than the most certain of all
the theorems of geometry. You will observe, Gentlemen, that the man who
speaks in this way is one of the greatest geometricians that ever lived.
He has found God, he has found the light. Reason does not deceive, when
it is faithful to its own laws: the senses do not deceive, when they are
exercised according to the rules of the understanding. Error is a
malady; it is not the radical condition of our nature; it is not without
limits and without remedy, for the final cause of our being is God, that
is to say truth and goodness.
From everlasting God was true,
For ever good and just will be,
says one of our old psalms. Faith in the veracity of God--such is the
ground of the assurance of believers; such is also the foundation on
which has been raised the greatest of modern philosophies. Without the
knowledge of God and faith in his goodness, man remains plunged in
irremediable doubt, possessing only this single, poor, and frightful
certainty: I am; and I exist perhaps only to be eternally deceived.
But, it has been said, and it needed no great cleverness to say it--What
a strange way is this of reasoning! Here is a man who first proves that
God is, by means of his reason; and then proves that his reason is good
because God is. His reason demonstrates God to him, and God demonstrates
his reason to him: it is an argument of which any schoolboy can at once
see the fallacy; it is manifestly a vicious circle. This has been said
again and again by persons who have neglected a sufficiently simple
consideration. The error is apparently a gross one; is it not likely
that the argument has been misunderstood? Ought we not to look very
closely at it, before declaring that one of the most lucid minds that
have ever appeared in the world left at the basis of his doctrine a
fault of logic which any schoolboy can discover? Self-sufficient levity
of spirit is not the best means of penetrating the thought of leading
minds; and it very often happens to us to fail of understanding because
we have failed in respect.
Let us examine with serious attention, not the very words of Descartes,
as an historian might do, but the course of thought of which Descartes
is one of the most illustrious representatives.
To recognize in the reason traces of God, and to show that in faith in
God consists the only warrant of the reason, is not to argue in a
vicious circle, because, in this way of proceeding, what we are employed
in is not reasoning, but analysis; we are establishing a fact in order
to ascertain what that fact implies and supposes. This fact is the
natural faith which man has in his own reason, when his reason reveals
to him the immediate light of evidence, or the mediate light of
certainty. Now, when man confides in his reason, it is not in his
individual reason that he confides, for he has no doubt that what is
evident for him is so also for others. If, tossed by a tempest, he were
thrown upon an island of savages, he would not think that those savages,
when they came to reflect, would be able to discover that the axioms of
our geometry are false, or to make elements of logic which would
contradict our own. We believe in a general reason, everywhere and
always the same, and in which the reason of each individual
participates. We believe therefore that there is a principle of truth
which exists in itself, a reason which is eternal and everywhere
present; in other words, we believe in God considered as the source of
the universal intelligence. To believe in one's reason, is to believe in
God, in this sense: the fact of the confidence which we place in our own
faculty of thought, supposes a concealed faith in eternal truth. This is
the analysis of which I was speaking. It is a circle if you please, but
it is a circle of light, outside of which there is, as we shall see by
and by, nothing but darkness and hard contradictions.
You deny the existence of God. On what ground do you rest this denial?
On the ground of your reason. You believe then that your reason is good,
you believe it very good, since you do not hesitate to trust it, while
you undertake to prove false the fundamental instincts of human nature.
But you would not venture to say that this reason which you believe in
with a faith so firm is your own separate reason merely, your personal
and exclusive property. You believe in the universal reason; you believe
in God, considered at least as the source of the understanding. The man
therefore who denies God, affirms Him in a certain sense at the same
time that he denies Him. He denies Him in his words, in the external
form of his thought; he affirms Him in reality, as the Supreme
Intelligence, by the very trust which he places in his own thought. Our
understanding is only the reflected ray of the Divine verity. Therefore
it is that Descartes, as soon as he has laid the first foundations of
his system, interrupts the chain of his reasonings to trace these lines:
"Here I think it highly meet to pause for a while in contemplation of
this all-perfect God, to ponder deliberately his marvellous attributes,
to consider, admire, and adore the incomparable beauty of that immense
light, at least so far as the strength of my mind, which remains in a
manner dazzled by it, shall allow me to do so."[19] Thus it is that
while descending into the depths of the understanding, the philosopher
who is supposed to be absorbed in pure abstractions, discovers all at
once a sublime brightness, and exclaims with the ancient patriarch: "The
LORD is in this place, and I knew it not!"[20] God is everywhere; He is
in the heights of heaven, He is in the depths of thought. Remember
those celebrated words of Lord Chancellor Bacon: "A little knowledge
inclineth the mind to atheism, but a further acquaintance therewith
bringeth it back to religion."
God is not demonstrated, in the ordinary sense which we attach to the
word demonstrate;[21] He is pointed out[22] as the source of all light.
The attempt to demonstrate God as anything else is demonstrated, by
descending, that is, from higher principles until the object in view is
arrived at--this attempt implies a contradiction. God is in fact the
first principle, the foundation of all principles, the principle beyond
which there is nothing. We may describe the process by which the human
mind rises to this supreme idea; but to wish to demonstrate God by
mounting higher than Himself in order to look for a point of
departure--this is literally to wish to light up the sun. If the sun of
intelligences is extinguished, reason sets out on its way vaguely
enlightened still with the remains of the light which it has reflected;
but it is not long ere it is stumbling in darkness. Then it is that--be
not deceived about it!--the doubts which Descartes called up by an act
of his own will do in good earnest invade the soul. We possess a
natural certainty, which does not suppose a clear view of God; we reason
without thinking distinctly of the principles on which we reason, just
as, when we are in a hurry, we take the shortest cut without thinking of
the axiom of geometry which prescribes the straight line. But if we pass
from the natural order of our thoughts into the domain of science, if we
ask--what is it which guarantees to me the value of my reason? then the
question is put, and many perish in the passage which separates natural
faith from the domain of science,--that dangerous passage where doubt
spreads out its perfidious fogs and its deceitful marshes. The moment
the question is started of the worth of reason, and all the schools of
scepticism do start it, our answer must be--_God_; and we must find
light in this answer, or see thought invaded in its totality by an
irremediable doubt. Then men come to ask themselves if all be not a lie;
and they speak of the universal vanity, without making the reserve of
Ecclesiastes.[23] There are more souls ill of this malady than are
supposed to be so. Many begin by setting up proudly against God what
they call the rights of reason, and by and by we see this reason, which
has revolted against its Principle, vacillate, doubt of itself, and at
last, losing itself in a bitter irony, wrap itself, with all beside, in
the shroud of a universal scorn.
Without God reason is extinguished. What, in like case, will happen to
the conscience? The conscience is a reality. I will say willingly in the
style of the prophets: Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, ere
I deny conscience, and disparage the sacred name of duty! Yes,
conscience is a reality; but God is in it: He it is who gives to it its
necessary basis and its indispensable support. The conscience is the
august voice of the Master of the universe. God has given us the light
of the understanding that we may see and comprehend some portions of the
works which He has created without us: a work there is for which He
would have us to be fellow-workers with Him. The heaven of stars is a
spectacle for the eyes of the body, a grander spectacle still for the
contemplation of the mind which has understood their wondrous mechanism.
We admire them; but if the stars failed to attract our admiration, no
one of them on that account would cease to trace its orbit. There is
another heaven, a heaven of loving stars and free, the sight of which is
one day to fill us with rapture, and the realization of which is to be
the work of our love and of our will. Before we contemplate it we must
make it; this is our high and awful privilege. The plan of the spiritual
heavens is deposited in the soul, and the utterances of the conscience
reveal it to the will. It is a law of justice and of love. This law is
evermore violated, because it is proposed to liberty, and liberty
rebels: it subsists evermore, because it is the work of the Almighty.
Humanity, in its strange destiny, has never ceased to outrage the rule
which it acknowledges, and to pronounce upon its own acts a ceaseless
condemnation. The laws which are investigated by the physical sciences
are the plan of the Creator realized in nature: the law proposed to
liberty is the plan of the Creator to be realized by the community of
minds. Such is the explanation of the conscience: God is its solid
foundation.
Duty and God, morality and religion, are inseparable principles; all the
efforts of a false philosophy have never succeeded, and never will
succeed, in disjoining them. Men will never be prevented from believing
that God is holy, and that His will is binding upon them: they will
never be prevented from believing that holiness is divine, and that the
will of God reveals itself in the admonitions of the conscience.
Therefore the progress of religion and the progress of morality are
closely united; the morality of a people depends above all on the idea
which it forms to itself of God. The conscience, in fact, at the same
time that it is real and permanent in its bases, is variable in the
degrees of its light. It is enlightened or obscured, according as the
man's religious conceptions are pure or corrupted; and, on the other
hand, when the religious worship is degraded beyond a certain limit by
error and the passions, the conscience protests, and by its protest
purifies the religious conceptions. It has often been said, that in the
onward march of humanity, morality is separated from faith, and comes at
last to rest upon its own bases. It is a notion of the eighteenth
century, which, although its root has been cut, is still throwing out
shoots in our time. The attempt has been made to support this theory by
the great name of Socrates. It is affirmed that the sage of Athens,
breaking the bond which connects the earth with heaven, separated duty
from its primitive source. Listen: Placed in the alternative of either
renouncing his mission or dying, it is thus that Socrates addresses his
judges: "Athenians, I honor you and I love you, but I will obey the
Deity rather than you. My whole occupation is to persuade you, young and
old, that before the care of the body and of riches, before every other
care, is that of the soul and of its improvement. Know that this it is
which the Deity prescribes to me, and I am persuaded that there can be
nothing more advantageous to the republic than my zeal to fulfil the
behest of the Deity."[24] Does the man who speaks in this way appear to
you to have wished to break the link which connects morality with
religion? He separates himself from the established religion; he pursues
with his biting raillery shameful objects of worship; his conscience
protests. But, while it protests, it attaches itself immediately to a
higher and holier idea of that God, of whose perfections the sage of
Athens had succeeded in obtaining a glimpse.
God then is the explanation of the conscience: He is moreover its
support. It has need in sooth to be supported,--that voice which speaks
within us; because it is unceasingly contradicted and denied. The
spectacle which the world presents is not an edifying one; the facts
which are taking place on the earth are not all of a nature to maintain
the steadfastness of the moral feeling. Let us imagine an example, a
striking example, such as it would be easy to find realized on a small
scale in more commonplace events. A peaceable population, menaced in its
most sacred rights, has taken up arms in the simplest and most
legitimate self-defence. I do not allow my thoughts to rest upon the
soldiers who are advancing to oppress it--mere instruments as they are
in the hands of their leaders--but upon the leaders themselves. One of
these, without the least necessity, with a calculating coolness, to
which he sacrifices all the feelings of a man, or under the sway of one
of those ferocious instincts which at times gain the mastery over the
soul, gives up a town, a village, to all the horrors of slaughter,
pillage, and fire. The blood of the victims will scarcely, perhaps, have
grown cold, the last gleams of the fire will not yet be extinct, when
this man shall be receiving the praises of his superiors. Men will laud
the bravery and daring of his exploit; his sovereign will place upon
his breast a brilliant cross, the august sign of the world's redemption;
he will return to his country amidst the acclamations of the multitude,
and drink in with delight the shouts of triumph which greet him as he
moves on his way. For such things as these, is there to be no penalty
but troublesome recollections which may sometimes be banished, and a few
timid protests soon hushed by the loud voice of success? Verily there
are perpetrated beneath the sun acts which cry aloud for vengeance. Have
you never felt it--that mighty cry--rising from your own bosom, at the
sight of some odious crime, or on reading such and such a page of
history? And it must be so; it must be that the cry for vengeance will
rise, until the soul has learnt to transform imprecation into prayer,
and the desire for justice into supplication for the guilty. But if, in
the presence of crime, we were forced to believe that there will never
be either vengeance or pardon, the mainspring of the moral life would be
broken, and humanity would at length exclaim, like Brutus in the plains
of Philippi:--"Virtue! thou art but a name!"
The conscience is a reality; but its voice is troublesome, and the
captious arguments which go to deny its value find support in the evil
tendencies of our nature. If it has no faith in eternal justice it runs
the risk of being blunted by contact with the world. So doubt takes
place, doubt still deeper and more agonizing than that which bears upon
the processes of the understanding. The questions which arise are such
as these:--"This voice of duty--whence comes it? and what would it have?
May not conscience be a prejudice, the result of education and of habit?
It has little power, it seems, for it is braved with impunity. Many say
that it is a factitious power from which one comes at last to deliver
one's self by resisting it. Am I not the dupe of an illusion? I am
losing joys which others allow themselves. Barriers encompass me on
every hand, for there are for me prohibited actions, unwholesome
beauties, culpable feelings. Others are free, and make a larger use of
life in all directions. What if I too made trial of liberty!" Here lies
the temptation. When the soul aspires to become larger than conscience
and more tolerant than duty, it is not far from a fall. The honest woman
will be tempted to repine at the liberty of the courtesan, and the man
who is bound by his word will become capable of looking with envy on
the liberty of the liar. Then come terrible experiences which teach at
length that the unbinding of the passions is the hardest of slaveries,
and that, in the struggle between inclination and duty, it is liberty
which oppresses and law which sets free. Happy then is he who, feeling
himself to be sinking in gloomy waters, cries to that God who is able to
rescue him from the abyss, and strengthens his shaken conscience by
replacing it on its solid foundation. "God speaks and reigns. All
rebellion is transient in its nature; justice will at length be done.
Justice may be slow in the eyes of the creature of a day, seeing that He
who shall dispense it has eternity at his disposal." But if God be not a
refuge for us from men and from the world, if, when we see all that is
passing around us, we cannot cast a look beyond and above the earth, men
may lose their faith in duty. And this faith is lost in fact. If there
are not dead consciences, there are consciences at any rate singularly
sunk in sleep. There are men for whom goodness, truth, justice, honor,
seem to be a coinage of which they make use because it is current, but
without for themselves attaching to it any value. These pieces of money
have no longer in their eyes any visible impression, because the
conception of the almighty and just God is the impression which
determines duty and guarantees its value.
When the necessary alliance of moral order with religious thought is
denied, the reality of conscience is opposed to what are called
theological hypotheses always open to discussion. It is seen well enough
that men may doubt of God, but it is supposed to be impossible to doubt
of conscience. This is an illusion of generous minds. Those who would
keep this illusion must not open the pages of the history of philosophy
where the negation of duty does not occupy less space than the negation
of God; they must not cast their eyes too much about them; they must
also take care not to open the most widely circulated books, and the
most fashionable periodicals: otherwise, as we shall see, they would not
be long in finding out that this morality which they would fain have
superior to all attacks, is perhaps what of all things is most attacked
now-a-days, and that that conscience which it is impossible to deny is
in fact the object of denials the most audacious on the part of a few of
the present favorites of fame. The voice of duty is heard no doubt even
when God does not come distinctly into mind; but when the questions are
clearly put, if God is denied, conscience grows dim, and comes at last
to be extinguished. This obscuration does not take place all at once:
the potter's wheel goes on turning for a while, says an old Hindoo poem,
after that the foot of the artisan is withdrawn from it. But the
darkening takes place gradually with time: such at least is the general
rule. There are exceptional men who seem to escape this law, and to bear
in their bosom a God veiled from their own consciousness. Such men may
be found, and even in considerable numbers, in a time like ours, when
doubt is, in many cases, a prejudice which current opinion deposits on
the surface of minds without penetrating them deeply. There are men all
whose convictions have fallen into ruins, while their conscience
continues standing like an isolated column, sole remaining witness of a
demolished building. The meeting with these heroes of virtue inspires a
mingled feeling of astonishment and respect. They are verily miracles of
that divine goodness of which they are unable to pronounce the name. If
there is a man on earth who ought to fall on both knees and shed burning
tears of gratitude, it is the man who believes himself an atheist, and
who has received from Providence so keen a taste for what is noble and
pure, so strong an aversion for evil, that his sense of duty remains
firm even when it has lost all its supports. But the exception does not
make the rule; and that which is realized in the case of a few is not
realized long, and for all. You know those crusts of snow which are
formed over the _crevasses_ of our glaciers. These slight bridges are
able to bear one person who remains suspended over the abyss, but let
several attempt to pass together,--the frail support gives way, and the
rash adventurers fall together into the gulf. Such is the destiny of
those schools of philosophy in which the notion of God disappears, and
of those civilizations in which the sense of God is extinguished; they
fall into dark regions where the light of goodness shines no longer.
After the mind and conscience, it remains for us to speak of the heart.
Man, an intelligent and free being, has in his reason an instrument of
knowledge, and in his conscience a rule for his will. But man is not
sufficient for himself, and cannot live upon his own resources. If you
inquire what the word heart expresses, in its most general acceptation,
you will find that it always expresses a tendency of the soul to look,
out of itself, in things or persons, for the support and nourishment of
its individual life. Does the question concern the relations of man with
his fellows? The heart is the organ of communication of one soul with
another, for receiving, or for giving, or for giving and receiving at
the same time, in the enjoyment of the blessing of a mutual affection.
The heart is in each of us what those marks are upon the scattered
stones of a building in course of construction which indicate that they
are to be united one to another. The philosopher suffices for himself,
the stoics used to say; the heart is the negation of this haughty maxim.
From the heart proceeds love, that son of abundance and of poverty, to
speak with Plato, that needy one ever on the search for his lost
heritage. Love has wings, said again the wisdom of the Greeks, wings
which essay to carry him ever higher. Let us extricate the thought which
is involved in these graceful figures: Our desires have no limits, and
indefinite desires can be satisfied only by meeting with an infinite
Being who can be an inexhaustible source of happiness, an eternal object
of love. "Our heart is made for love," said Saint Augustine, the great
Christian disciple of Plato: "therefore it is unquiet till it finds
repose in God." From this unrest proceed all our miseries. Men do not
always succeed in contenting themselves with a petty prosaic happiness,
a dull and paltry well-being, and in stifling the while the grand
instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due
object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its
indefinite aspirations attach themselves to objects which cannot satisfy
them, and thence arise stupendous aberrations. With some, it is the
pursuit of sensual gratifications; they rush with a kind of fury into
the passions of their lower nature. With others it is the ardent pursuit
of riches, power, fame,--feelings which are always crying more: More!
and never: Enough. And the after-taste from the fruitless search after
happiness in the paths of ambition and vanity is not less bitter perhaps
than the after-taste from sensual enjoyments. Listen to the confession
of a man whose works, full as they are of beauties, are disfigured by so
many impure allusions, that the author appears to have indulged, more
than most others, in the giddy follies and culpable pleasures of life:
If, tired of mocking dreams, my restless heart
Returns to take its fill of waking joy,
Full soon I loathe the pleasures which impart
No true delight, but kill me, while they cloy.[25]
Here are the accents of a true confession. These are moreover truths of
daily experience. I have seen--and which of you could not render similar
testimony?--I have seen the sick man, deprived of all the ordinary
avocations and amusements of life, and with pain for his constant
companion, I have seen him find joy in the thought of his God, and
feeding, without satiety, on this bread of contentment. I have seen the
face of the blind lighted up by a living faith, and radiant with a light
of peace, for him sweeter and brighter than the rays of the sun. But
where God is wanting, and all connection is broken with the source of
joy, there you shall see the richest of the rich, the most prosperous
among the ambitious, the man of fame whose renown is most widely
extended,--you shall see these men carrying the heavy burden of
discontent. Their brow, unillumined by the celestial ray, is furrowed by
the lines of sadness. If you meet them in a moment of candor, these
rich, ambitious, and famous men will tell you with a sigh: "All this
does not satisfy; we are but pursuing chimeras." Still they continue to
run after these chimeras. They cry Vanity! Vanity! and they do not cease
to pursue vanity. They flee from themselves: if they retired within
themselves, they would find there ennui, inexorable ennui, which is but
the sense of that place which God should fill left void in the depth of
the soul. For the deceived heart, life becomes a bitter comedy. Those
who do not succeed in blinding themselves by the dust of thoughtless
folly, end oftentimes by wrapping themselves in disdain as with a cloak;
they seek a sad and solitary satisfaction in the greatness of their
contempt for life. But neither does this satisfy: disdain is not a
beverage, and contempt is not food.
Such are the destinies of the heart, to which God is wanting. But I
hope, Gentlemen, that you have here some remonstrances to offer. I have
just spoken of the pleasures of sense, of pride, of vanity, and I have
made no allusion to those affections in which the heart manifests its
highest qualities. Shall we forget the joys of pure love? the domestic
hearth? friendship? country? Do not fear that, having given myself up
to a fit of misanthropy, I am come hither to blaspheme the true
happinesses of life. But do the affections of earth offer us sufficient
guarantees? We have need of the infinite to answer to the immensity of
our desires; in the presence of those we love, have we no need of the
Eternal that we may lean our hearts on Him? Will not all human love
become a source of torment, if we have no faith in the love of Him who
will stamp holy affections with the seal of His own eternity?
A single question will suffice to enlighten us on this head. Do you know
the feeling of anxiety? We all know it, though in different degrees.
Epidemical disease may appear. The cholera has started on its course; it
has left the interior of Asia, and is approaching. The report is current
that neighboring cities have begun to feel its ravages. Those we
love--in a month, in a week, where will they be? War is declared. We
hear of preparations for death; the sovereigns of Europe apply
themselves to calculations which seem to portend torrents of blood. If
war breaks out, that brother, that son, who will have to take up arms,
that daughter who will one day perhaps find herself at the mercy of an
unbridled soldiery----. But let us not look for examples so far away.
Have you no dear one in a distant land of whom you are expecting
tidings? And those who are near you! To-morrow, to-day, now perhaps,
while you are listening to me, a fatal malady is discovering its first
symptoms----. Have you received the hard lessons of death? If you see
children playing, full of ruddy and joyous health, does it happen to
none of you to think of another child, once the joy of your fireside,
now lying beneath the sod? Does it never happen to you, by a sinister
presentiment, to see features you love to gaze on convulsed with agony
or pale in death? And yet you must either see the death of your beloved
ones, or they must lay you in the earth; for every life ends with the
tomb, and we do but walk over graves. When the soul has been thus
wounded by anxiety, for this poisoned wound there is one remedy, but
only one: "God reigns!" Nothing happens without the permission of His
goodness. And of all those who are dear to us, we can say: "Father, to
Thy hands I commit them." If we are without this trust, we shall only
escape torment by levity. Without God our mind is sick; our conscience
and our heart are sick also, and in a way more grievous still.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] _Méditation troisième_, at the end.
[20] Gen. xxviii. 16.
[21] _Démontrer_.
[22] "_On le montre_."
[23] "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.... Let us hear the conclusion
of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is
the whole duty of man." (Eccles. i. and xii.)
[24] Apology.
[25]
Si mon coeur, fatigué du rêve qui l'obsède,
A la réalité revient pour s'assouvir,
Au fond des vains plaisirs que j'appelle à mon aide,
Je trouve un tel dégoût que je me sens mourir.