God the Creator is also God the Preserver. He lives, and is at
the same time the source of life. The union between Him and his
creature does not cease when the creature is brought into
existence. The dogma of Providence is consequent upon that of
Creation.
{26}
Prayer is more than the mere outburst of the desires or sorrows
of the soul, seeking that satisfaction, strength, or consolation
which it does not find within itself; it is the expression of a
faith, instinctive or reflective, obscure or clear, wavering or
steadfast, in the existence, the presence, the power, and the
sympathy of the Being to whom prayer is addressed. Without a
certain measure of faith and trust in God, prayer would not burst
forth, or would suddenly be dried up in the soul. If faith
everywhere resists, and everywhere outlives all the denials, all
the doubts, and all the darkness which oppress mankind, it is
that man bears within himself an imperishable consciousness of
the enduring bond which connects him with God, and God with him.
Far from destroying this sentiment, experience and the spectacle
of life explain and confirm it. In reflecting on his destiny, man
recognises in it three different sources, and divides, so to say,
into three classes the facts which make up the whole. He is
conscious of being subject to events which are the consequence of
laws, general, permanent, and independent of his will, but which
by his intelligence he observes and comprehends.
{27}
By the act of his free will he also himself creates events, of
which he knows himself to be author, and these have their own
consequences and enter too into the tissue of his life. Lastly,
he passes through events, in his view, neither the result of
those general laws from which nothing can withdraw him, nor the
act of his own liberty,--events of which he perceives neither the
cause, the reason, nor the author.
Man attributes this last class of events sometimes to a blind
cause, which he terms chance; at another, to an intelligent and
supreme intention which is in God. His mind at times revolts at
the inanity of this word _chance_, which explains and
defines nothing; and he then pictures to himself a mysterious,
impenetrable power, a merely necessary chain of unknown facts, to
which he gives the name of fatality, destiny. To account for this
obscure and accidental part of human life, which originates
neither from any general and conceivable laws, nor from the free
will of man himself, we must choose between fatality and
Providence, chance and God.
{28}
I express my meaning without hesitation. Who ever accepts as a
satisfactory explanation the theory of fatality and chance, does
not truly believe in God. Whoever believes truly in God, relies
upon Providence. God is not an expedient, invented to explain the
first link in the chain of causation, an actor called to open by
creation the drama of the world, then to relapse into a state of
inert uselessness. By the very fact of his existence, God is
present with his work, and sustains it. Providence is the natural
and necessary development of God's existence; his constant
presence and permanent action in creation. The universal and
insuperable instinct which leads man to prayer, is in harmony
with this great fact; he who believes in God cannot but have
recourse to Him and pray to Him.
{29}
Objections are raised to the name itself of God. He acts, it is
said, only by general and permanent laws: how can we implore His
interference in favour of our special and exceptional desires? He
is immutable, ever perfect, and ever the same: how is it
conceivable that He lends Himself to the fickleness of human
sentiments and wishes? The prayer which ascends to Him is
forgetful of his real nature. Men have treated the attributes of
God as furnishing an objection to his Providence.
This objection, so often repeated, never fails to astonish me.
The majority of those who urge it, assert at the same time that
God is incomprehensible, and that we cannot penetrate the secret
of his nature. What then is this but to pretend to comprehend
God? and by what right do they oppose his nature to his
providence, if his nature is, to us, an impenetrable mystery? I
refrain from reproaching them for their ambition; ambition is the
privilege and the glory of man; but in retaining it, let them not
overlook its legitimate limits. There is only this alternative:
either man must cease to believe in God, because he cannot
comprehend Him, or in effect admit his incomprehensibility, and
still at the same time believe in Him.
{30}
He cannot pass and repass incessantly from one system to the
other, now declaring God to be incomprehensible; now speaking of
Him, of his nature and his attributes, as if He were within the
province of human science. Great as is the question of
Providence, the one I have here to consider is still greater, for
it is the question of the very existence of God; and the
fundamental inquiry is to know whether He exists, or does not
exist. God is at once light and mystery: in intimate relation
with man, and yet beyond the limits of his knowledge. I shall
presently endeavour to mark the limit at which human knowledge
stops, and indicate its proper sphere; but this I at once assume
as certain: whoever, believing in God and speaking of Him as
incomprehensible, yet persists in endeavouring to define Him
scientifically, and seeks to penetrate the mystery, which he has
yet admitted, is in great risk of destroying his own belief, and
of setting God aside, which is one way of denying Him.
{31}
But I leave for a moment these two simultaneous propositions,
namely, the impossibility of comprehending God, and the necessity
of believing in Him; and I proceed at once to that objection to
the special providence of God which is drawn from the general
character of the laws of nature. This objection results from
confounding very different things, and overlooking a fundamental
one,--the fact characteristic indeed of human nature. It is true
that the providence of God presides over the order of the world
which He governs by general and permanent laws: these laws would
be more accurately designated by another name; they are the Will
of God, continually acting upon the world, for not only the laws
but the Lawgiver are there ever present. But when God created
man, He created him different from the physical world; free, and
a moral agent; and hence there is a fundamental difference
between the action of God on the physical world, and his action
on man.
{32}
I shall subsequently state my opinion as to the full meaning of
the expression, "Man is a free being," and as to the nature of
the consequences to which it leads; for the present, I assume, as
a certain and incontestable fact, this principle of human
liberty,--of the free determination of man considered as a moral
agent. Admitting this, it cannot be said that God governs mankind
at large by general and permanent laws; for what would this be
but to ignore or annul the liberty granted to man, that is to
say, to misconceive and mutilate the Work of God himself. Man
exercises a free determination, and in his own life actually
gives birth to events which are not the result of any general and
external laws. Divine Providence watches the operations of man's
volition, and records the manner in which it has been exercised.
It does not treat man as it deals with the stars in heaven and
the waves of the ocean, which have neither thought nor will; with
man it has other relations than with nature, and employs a
different mode of action.
{33}
There is little wisdom in instituting comparisons between objects
or facts not essentially analogous; and the idea of God has been
so often disfigured by representing Him in the image of man, that
I mistrust the efficacy of any analogies borrowed from humanity
to convey a conception of God. I cannot, however, overlook the
fact, that God has created man in his own image, nor can I
absolutely refrain from seeking, in nature or the life of man,
some type to shadow forth the features of God. Let us consider
the human family: the father and mother assist in directing the
active development of the child; they watch over it with
authority and tenderness; they control its liberty without
annulling it, and they listen to its little prayers--now granting
them, now refusing them, as their reason dictates, and with a
view to the child's main and future interests.
{34}
The child, without thought or design, by the spontaneous instinct
of its nature, recognizes the authority and feels the tenderness
of its parents; as it advances in age, it sometimes obeys and
sometimes resists their injunctions, using or misusing its
natural liberty; but in all the fickleness of its will, it asks,
it entreats, full of confidence--joyous and thankful when it
obtains from its parents what it desires; yet, when denied, still
ready again to ask and to entreat with the same confidence as
before.
This is what takes place in the government of the human family
when ruled according to the dictates of nature and right. An
image we have here, imperfect but still true--a shadowing-forth,
faint yet faithful--of Divine Providence. Thus it is that the
Christian religion qualifies and describes the action of God in
the life of man. It exhibits God as ever present and accessible
to man, as a father to his child; it exhorts, encourages, invites
man to implore, to confide in, to pray to God. It reserves
absolutely the answer of God to that prayer; He will grant, or He
will refuse: we cannot penetrate his motives--"The ways of God
are not our ways."
{35}
Nevertheless, to prayer, ceaseless and ever renewed, the
Christian dogma associates the firm hope that "nothing is
impossible with God." This dogma is thus in full and intimate
harmony with the nature of man; whilst recognizing his liberty,
it does homage to his dignity; in tendering to him the resource
of an appeal to God it provides for his weakness. In science, it
suppresses not the mystery which cannot be suppressed; but, in
man's life, it solves the natural problem which weighs upon the
soul.