- Al
 
 GOD. 
 
 CONFERENCES 
 
 DELIVERED AT NOTRE DAME IN PARIS, 
 
 REV. PERE LACORDAIRE, 
 
 OF THE ORDER OF FRIAR-PREACHERS. 
 
 Translated from the French, with the Author's permission, by a 
 Tertiary of the same Order. 
 
 CHAPMAN & HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1870.
 
 LONDON : 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, 
 
 STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
 
 To 
 J. H. Y. 
 
 in affectionate remembrance 
 
 of 
 1865. 
 
 H. D. L.
 
 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 ENCOURAGED by the reception given to the Con- 
 ferences on JESUS CHRIST, the translator offers another 
 volume of the great Dominican's works, anticipating 
 the pleasure of publishing the whole series in the 
 same form. 
 
 Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, 1870.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 The Existence of God I 
 
 The Inner Life of God 27 
 
 The Creation of the World by God 59 
 
 The General Plan of Creation 91 
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being . . . . . .121 
 
 Man as a Moral Being 160 
 
 Man as a Social Being . 200 
 
 The Double Work of Man 231
 
 CONFERENCES. 
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. 
 
 MY LORD/ GENTLEMEN, 
 
 WE have proved the divinity of Christian doctrine 
 in a twofold manner ; by its results, in showing that it 
 produces that marvel the Church, to which nothing is 
 comparable, and which evidently surpasses all human 
 power ; and also by showing that her founder is Jesus 
 Christ, the envoy of God and the Son of God. The 
 effects and source of this doctrine being divine, it 
 is manifestly stamped with the seal of divinity, or, 
 in other words, it is divine. It would seem then that 
 our task is ended, and that having crowned the 
 doctrine whose minister we are with the most sacred 
 and certain of all characters, we have but two things 
 to demand from you, or rather to impose upon you, 
 namely, silence and adoration. 
 
 1 MoNSElGNEUE AFFRE, Archbishop of Paris. 
 
 B
 
 2 The Existence of God. 
 
 But the human mind is so formed, it has been so 
 steeped in light, that even if it saw the very hand of 
 God bearing doctrine to it, it would not be willing to 
 receive that doctrine without receiving therewith the 
 right and power to sound its depths. The road of 
 authority is doubtless a just, a natural road, and 
 necessary for our present state ; but it does not suffice 
 for us. For our present state includes the foretaste of 
 the future promised to us, and in regard to that future, 
 nothing will fully satisfy us but light seen by us in the 
 very essence of God himself. We do not desire 
 henceforth to behold that light in its infinite fulness ; 
 we understand that limits have been placed to our 
 mental vision and to our horizon : but how feeble 
 soever that vision may be, it is that of an intelligent 
 being ; how limited soever its horizon, it is an horizon 
 traced by the hand of God. Our mind seeks light, 
 and our horizon receives its rays. As soon then as a 
 doctrine is proposed to us, from whatever hand it may 
 come, we thirst to fathom it, to scrutinize it from 
 within, to assure ourselves, in fine, that it possesses 
 other marks of its truth than merely outward signs, 
 however great they may be. I cannot escape from 
 this law of our being, nor do I desire so to do. I 
 respect it in you as in myself ; I recognize therein our 
 origin and our predestination. After having led
 
 The Existence of God. 3 
 
 you then for so many years through the externals of 
 Christianity, I must now, under the eye of God, pass 
 the threshold of the temple, and, without fear as with- 
 out presumption, contemplate doctrine itself, the 
 daughter of God and the mother of your soul. 
 
 I do not promise to show you its absolute superiority ; 
 this can be done only by leaving the present world and 
 reaching the bright shores of the infinite. But I promise 
 you that in comparing it with all the doctrines that have 
 endeavoured to explain the mysteries of the world, 
 you shall easily discover in it an unquestionable and a 
 divine superiority. I promise you that a light shall 
 shine from it, which, without always attaining to 
 evidence itself, will form at least a glorious dawn of 
 evidence, and perhaps even at times a blending, as it 
 were, of the reason of man with the reason of God. 
 Your soul elevated by veiled truths, will see them 
 gradually growing clearer in the dawn of contempla- 
 tion ; in that holy exercise it will become accustomed 
 to flights before unknown to it, and at length wonder 
 at the sublime simplicity of the greatest mysteries. 
 
 But where shall we find a basis in order to found 
 doctrine and appropriate it to ourselves? Where 
 shall we find terms of comparison and means of verifi- 
 cation? We shall not need to seek far. God has 
 placed near to us the instruments destined by his
 
 4 The Existence of God. 
 
 Providence to lead us toward himself. He has given 
 them to us in nature and in intelligence, in conscience 
 and in society. This is the quadruple and unique 
 palace which he has built for us ; quadruple in the 
 diversity of its constructions, unique in the relations 
 which they hold to one another, and in our indivisible 
 abode therein. As God is whole and ever present 
 to every part of the universe, man is whole and always 
 present to nature, to his intelligence, to his conscience, 
 to society ; he draws from them a life which con- 
 stantly receives light from their reverberation, and 
 which never leaves him in the solitary gloom of him- 
 self. Nature speaks to his intelligence, his intelligence 
 responds to nature, both meet in his conscience, and 
 society places the seal of experience to the revelations 
 of all the three. Such is our life, and there all 
 doctrine finds its verification. A doctrine contrary 
 either to nature, intelligence, conscience, or society, is 
 a false doctrine, because it destroys our life; a 
 doctrine in harmony with these is a true doctrine, 
 because it strengthens and enlarges our life, and 
 because our life, taken in its totality, is heaven and 
 earth, matter and spirit, time and space, man and 
 mankind, whatever comes from God and bears with it 
 a demonstration of him and of ourselves. 
 
 It behoves me then to show you the conformity of
 
 The Existence of God. 5 
 
 Catholic doctrine with nature, intelligence, conscience, 
 and society; and to draw from that comparison, 
 unceasingly rising before you, rays of light which will 
 lead us to the depths of the invisible and the immensity 
 of the supernatural. This will form the last part of 
 our conferences, and although it must necessarily 
 employ several years, I cannot divest myself of a feel- 
 ing of sadness in thinking that the day draws nearer 
 when I must separate from you, and when I shall see 
 no longer, save from a distance in the feebleness of 
 remembrance, those great assemblies in which God 
 was with us. Nevertheless some consolation is 
 blended with the feeling of our coming separation ; the 
 consolation of the man who reaches his end, who has 
 finished a career, and who foresees the hour when he 
 will be able to say with St. Paul : / have fought the 
 good fight, I have finished my course? Share with me 
 this sadness and this joy ; for our conferences belong 
 to you as much as to me; they form a monument 
 which has risen up from your hearts and from mine as 
 from a single principle ; and some day, if it please God 
 to grant us the repose of old age, we shall each alike 
 be able to say, on recalling the times which we loved : 
 I formed part of those conferences of Notre Dame 
 which held our youth captive under the word of God. 
 2 2 Tim. iv. 7.
 
 6 The Existence of God. 
 
 MY LORD : 
 
 The Church and the country thank you to- 
 gether for the example you have given to us in these 
 days of great and memorable emotion.* You have 
 called us into this cathedral on the morrow of a revo- 
 lution in which all seemed to have been lost ; we have 
 responded to your call ; we are here peaceably assem- 
 bled under these antique vaults ; we learn from them 
 to fear nothing either for religion or for country ; both 
 will continue their career under the hand of God who 
 protects them ; both render thanks to you for having 
 believed in this indissoluble alliance, and for having 
 discerned in passing things those which remain firm 
 and become strengthened even by the changeableness 
 of events. 
 
 Doctrine is the science of destinies. We live, but 
 why do we live ? We live, but how do we live ? We, 
 and all that is passing around us, move by a motion 
 which never ceases. The heavens move onwards, the 
 earth is borne along, the waves follow each other on 
 the old shores of the sea ; the plant springs up, the 
 tree waxes great, the dust drifts along, and the mind 
 of man, yet more restless than all else in nature, knows 
 no repose. Whence and why is this? All motion 
 supposes a starting point, a term to which it tends, and 
 * The Revolution of 1848.
 
 The Existence of God. 7 
 
 a road by which it passes. What is then our starting- 
 point ? What our end ? What our road ? Doctrine must 
 answer us ; doctrine must show us our beginning, our 
 end, our means ; and, with them, the secret of our 
 destinies. All science does not reach so far. The 
 lower sciences teach us the law of particular move- 
 ments ; they tell us how bodies attract and repel each 
 other ; what orbit they describe in the undefined 
 spaces of the universe ; how they become decomposed 
 and reconstituted, and numberless secrets of that 
 restless and unremitting life which they lead in the 
 fertile bosom of nature : but they do not make known 
 to us the general law of motion, the first principle of 
 things, their final end, their common means. This is 
 the privilege of doctrine, a privilege as far above all 
 the sciences as the universal is above the individual. 
 
 Now of these three terms which comprise the system 
 of destinies, the one which doctrine should first reveal 
 to us is doubtless the principle of things ; for it is easy 
 to conceive that upon the principle depends the end, 
 that from the end and the principle proceeds the 
 means. The principle of beings evidently includes 
 the reason of the end assigned to them, as their 
 principle and their end determine the means by which 
 they are to attain and fulfil their vocation. 
 
 I ask then this supreme question, I ask it with you
 
 8 The Existence of God. 
 
 and with all time. What is the principle of things ? 
 Catholic doctrine answers us in these three first words 
 of its Creed : CREDO IN DEUM, PATREM OMNIPO- 
 TENTEM / believe in God, the Father Almighty. 
 
 Hear its own explanation of this answer. 
 
 There is a primordial being : by that alone that it 
 is primordial, it has no beginning, it is eternal, that is 
 to say, infinite in duration ; being infinite in duration, 
 it is so also in its perfection ; for, if anything were 
 wanting to its perfection, it would not be total being, 
 it would be limited in its existence ; it would not 
 exist of itself, it would not be primordial. There is 
 then a being, infinite in duration and perfection. 
 Now the state of perfection involves the personal 
 state, that is to say, the state of a being possessing 
 consciousness and intelligence of itself, rendering an 
 account to itself of what it is, distinguishing from 
 itself that which is not itself, removing from itself that 
 which is against itself; in a word, of a being who 
 thinks, who wills, who acts, who is free, who is sove- 
 reign. The primordial being is then an infinite spirit 
 in a state of personality. Such is Catholic doctrine on 
 the principle of things, the doctrine contained in that 
 short phrase : CREDO IN DEUM / believe in God. 
 
 Let us now hear the contrary doctrine, for there is a 
 contrary doctrine ; and you will never find Christianity
 
 The Existence of God. 9 
 
 announcing a dogma without at once meeting with a 
 negation, a negation intended to combat it, but which 
 must serve to prove it. For error is the counterproof 
 of truth, as shadows are the counterproofs of light. 
 Do not wonder then at so prompt an opposition to so 
 manifest a dogma ; invite it rather, and listen to the 
 first expression of Rationalism against the first expres- 
 sion of Christianity : CREDO IN NATURAM, MATREM OM- 
 NIPOTENTEM / believe in nature, the mother almighty, 
 You hear then that Rationalism, like Christianity, 
 admits the existence of a principle of things ; but for 
 Rationalism, nature is the primordial, necessary, 
 eternal, sovereign being. Now, nature is not unknown 
 to us, and it is evident to us that nature is in the state 
 of impersonality ; that is to say, nature has no con- 
 sciousness of what it is, it does not possess that 
 intellectual unity by which each of its members 
 should live of the universal life, and the universe of the 
 life of the least blade of grass comprised in its immen- 
 sity. We are, so to say, immersed in nature, we 
 draw from nature the aliment of our existence ; but so 
 far from forming there one single life by common 
 knowledge, we know nothing even of the beings 
 nearest to us. We pass each other by as strangers, 
 and the universe answers to our laborious investiga- 
 tions only by the mute spectacle of its inanimate
 
 IO The Existence of God. 
 
 splendour. Nature is deprived of personality, and 
 this is why Rationalism, which declares that nature is 
 self-existent, defines the principle of things as an 
 infinite force in the state of impersonality. 
 
 Such are the two doctrines. 
 
 And observe that the human mind could not con- 
 ceive a third doctrine upon fhe principle of things. 
 For either nature exists of itself and suffices to itself, 
 or we must seek its cause and support above itself, 
 not in an analogous nature subject to the same 
 infirmity, but in a superior being answering in its 
 essence to the idea and function of a principle. It is 
 the one or the other. If we choose nature, as nature 
 wants personality, we must say that the principle of 
 things is an infinite force in the state of impersonality. 
 If we reject nature, we must say that the principle of 
 things is a supernatural being, the logical conception 
 of which necessarily leads to the conclusion that the 
 principle of things is an infinite spirit in the state of 
 personality. Therefore human reason, in regard to 
 the first question concerning the mystery of destinies, 
 the question of principle, is inevitably condemned to 
 one or the other of these professions of faith : / believe 
 in God; / believe in nature. 
 
 This is the reason why there are but two funda- 
 mental doctrines in the world : theism, and pantheism.
 
 The Existence of God. 1 1 
 
 The first of these builds upon the idea of God, the 
 second upon the fact of nature ; one starts from the 
 invisible and the infinite, the other from the visible 
 and the indefinite. Whoever is not a theist is 
 logically a pantheist, and whoever is not a pantheist 
 is necessarily a theist. Every man chooses between 
 these two doctrines, and the life of mankind cleaves 
 to one or the other, as to the tree of life and the tree 
 of death. Pantheism has perhaps been brought 
 before you as a rare discovery of modern times, as a 
 treasure slowly drawn forth from the fields of contem- 
 plation by the labour of sages : the fact is, it is as old 
 as corrupted mankind, and the mind of a child is able 
 to conceive that there is a God, or if there is not, that 
 nature is itself its principle and its god. 
 
 It is a gift of truth, that upon a question so capital 
 as that of the principle of things, you should have but 
 to choose between two doctrines, and that on the 
 rejection of one of these, the other becomes invested 
 with the infallible character of logical necessity. 
 
 What do you now expect from me? You think 
 perhaps that I am about to demonstrate to you the 
 existence of God ? I assure you I have no such 
 intention, not because the thing is impossible, but 
 because this is not the question before us. The 
 existence of God is not a dogma overthrown, which
 
 1 2 The Existence of God. 
 
 it is needful to raise up again from the dust ; it is a 
 dogma standing erect, which holds its place between 
 the Church, whose divine authority I have shown you, 
 and Jesus Christ, whose personal divinity I have 
 proved to you. God has been the basis of all that 
 we have yet seen. He has revealed himself to us 
 as all beings reveal themselves, namely, by his action. 
 If God had not acted upon earth, and if he did not 
 still act here day by day, no one would believe 
 in him, whatever demonstration metaphysics and 
 eloquence might make of him. Mankind believes 
 in God because it sees him act. We have not then 
 to demonstrate God, but to examine the idea of God, 
 and to place it before our minds in all the splendour 
 that we can draw from it 
 
 Let us even put aside those positive proofs of God ; 
 let us forget his works in the world, and suppose that 
 we have before us the bare question of his existence. 
 The necessity of a direct demonstration of him would 
 not even then follow. For our mind carries in itself 
 the certainty that a principle of things exists, and, in 
 addition, that this principle is either God or nature. 
 Nothing remains then but to choose between them, 
 and a matter of choice is quite another thing than a 
 position in which reasoning has all to create. I have 
 to oppose theism to pantheism, this is my task ; I
 
 The Existence of God. 1 3 
 
 have to seek which of these is in harmony with nature, 
 intelligence, conscience, and society; such is the 
 strength of my position. 
 
 Before entering upon this comparison, or rather on 
 entering upon it, I will make one observation. It is 
 that God is here below the most popular of all beings, 
 whilst pantheism is a purely scientific system. In 
 the open fields, resting upon his implement of toil, 
 the labourer lifts up his eyes towards heaven, and he 
 names God to his children by an impulse as simple 
 as his own soul. The poor call upon him, the dying 
 invoke his name, the wicked fear him, the good bless 
 him, kings give him their crowns to wear, armies 
 place him at the head of their battalions, victory 
 renders thanksgivings to him, defeat seeks help from 
 him, nations arm themselves with him against their 
 tyrants ; there is neither place, nor time, nor circum- 
 stance, nor sentiment, in which God does not appear 
 and is not named. Even love itself, so sure of its 
 own charm, so confident in its own immortality, dares 
 not to ignore him, and comes before his altars to 
 beg from him the confirmation of the promises to 
 which it has so often sworn. Anger feels that it 
 has not reached its last expression until it has cursed 
 that adorable name; and even blasphemy is the 
 homage of faith that reveals itself in its own forget-
 
 14 The Existence of God. 
 
 fulness. What shall I say of perjury ? A man 
 possesses a secret upon which his fortune or his 
 honour depends : he alone upon earth knows it, he 
 alone is his own judge. But truth has an eternal 
 accomplice in God ; it calls God to its help, it places 
 the heart of man to struggle against an oath, and even 
 he who may be capable of violating its majesty would 
 not do so without an inward shudder, as before the 
 most cowardly and the basest of actions. And yet 
 what is there contained in those words of an oath ? 
 Only a name, indeed, but it is the name of God. It 
 is the name which all nations have adored, to which 
 they have built temples, consecrated priests, offered 
 prayers ; it is the highest name, the most holy, the 
 most efficient, the most popular name which the lips 
 of men have received the grace to utter. 
 
 Is it so with pantheism? Where shall we look 
 for it ? Come with me, let us knock at yonder door ; 
 it is illustrious, and more than one celebrity has 
 already been there. We are in the presence of a 
 sage. Let us beg of him to explain to us the mystery 
 of our destinies, for he has sounded it. What says 
 he to us ? That there is in the world only one single 
 substance. Why ? Because substance is that which 
 is in itself, and that which is in itself is necessarily 
 unique, infinite, eternal, God. Behold then the whole
 
 The Existence of God. 1 5 
 
 explanation of our life based upon a metaphysical 
 definition. I do not now examine whether it be true 
 or false, whether the conclusions drawn from it are 
 legitimate, whether it is easy otherwise to define 
 substance, and so to overthrow the whole structure of 
 this doctrine. I simply defy mankind to understand 
 it; even you, who from your childhood have been 
 initiated to speculations of words and ideas, you 
 would not seize its tissue without great difficulty were 
 I to expose it to you. Many of you, perhaps, would 
 not succeed so far ; for nothing is more rare than 
 metaphysical sagacity, than that vision which dispels 
 before it all realities and penetrates with a fixed 
 regard the -world of abstractions. You would soon 
 feel the swelling veins of your brow, a kind of dimness 
 would seize even upon the most hidden recesses of 
 your thoughts, and all would disappear before you, 
 the real and the ideal, in painful obscurity. And we 
 are to believe that truth lies hidden in such subtle and 
 inaccessible depths ! That there it awaits the human 
 race to declare to it its destiny ! Can you believe it ? 
 For my part, I do not believe it. I believe in the God 
 of the poor and the simple-minded ; I believe in the 
 God who is known in the lowly cottage, whom in- 
 fancy hears, whose name is dear to misfortune, who 
 has found ways to reach to all, how humble soever
 
 1 6 The Existence of God. 
 
 they may be, and who has no enemies but the pride 
 of knowledge and the corruption of the heart. I 
 believe in this God. I believe in him because I am 
 a man, and, in repeating with all nations and all ages 
 the first article of the Church's Creed, I do but 
 proclaim myself a man and take my rank in the 
 natural community of souls. 
 
 Need I avow it ? Since I have been charged with 
 the work of preaching the divine word, this is the first 
 time that I have approached this question of the 
 existence of God if indeed it can be called a ques- 
 tion ! Hitherto I have disdained it as unnecessary. 
 I have thought it needless to prove to a son the 
 existence of his father, and that he who did not know 
 him was unworthy of such knowledge. But the course 
 of ideas constrains me to touch upon this subject. 
 Nevertheless, in making this concession to logical 
 order, I could not allow you to think that I purposed 
 to satisfy a want of your hearts, or of the people and 
 the age in which we live. God be thanked, we believe 
 in him, and were I to doubt of your faith in him, you 
 would rise and cast me out from amongst you ; the 
 doors of this cathedral would open before me of them- 
 selves, and the people would need but a look in order 
 to confound me. That same people who in the in- 
 toxication of victory, after having overthrown many
 
 The Existence of God. 17 
 
 generations of kings, bore off in their submissive hands, 
 and as the associate of their triumph, the image of the 
 Son of God made man. (Applause.) 
 
 Gentlemen, let us not applaud the word of God ; 
 let us love it, believe in it, practise it ; this is the only 
 applause that mounts to heaven and is worthy of it. 
 
 I might here close this discourse since you hap- 
 pily show me that it is needless. Allow me, however, 
 before doing so, to seek why the idea of God is popular, 
 and whether that popularity is but a vain illusion of 
 mankind. 
 
 We have said that we possess four means of verify- 
 ing doctrines ; namely : nature, intelligence, conscience, 
 and society. If the idea of God be legitimate, it should 
 derive strength from these four sources of light, whilst 
 pantheism should necessarily find its condemnation in 
 them. 
 
 Nature is a grand spectacle which easily exhausts 
 our vision and our imagination ; but does it bear the 
 stamp of a being without cause, of a being existing of 
 itself? Can nature say like God, through Moses : EGO 
 SUM QUI SUM / am who am ? Infinity is the first 
 mark of the being without cause ; does nature bear this 
 sign? Let us examine it. All that we see there is limited, 
 all is form and movement, form determined, movement 
 calculated ; all falls under the straightened empire of 
 
 c
 
 1 8 TJte Existence of God. 
 
 measure, even the distances which remain unknown to 
 our instruments, but are by no means unknown to our 
 conceptions. We feel the limit even where our eye 
 does not perceive it ; it is enough for us to seize it at 
 one point, to determine it everywhere. The infinite 
 is indivisible, and were but one single atom of the 
 universe submitted to our feeble hands, we should 
 know that nature is finite, and that its immensity is but 
 the splendid veil of its poverty. 
 
 If nature existed of itself, it would moreover pos- 
 sess the character of absolute liberty, or sovereignty : 
 for, what can a being be said to depend upon which 
 has no cause ? But do we find this in the operations 
 that manifest the life of nature to us ? The universe 
 is a serf; it revolves in a circle wherein nothing 
 spontaneous appears; the stone remains where our 
 hand places it, and the planet describes an orbit where 
 we always find it. Those worlds, so prodigious by 
 their mass and their motion, have never revealed to the 
 observer anything but a silent and blind mechanism, 
 a slavish force, a helpless powerlessness to deviate 
 from their law. And man himself man in whom 
 alone upon earth appears that liberty whose traces 
 we vainly seek for in all the rest is he a sovereign ? 
 Is he born at his own time ? Does he die when it 
 pleases him ? Can he free himself from that which
 
 The Existence of God. 19 
 
 limits and embitters his existence? Like nature, of 
 which he forms a part, he has his greatness, but it is a 
 greatness which so much the more betrays his in- 
 firmity. He is like those kings who followed their 
 victor to the Capitol, and whose abasement was but 
 increased by the remnants of their majesty. The 
 spectacle of the universe then awakens two sentiments, 
 namely, wonder and pity. And these, strengthened 
 by one another, together lead us to see the emptiness of 
 nature, and to seek its author. Such is the language 
 of worlds, their eternal eloquence, the cry of their 
 conscience, if we may give such a name to the force 
 that constrains them to speak for a greater than they, 
 and to repeat to all the echoes of time and space the 
 hymn of the creature to the Creator : NON NOBIS, 
 
 DOMINE, NON NOBIS, SED NOMIN1 TUO GLORIAM 
 
 Not unto us, Lord, not tmto us, but to thy name be the 
 glory ! Yes, sacred worlds that roll above us, brilliant 
 and joyous stars that pursue your course under the 
 hand of the Most High, happy islands whose shores 
 are traced out in the ocean of heaven, yes, you have 
 never lied to man ! 
 
 It matters little whether pantheism does or does not 
 endeavour to pervert the meaning of the spectacle of 
 nature. It is of importance for us to know, however, 
 that man, taken in general, the man of mankind, sees
 
 2O The Existence of God. 
 
 at a glance that the universe does not exist of itself. 
 Metaphysics will never destroy that deep impression 
 made upon mankind by the spectacle of things which 
 forms the scene upon which we live. A child perceives 
 the incapacity of the heavens and the earth ; he sees, 
 he feels, he touches it ; he will always return to it as to 
 an invincible sentiment forming a part of his being. 
 In vain will you tell him that he is God, it is enough 
 for him to have had but a fever to know that you are 
 laughing at him. 
 
 In contemplating nature, man sees realities; in 
 contemplating his intelligence, he sees truths. Realities 
 are finite like the nature that contains them ; truths 
 are infinite, eternal, absolute, that is to say, greater than 
 the intelligence in which we find them. Nature shows 
 us geometrical figures; the intelligence reveals to 'us 
 the mathematical law itself, the general and abstract 
 law of all bodies. It does more, it reveals to us the 
 metaphysical law, that is to say, the law of all beings 
 of what kind soever, the law which is as applicable 
 to spirits as to bodies. At this height, and in this 
 horizon, the universe disappears from our mental 
 vision, or, at least, we ao longer perceive it save as 
 the reflection of a higher world, as the shadow of a 
 boundless light ; the real becomes absorbed in the true, 
 which is its root, reality becomes measured by truth.
 
 The Existence of God. 2 1 
 
 But where is truth ? Where its dwelling-place, its 
 seat, its living essence ? Is it a pure abstraction of 
 our mind? Is it nothing but the universe magnified 
 by a dream? If it were so, our intelligence itself 
 would be but a dream; truth, which appears to us 
 as the principle of all things, would be only the 
 exaggeration, and, as it were, the extravagance of 
 sensible reality. , 
 
 Shall we say that truth has its seat in our own 
 mind? But our mind is limited, truth has no limits; 
 our mind had a beginning, truth is eternal ; our mind 
 is susceptible of more or less, truth is absolute. To 
 say that our mind is the seat of truth, is to say in 
 obscure terms that our mind is truth itself, living truth : 
 who is so mad as to believe this ? Besides the contra- 
 diction existing between the nature of our mind and 
 the nature of truth, do we not see the minds which 
 form mankind engaged in a perpetual war of affirma- 
 tions and negations ? Truth would then be battling 
 with itself? It would affirm and deny at the same 
 time, although remaining absolute. It is the very 
 height of folly ! 
 
 If truth be not a vain name, it is in the universe only 
 in the state of expression, and in our mind only in the 
 state of apparition ; it is in the universe as the artist is 
 in his work, it is in our mind as the sun is in our eyes.
 
 22 The Existence of God. 
 
 But beyond the universe and our mind, it subsists of 
 itself, it is a real, an infinite, an eternal, an absolute 
 essence, existing of itself, possessing consciousness 
 and intelligence of itself; for how could it be that 
 truth should not understand itself, since it is the source 
 of all understanding ? Now, so to speak of truth is to 
 define God ; God is the proper name of truth, as truth 
 is the abstract name of God. 
 
 There is then a God, if truth exists. Would you 
 say that there is no truth ? It is for you to choose. 
 I do not deny your liberty. 
 
 Perhaps you will still better understand the force of 
 this conclusion by applying it to the order of conscience. 
 Even as truth is the object and life of the mind, justice 
 is the object and life of conscience. Conscience sees 
 and approves a rule of the rights and duties between 
 beings endowed with liberty. That rule is justice. 
 But where is justice ? Is it a simple result of human 
 will ? In that case justice would be but a convention, 
 a fragile law called into life to-day and which may fall 
 to-morrow. Is it an order founded on the very nature 
 of man ? But that nature is variable, corruptible, 
 subject to passions that lead it astray. What is order 
 for one would be disorder for another. If then justice 
 be a reality, it must be an eternal and absolute law, 
 regulating the relations of free volitions, as mathematics
 
 The Existence of God. 23 
 
 are an eternal and absolute law regulating the relations 
 of material beings, and metaphysics an eternal and 
 absolute law regulating the relations of intelligent 
 beings with all beings, either existing or possible. 
 Beyond this notion, justice is but a name which arms 
 the strong against the weak, the prosperous against the 
 needy. Now, this notion necessarily calls forth the 
 notion of God, since an eternal and absolute law could 
 only be a reality in the person of a being subsisting of 
 himself, possessing a will active and just, able to 
 promulgate an order, to maintain it, to reward 
 obedience and punish rebellion. 
 
 Truth is the first name of God ; justice is the 
 second. 
 
 Now it is easy to conceive that there may be men 
 for whom truth and justice are nothing but philoso- 
 phical speculations, men who shut themselves up in 
 the proud solitude of their own thoughts, and build up 
 in them their own glory upon systems that bear their 
 names. But it is not so with poor and suffering 
 mankind : it needs truth for its nourishment, justice 
 for its defence, and it knows that the real name of 
 both is the name of God, and that the real strength 
 of both is the power of God. The poor and the 
 afflicted have never been deceived herein. When they 
 are oppressed, they lift up their hands towards God,
 
 24 The Existence of God. 
 
 they write his name upon their banners, they pro- 
 nounce to the oppressor that last and solemn expres- 
 sion of the soul that believes and hopes : I cite you 
 before the tribunal of God ! 
 
 The time of that tribunal comes sooner or later, its 
 temporal and visible, as well as its eternal time. Kings 
 even here below are cited before it, and nations also. 
 It is the permanent tribunal set up in the midst of 
 error and wickedness, and which saves the world. In 
 vain would pride destroy it ; the people saved by it 
 save it in their turn. If there were none but sages 
 among us, the idea of God might perish here, for a 
 man alone is always powerful against God ; but happily 
 nations are feeble against him, because they cannot do 
 without justice and truth. They protect him against 
 the learned chimeras of false wisdom ; they preserve 
 his memory with a faithfulness which does not always 
 preserve the perfect idea of him, but which at least 
 has never yet permitted the sun and history to see a 
 nation of atheists. Notwithstanding all that men 
 have done, God remains as the corner-stone of human 
 society ; no legislator has dared to banish him, no age 
 has ignored him, no language has effaced his name. 
 Upon earth as in heaven, he is because he is. 
 
 But if God has on his side, nature, intelligence, con- 
 science, and society, what remains there to pantheism ?
 
 The Existence of God. 25 
 
 Where is it to find its basis ? It seeks its basis in the 
 obscurities of abstruse metaphysics ; withdrawing from 
 all realities, from every feeling and every want, in 
 order to form a labyrinth from whence thought can 
 find no exit. It loses itself the clue, and, shut up in 
 the subtle prison which it has made, takes refuge in 
 the sneer of self-deceived pride, and calling to its help, 
 from the corrupted depths of ages, the prying spirits 
 of subtle doctrines, it hurls against God and mankind 
 the anathema of scorn. God passes by without 
 hearing and mankind without answering. Let us do 
 likewise, let us pass by also. 
 
 We have a threefold intuition of God : a negative 
 intuition in nature ; a direct intuition in the ideas of 
 truth and justice ; a practical intuition in human 
 society. Nature, in manifesting characteristics to us 
 incompatible with a being existing of itself, causes us 
 to mount to its source ; the ideas of truth and justice 
 name God to us, without whom they would be nothing ; 
 human society, which cannot do without him, proves to 
 us his existence by its need of him. But besides these 
 continuous and inamissible revelations, there are others 
 which divine providence scatters from time to time 
 on the road of nations. He strikes with his thunders 
 and rends the veils, he gives so full and deep a con- 
 sciousness of his presence, that none can be deceived,
 
 26 The Existence of God. 
 
 and causes a whole nation to utter from its inmost 
 heart that unanimous and involuntary cry : It is the 
 hand of God ! We are witnessing one of those times 
 when God unveils himself; but yesterday he passed 
 through our gates and the whole world beheld him. 
 Shall I then remain silent before him ? Shall I hold 
 upon my trembling lips the prayer of a man who, 
 once in his life, has seen his God before him? 
 
 O God, who has just dealt these terrible blows, O 
 God, the judge of kings and arbiter of the world, look 
 down in mercy upon this old Frank nation, the elder son 
 of thy right hand and of thy Church. Remember its past 
 services, thy first blessings ; renew with it that ancient 
 alliance which made it thy people ; touch its heart 
 which was so full of thee, and which now again, in 
 the flush of a victory wherein it spared nothing royal, 
 yielded to thee the empire which it yields to none 
 other. O God, just and holy, by the cross of thy Son 
 which their hands bore from the profaned palace of 
 kings to the spotless palace of thy spouse, watch over 
 us, protect us, enlighten us, prove once more to the 
 world that a people that respects thee is a people 
 saved !
 
 THE INNER LIFE OF GOD. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 GOD exists, but what does he? What is his 
 action ? What is his life ? This question at once 
 rises in our thoughts. As soon as the mind has recog- 
 nised the existence of a being, it asks how that being 
 lives ; and still more so in regard to God, who, as the 
 principle of beings, excites within us a thirst for know- 
 ledge of him, so much the more ardent and just as his 
 action is the model of all action, and his life the 
 pattern of all life. What then is the life of God? 
 How does he employ his eternity ? This is doubtless 
 a bold question. Nevertheless it is a question which 
 men ask and which they desire to solve. But how is 
 it to be solved ? How are we to penetrate the divine 
 essence in order to catch a glimpse of the incompre- 
 hensible movement of an eternal, infinite, absolute, and 
 immutable spirit ?
 
 28 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 Three doctrines come before us. One of these 
 affirms that God is condemned by the sovereign 
 majesty of his nature to isolation dreadful to imagine ; 
 that, alone in himself, he contemplates himself seeing 
 only himself, and loves himself with a love which has 
 no other object than himself; that in this contempla- 
 tion and this love, eternally solitary, the nature and 
 perfection of his life consist 
 
 According to the second doctrine, the universe 
 shows us the life of God, or rather it is itself the life of 
 God. We behold in it his permanent action, the 
 scene upon which his power is exercised, and in which 
 all his attributes are reflected. God is not out of the 
 universe any more than the universe is out of God. 
 God is the principle, the universe is the consequence, 
 but a necessary consequence, without which the 
 principle would be inert, unfruitful, impossible to 
 conceive. 
 
 Catholic doctrine condemns these two systems. It 
 does not admit that God is a solitary being eternally 
 employed in a sterile contemplation of himself; nor 
 does it admit that the universe, although it is the work 
 of God, is his proper and personal life. It soars 
 above those feeble ideas, and, bearing us with the 
 word of God beyond all the conceptions of the human 
 mind, it teaches us that the divine life consists in the
 
 The Inner Life of God. 29 
 
 co-eternal union of three equal persons, in whom 
 plurality destroys solitude, and unity division ; whose 
 thought corresponds, whose love is mutual, and 
 who, in that marvellous communion, identical in sub- 
 stance, distinct in personality, form together an in- 
 effable association of light and love. Such is the 
 essence of God, and such is his life, both powerfully 
 expressed in those words of the Apostle St. John : 
 
 TRES SUNT QUI TESTIMONIUM DARET IN CCELO : 
 PATER,. VERBUM, ET SPIRITUS SANCTUS There are 
 three who give testimony in heaven : the Father, the 
 
 Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one? 
 Here, and very soon after having promised you 
 light, it would seem that I am leading you into a maze 
 of darkness ; for, can anything be conceived more 
 formidable to the mind than the terms by which I 
 have just expressed, according to the Scriptures and 
 the Church, the relations that constitute the inner life 
 of God ? Do not, however, yield to this first impres- 
 sion ; trust rather to my promises, since they are those 
 of the Gospel, wherein it is written : EGO SUM LUX 
 MUNDI I am the light of the world. And again : QUI 
 
 SEQUITUR ME NON AMBULAT IN TENEBRIS, SED HABEBIT 
 
 LUMEN VIT/E He that followeth me walketh not in 
 
 darkness, but shall have the light of life* Yes, be confi- 
 
 1 i John v. 7. - St. John viii. 12.
 
 3O The Inner Life of God. 
 
 dent, count upon God, who has proposed nothing to 
 you unnecessary to be believed, and who has hidden 
 marvellous treasures in the most obscure mysteries, as 
 he has hidden the fires of the diamond in the depths 
 of the earth. Follow me, let us pass the pillars 
 of Hercules, and, leaving truth to fill our sails, let us 
 fearlessly advance even to the transatlantic regions 
 of light 
 
 We would understand something of the divine life : 
 the first question, therefore, we have to ask is : What is 
 life ? For, as long as we do not know what life is in 
 itself, it is clear that we shall not be able to form any 
 idea of the life of God. What, then, is life ? In order 
 to comprehend this, we must learn what being is ; for 
 life is evidently a certain state of being. We thus 
 arrive at that first and supreme question : What is 
 being ? And we shall solve it by seeking for what is 
 permanent and common in the infinitely varied beings 
 which surround us. Now, in all of these, whatsoever 
 their name, their form, their degree of perfection or 
 inferiority, we find a mysterious force which is the 
 principle of their substance and organization, and 
 which we call activity. Every being, even the most 
 inert in appearance, is active ; it condenses, it resists 
 foreign efforts, it attracts and incorporates to itself 
 elements which obey it. A grain of sand is in con-
 
 The Inner Life of God. 3 1 
 
 test and in harmony with the whole universe, and 
 maintains itself by that force which is the very seat of 
 its being, and without which it would become lost in 
 the absolute incapacity of nothingness. Activity, being 
 the permanent and common characteristic of all that is, 
 it follows that being and activity are one and the same 
 thing, and that we are warranted in making this defini- 
 tion : Being is activity. St. Thomas of Aquinas 
 gave us an example when, having to define God, 
 who is being in its total reality, he said : God is a 
 pure act. 
 
 But activity supposes action, and action is life. Life 
 is to being what action is to activity. To live, is to 
 act. It is true that spontaneous, and, above all, free 
 action, being perfect action, the birth or apparition 
 of life is generally marked at the point where that 
 kind of action is manifested. Thus we say that the 
 stone is, that the plant grows, that the animal lives ; 
 but these different expressions mark only the grada- 
 tions of activity, whose presence, how feeble soever it 
 may be, everywhere constitutes the living being. 
 
 We know what life is. Let us advance another 
 step, let us learn what are its general laws, and then 
 apply them to God. 
 
 The first general law of life is : The action of a being 
 is equal to its activity. In fact the action of a being
 
 32 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 can be limited only by a foreign force, or by its own 
 will. Now a foreign force checks it only at the point 
 where its own energy ceases, and as to its own will, 
 should it possess any, that necessarily bears it as far as 
 it can reach by its own nature. An action superior to 
 its activity is impossible to it ; an action inferior is 
 insufficient ; an action equal to its activity is the only 
 action that places it in harmony with itself and with 
 the rest of the universe. Therefore, whether you con- 
 sider the general movement of worlds or the tendency 
 of each being in particular, you will find them all 
 acting according to the measure of their forces, and 
 placing limits to their ambition only because they exist 
 to their faculties. All, and man among the rest, 
 advance as far as they can ; all, having reached the 
 point which exhausts and stops them, write like the 
 poet, proudly accusing their own powerlessness : 
 
 SlSTIMUS HIC TANDEM NOBIS UBI DEFUIT ORBIS. 
 
 This first general law being recognised, I at once 
 draw some conclusions from it touching the life of 
 God ; for as the action of a being is equal to its 
 activity, and as God is infinite activity, it follows that 
 in God there is infinite action, or, to speak still more 
 clearly, that infinite action constitutes in God the very 
 life of God. But what is an action? Nature and
 
 The Inner Life of God. 33 
 
 mankind are composed only of a tissue of actions ; we 
 do nothing else from the moment of our birth to our 
 death. Nevertheless, do you know clearly what an 
 action is ? Have you ever weighed the sense of that 
 word which comprises all that passes in heaven and 
 upon earth ? An action is a movement ; it is impossible 
 for us to conceive its nature under a more clear and 
 general form. The body moves when it acts, thought 
 moves when it works, the heart moves when it con- 
 ceives affections ; from wheresoever the action conies, 
 the tongue has but one term for expressing it, and the 
 understanding but one idea for conceiving it. All is 
 in movement in the universe because all therein is 
 action, and all therein is action, because, from the atom 
 to the planet, from the dust even to intelligence, all is 
 activity. But movement supposes an object, an end 
 to which the being aspires. I move, I run, I risk my 
 life : Why ? What do I seek ? Apparently I seek 
 something wanting to me and which I desire ; for if 
 nothing were wanting to me, my movement would 
 have no cause, repose would be my natural state, im- 
 mobility my happiness. Since I move, it is to act : to 
 act is at the same time the motive and the end of 
 movement, and consequently action is a productive 
 movement. 
 
 Do not grow weary of following me ; it is true I am 
 
 D
 
 34 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 leading you by ways whose outlets perhaps you do not 
 yet see ; you are passengers in the ship of Columbus, 
 you seek in vain the star that announces the port to 
 you ; but take courage, you will soon hail the shore, it 
 is already near. 
 
 Action is a productive movement, as I have just 
 shown, and, as action is the consequence of activity, it 
 follows that production is the final end of activity ; that 
 is to say of being, since being and activity are one and 
 the same thing. But in what proportion does being 
 produce ? Evidently in proportion to its activity ; 
 since, according to the first general law of life, the 
 action of a being is equal to its activity. Therefore, 
 to live is to act ; to act is to produce ; to produce is 
 to draw forth from self something equal to itself. 
 Doubtless we can conceive a production inferior to the 
 being from whence it emanates ; but that production, 
 were it to take place, would not be the principal act 
 of such life, it would but be accessory and accidental 
 thereto. Every being tends to produce in the 
 plenitude of its faculties, because it tends to live in 
 the plenitude of its life, and it attains that natural 
 term of its ambition only by drawing from itself 
 something equal to itself. It is easy to prove this by 
 observation, after having established it by reasoning. 
 In what, for instance, consists the painful labour of
 
 The Inner Life of God. 35 
 
 the artist ? The artist has had in his soul a vision of 
 the Beautiful and the True ; the horizon has opened 
 before him, and in the luminous distance of the 
 infinite he has seized an idea which has become his 
 own, and which torments him day and night. What 
 would he do, and what is it that troubles him ? He 
 would produce what he has seen or heard ; he 
 thirsts to make a piece of canvas, a stone, or words, 
 express his thought as it is in himself, with the same 
 clearness, the same force, the same poesy, the same 
 tone. As long as he does not obtain that desired 
 equality between his conception and his style, he is 
 troubled and desponding, for he remains beneath 
 himself, and sheds burning tears over the inemcacy of 
 his genius, which is as a reproach and as death to 
 him. From him to whom much is given, says the 
 Gospel, will much be required. Such is the law of 
 production, in the order of nature and art, as in the 
 order of virtue. 
 
 But in order for life to produce something equal to 
 itself, it must produce life; in order for the living 
 being to produce something equal to itself, it must 
 produce a being like itself, or, in other words, it must 
 be fruitful. Fecundity is the extreme and complete 
 term of production, which is itself the necessary term 
 of activity. Thus we learn and lay down that second
 
 36 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 general law of life : The activity of a being is resumed 
 in its fecundity. 
 
 Here the spectacle of the world around us is so 
 striking, that it is almost needless to invoke it. 
 Where in nature can we find any being so abject 
 and disinherited as not to have received from God the 
 grace to produce a being like itself, to see itself in 
 another emanating from itself? The plant ceases not 
 to sow in the earth the germ that multiplies it ; the 
 tree sheds around it and confides to the winds of 
 heaven the mysterious seeds that assure to it a 
 numerous offspring ; the animal gathers its little ones 
 to its unfailing breasts ; and last of all, man, spirit and 
 matter, combines in his fragile life the double fe- 
 cundity of the senses and thought. He bequeaths 
 himself as a whole to a posterity which perpetuates 
 him by the soul as much as by the body, a father 
 twice blessed and doubly immortal. Shall I dare to 
 advance further, and, passing from man to the oppo- 
 site frontiers of life, show you the prodigy of fecundity 
 even in those beings to whom science refuses organi- 
 sation, and which, notwithstanding their apparent 
 insignificance, still find in themselves the power to 
 seduce nature and be perpetuated in its bosom by 
 alliances that manifest their vital energy? In vain, 
 from one pole to the other, from man to the worm of
 
 The Inner Life of God. 37 
 
 the earth, I seek sterility. I find it only in one place 
 and in one thing, in death. So that we may say with 
 rigorous exactness, that life is fecundity, and that the 
 fecundity is equal to the life. 
 
 Let us now lift up our eyes, for we can do so ; let 
 us turn them towards God. If what we have said be 
 true, God, being infinite activity, is also, and even 
 thereby, infinite fecundity. For, if he were active 
 without being fruitful, if he were infinitely active 
 without being infinitely fruitful, one of two things 
 would follow, either his action would be unproductive, 
 or he would produce only outside of himself, in 
 the region of the temporary and the finite. To say 
 that the action of God is unproductive, is to say that 
 he acts without cause, and that his life is consumed in 
 the powerlessness of eternal sterility ; to say that his 
 action is only productive outside of himself, is to say 
 that his life is not his own, which is absurd, or that 
 the universe is his life, which brings us to pantheism. 
 We must then conclude that the life of God is exer- 
 cised within himself by an infinite and a sovereign 
 fecundity. Do not seek beforehand how this adorable 
 mystery is accomplished ; do not hurry your curiosity 
 beyond the light and the abyss. Be masters of your- 
 selves, examine the point you are investigating, hear 
 the sounds that you hear, and no more. The infinite,
 
 38 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 in heaven, is seen at a glance ; here upon earth it is 
 difficult for us to lift even a little of the veil that hides 
 it from us. 
 
 I ask you now but one thing, I ask you if you can 
 form any idea of being without the idea of activity ; 
 any idea of activity without the idea of production ; 
 any idea of production without the idea of fecundity ? 
 I ask you if your mind consents to pronounce this 
 judgment : God is infinite activity which ends in 
 infinite sterility. You may say : He sees and loves 
 himself, is this nothing ? Yes, but his regard and his 
 love are sterile ; does that satisfy you ? What ! 
 Your regard and your love are fruitful ; they produce 
 a living being like yourself, equal to you, in whom you 
 see and love yourself; and God, the principle and 
 pattern of all things, does not possess, under an 
 infinite and a supernatural form, the mystery which 
 you possess under a finite and natural form ! His 
 outer activity is great enough to give life to the 
 universe, whilst his inner and personal activity is to 
 produce nothing but the silence of unmeasured 
 solitude ! Is fecundity then a calamity, and sterility 
 a state of perfection ? If it be a state of perfection, 
 do you not see that God contains them all in a super- 
 eminent degree? We must then conclude with 
 St. Thomas of Aquinas, in his marvellous treatise on
 
 The Inner Life of God. 39 
 
 the divine persons : The consequence of all action being 
 something which proceeds from that action, even as there 
 is an outer procession that follows the outer action, there 
 is also an inner procession that follows the inner action 
 . . . and thus the Catholic faith establishes a procession 
 in God? 
 
 Let us still advance and ask why fecundity is the 
 sum or term of the activity of beings ? Why beings tend 
 to produce other beings like themselves, and, in fact, 
 do produce them ? The reason of this is contained 
 in the very idea of activity and action. For an action 
 is a movement ; a movement supposes a starting- 
 point, which is the acting being ; a point to be at- 
 tained, which is the desired being; and a relation 
 between the principle and the end of movement, 
 between the acting being and the desired being. 
 Without that relation there would be no cause of 
 movement, and consequently no more action, no 
 more activity, no life, no being, nothing. Rela- 
 tion is the very essence of life, and we have but 
 to examine our own life to find abundant proof of 
 it. What do we from the first of our days even to 
 the last ? We hold relations with God, with nature, 
 with men, with books, with the dead, and with the 
 living. The very time that measures our age is a 
 3 Question 27, art. I.
 
 4O Tlie Inner Life of God. 
 
 relation, and our mind would lose itself in vainly 
 endeavouring to imagine life otherwise than as an 
 indivisible tissue of numberless relations. 
 
 What then is a relation ? It is more than needful 
 for us to know, since this is the last link of our whole 
 being. A relation consists in the bringing together 
 of two distinct terms. The perfect conjunction of 
 these terms is unity, their perfect distinction is, 
 plurality, and consequently their perfect relation is 
 unity in plurality. Survey the whole web of your 
 relations, you will find nothing else there. The life 
 of your intelligence is unity of mind in plurality 
 of thoughts ; the life of your body is unity of 
 action in plurality of members ; your life as a 
 family is unity of affection and interests in plurality 
 of persons ; your life as citizens is unity of 
 origin, duties, and rights, in plurality of families ; 
 your Catholic life is unity of faith and love in 
 plurality of souls tending towards God; and so 
 is it with all the rest. What am I now doing ? 
 Why are my words addressed to you ? What is 
 there between them and this auditory? Nothing, 
 if it be not that my soul seeks yours to lead it to 
 the seat of a light which, without destroying the 
 distinction between your personality and mine, would, 
 nevertheless, bring us together in the present unity of
 
 The Inner Life of God. 41 
 
 the same hope and in the future unity of the same 
 beatitude. 
 
 Now this marvel of unity in plurality could be pro- 
 duced only by the likeness of beings, and the likeness 
 of beings supposes their equality of nature by their 
 community of origin. Fecundity, which produces 
 beings like their authors and like each other, is then 
 the natural principle of unity in plurality ; that is to 
 say, of the relations which form the life of beings by 
 the continuous totality of their acts. It is true that 
 we hold relations with beings to whom we are neither 
 drawn by a similar origin nor by an exact likeness ; 
 but these relations are also feeble and distant, and the 
 degree of likeness is always marked by the degree of 
 kindred which measures the strength and intimacy of 
 the relations. Thus members of the same family are 
 nearer to each other than fellow-citizens ; nations of 
 the same race are more closely united than nations of 
 different races ; and all created beings derive from 
 God, their common father, the reason of likenesses 
 and relations, more or less direct, which bind them 
 together in the vast unity of nature. 
 
 We are then entitled to lay down this third general 
 law of life : The end of fecundity is to produce relations 
 between beings, that is to say, to give an object to and a 
 reason for their activity.
 
 42 T/ie Inner Life of God. 
 
 Already you cease to wonder at those prodigious 
 words by which the Apostle St John denned the 
 divine life for us : There are three who give testimony 
 in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, 
 and these three are one.* You see that the mystery ot 
 life is a mystery of relations, that is to say, a mystery 
 that involves these two terms unity in plurality, plu- 
 rality in unity. But before we arrive at a still more 
 formal conclusion, let us halt for a moment to con- 
 sider the effect of relations in beings. 
 
 Life is not the only phenomenon they offer to us. 
 Above the movement that mingles and bears them 
 onward, we find a charm which we call beauty. 
 Beauty is the result of order; wheresoever order 
 ceases, beauty vanishes. But what is order, if not the 
 unity which shines in a multitude of beings, and 
 which, notwithstanding their distinctions and their 
 variety, brings them together again in the splendour 
 of a single act ? 
 
 Goodness is the sister of beauty. It is the gift 
 which beings reciprocally make of their advantages, 
 and consequently it is also the effect of relations. In 
 order to give and to receive, it is necessary at least to 
 be two. 
 
 Thus life, beauty, and goodness, have one and the 
 4 I John v. 7.
 
 Tlie Inner Life of God. 43 
 
 same principle, which is unity in plurality; and to 
 refuse this double character to God is at once to 
 refuse life, beauty, and goodness to him. Would you 
 do this ? Even should you not understand how one 
 and the same being could realize in himself one and 
 many, unity and plurality, would that feebleness of 
 your intelligence destroy the chain of the reasonings 
 and observations which have initiated us into the most 
 profound secrets of the nature of things ? But let us 
 meet the difficulty face to face. 
 
 God is one : his substance is indivisible because it 
 is infinite ; this is beyond doubt for faith as for reason. 
 God cannot then be many by the division of his 
 substance. But if he is not many by the division of 
 his substance, how can he be many? How can a 
 being who is one and indivisible at the same time 
 be many ? Gentlemen, I require but one word, and 
 I ask you in return : Why should God need to be 
 many ? Is it not in order to possess relations in him- 
 self, those relations without which we can neither 
 conceive activity, nor life, nor being ? Let the sub- 
 stance of God, then, remain what it is and what it 
 should be the seat of unity ; and let it produce in 
 itself, without being divided, terms of relation, that is 
 to say, terms which are the seat of plurality in relation 
 to unity. For those two things, one and many, are
 
 44 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 alike necessary in order to form relations ; and if the 
 substance of God were divisible, unity being wanting 
 thereto, relations would be wanting also. 
 
 I divine your thoughts. You would tell me that 
 you do not even understand the expressions which I 
 employ, and that there is manifest contradiction 
 between the idea of an unique substance and the idea 
 of several terms of relation to be contained therein 
 without dividing it. I will show you that it is not so, 
 and had you but the intelligence of a child, it would 
 suffice to enable you to follow me and to render justice 
 to truth. 
 
 I stretch forth my hand : Where is it ? In space ! 
 What is space ? Philosophers have disputed about its 
 nature : some have thought that it is an exceedingly 
 delicate and subtle substance ; others that it is some- 
 thing void, a simple possibility of receiving bodies. 
 Whatever it may be, whether substance or not, space 
 is manifestly a capacity constituted by three terms of 
 relation, length, breadth, and height; three terms 
 perfectly distinct, equal, inseparable save by an ab- 
 straction of the mind, and yet in their evident dis- 
 tinction forming together but one single and indivisible 
 extent, which is space. I say that length, breadth, 
 and height, are terms of relation, that is to say, terms 
 which relate to each other, since the sense of length is
 
 The Inner Life of God. 45 
 
 determined by the sense of breadth, and so on. I 
 say that these terms of relation are distinct from each 
 other ; for it is manifest that length is not breadth, 
 and that breadth is not height. I say, in fine, that 
 these three terms, notwithstanding their real dis- 
 tinction, form but one single and indivisible extent. 
 This, moreover, is perfectly clear to the senses and to 
 the mind. There is then neither obscurity nor con- 
 tradiction in this proposition : God is an unique 
 substance, containing in his indivisible essence terms 
 of relation really distinct in themselves. 
 
 Shall I give a more positive example than that of 
 space ? For, notwithstanding the reality of space, you 
 may perhaps accuse it of being a kind of abstraction. 
 Take then the hrst body you meet with. Every body, 
 whatever it may be, a stone or a diamond, is comprised 
 under the three forms of length, breadth, and height. 
 Prisoner of extent, it bears it in its simple and triple 
 form, and becomes wholly incorporated in it by a 
 reciprocal penetration which makes of both one single 
 thing. Body is space, and space is body. Length, 
 breadth, and height are body, inasmuch as it is long, 
 inasmuch as it is wide, inasmuch as it is high. Divide 
 the body as you will, change its inmost matter at 
 pleasure, the same phenomenon of unity in plurality 
 will always subsist : so that there is nothing in nature,
 
 46 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 space and body, that which contains and that which is 
 contained, which does not fall under this definition 
 as simple as it is marvellous an unique substance in 
 three terms of relation really distinct from each other. 
 
 The universe speaks then like St. John. Not only 
 does it contain nothing contradictory to the logical 
 rectitude of the expressions which represent the 
 mystery of the divine life ; not only do these expres- 
 sions take in it the character of a general and algebraic 
 formula of beings ; but the force of analogy leads us 
 also to apply this formula to the very principle of 
 beings, to that being who should have placed in his 
 works a copy only or a reflection of his own nature. 
 
 As soon, however, as we apply expressions or laws 
 of the visible order to God, their proportions at once 
 become changed, because they pass from the region of 
 the finite to that of the infinite. You must not 
 wonder then, if Catholic doctrine teaches you that 
 terms of relation take, in God, the form of personality. 
 Let us clearly understand this word. Every being, by 
 that alone that it is itself and not another, possesses 
 what we call individuality. As long as it subsists, it 
 belongs to itself ; it may increase or decrease, lose or 
 gain ; it may communicate to others something of 
 itself, but not itself. It is itself as long as it is ; none 
 other is or will ever be so, save itself. Such is the
 
 The Inner Life of God. 47 
 
 nature and force of individuality. Suppose now that 
 the individual being possesses consciousness and 
 knowledge of its individuality, that it sees itself living 
 and distinct from all that is not itself, it would be a 
 person. Personality is no other thing than indi- 
 viduality having consciousness and knowledge of itself. 
 Individuality is the characteristic of bodies : per- 
 sonality is the characteristic of spirits. Now God is 
 an infinite spirit ; all that which constitutes him, 
 substance and terms of relation, is spirit. Conse- 
 quently each term of the divine relations possesses 
 consciousness and knowledge of itself, sees itself 
 distinct from the others as term of relation, one with 
 them as substance : its distinction marks its relative 
 individuality ; consciousness and knowledge of its 
 individuality makes it a person. Imagine space 
 become a spiritual being, you will have before you an 
 analogous phenomenon. Length, breadth, and height 
 would possess consciousness and knowledge of their 
 relative individuality, consciousness and knowledge 
 of their absolute unity in space ; they would be one 
 by substance, many by distinction raised to the state of 
 personality. 
 
 It remains for us to consider how many persons 
 there are in God, how and in what order they are 
 manifested in him.
 
 48 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 Up to this point we have only employed analogies 
 drawn from external nature, but now, having to con- 
 sider the number and genesis of the divine persons, we 
 must seek in more distant regions a light approaching 
 nearer to the light of God. 
 
 Our horizon and light are not limited to external 
 nature. We come in contact therewith by our body ; 
 but it is out of us, even of our body, and in addition, 
 it is but dust and ashes ; and if we possess something 
 of God, it is but a vestige and not an image of him. 
 Let us leave the dust and limit, and enter into ourselves : 
 Are we not spirits ? Yes, I am a spirit ! In this 
 material sepulchre which I inhabit as a traveller, a 
 light has been kindled, an immaterial and a pure 
 light enlightening my life, which is my true life, which 
 descends from eternity, and leads me thitherward as 
 to my origin and nature. Why do I speak of time 
 and space ? Who shall stay me in these abject com- 
 parisons ? Ah ! I feel that you are ready to upbraid 
 me. You wonder that I imprison my soul and your 
 own in these inanities of the universe, where I see 
 shadows only, and touch but the dead ; from whence I 
 have drawn only faint and defaced images of truth. You 
 impatiently expect me to open to you the arena of a 
 higher vision ; I feel that it is there before us. I see 
 that which is unseen, I hear that which is not heard, I
 
 The Inner Life of God. 49 
 
 read that which has neither form nor colour. Truth has 
 still a veil, but it is its personality ; it still has secrets, 
 but they are the last. Nature, withdraw ; and let us 
 behold God in the spirit ! 
 
 The mind lives, like God, of an immaterial life, and 
 consequently it knows that life in which the senses 
 have no part, and which is that of God. What, then, 
 does the mind when, shut up within itself, imposing 
 silence on all the rest, it lives of its own life ? What 
 does it, gentlemen ? Two things only two inex- 
 haustible acts, which are constantly renewed, which 
 never tire, and whose progress forms its whole labour 
 and delight it thinks and it loves. First it thinks, 
 that is to say, it sees and combines objects divested of 
 matter, form, extent, and horizon ; a kind of universe 
 before which the one that we inhabit by the senses is 
 but a close and dreary dungeon. It dilates in that 
 boundless sea of ideas. It calls into life, to form its 
 own life, nameless and endless worlds which obey it 
 with the quickness of lightning. It may be ignorant 
 of their value and disdain them ; pure contemplation 
 will be so much the more burdensome to it as it 
 exercises it the less and enchains its faculties to the 
 abasements of the body. But I speak not of these 
 treasons of the mind against itself; I speak of the 
 mind as it is of its own nature, as it lives when it wills 
 
 E
 
 5o The Inner Life of God, 
 
 to live at the height where God has placed it. It 
 thinks then, this is its first act. 
 
 But thought; is it the mind itself, or something 
 distinct from it ? It is not the mind itself, for thought 
 comes and goes, whilst the mind always remains. I 
 forget on the morrow the ideas of the eve ; I call them 
 up and dismiss them ; sometimes they beset me in 
 spite of myself ; my thought and my mind are two. I 
 speak to myself in the solitude of my understanding ; 
 I interrogate myself. I answer to myself, my inner 
 life is but a continual and mysterious colloquy. And 
 yet I am one. My thought, although distinct from 
 my mind, is not separated therefrom ; when it is 
 present, my mind sees it in itself : when it is absent, it 
 seeks it in itself. I am at the same time one and two. 
 My intellectual life is a life of relation; I find 
 again therein what I have seen in external nature, 
 namely, unity and plurality unity resulting from the 
 very substance of the mind, plurality resulting from its 
 action. What, indeed, would the action of the mind 
 be if it were unfruitful ? What would be its reason, 
 its end, its object? The mind, like the whole of 
 nature, but in a much higher manner, is then prolific. 
 Whilst bodies divide in order to multiply, the mind, 
 created in the likeness of God, remains inaccessible to 
 all division. It engenders its thought without emitting
 
 The Inner Life of God. 5 1 
 
 any of its incorruptible substance ; multiplies it without 
 losing anything of the perfection of unity. 
 
 You see that in rising from the outer to the inner 
 life from the life of the body to that of the mind we 
 find again the same law ; but we find it, as was inevit- 
 able, with an increase of light and precision. Bodies, 
 notwithstanding their marvellous revelations, kept us 
 too far from God ; the mind has borne us even to the 
 sanctuary of his essence and his life. Let us enter, or 
 at least, if we are forbidden to pass certain limits, let 
 us approach as near as divine goodness will permit 
 us. 
 
 God is a spirit ; his first act is, then, to think. But 
 his thought could not be like ours, multiple, unceas- 
 ingly appearing but to vanish, and vanishing but to 
 appear again. Ours is multiple, because since we are 
 finite, we can but represent to ourselves one by one 
 the objects susceptible of being known to us ; it is 
 liable to perish, since in the crowding on of our ideas 
 one upon another, the second dethrones the first, and 
 the third overthrows the second. On the contrary, in 
 God, whose activity is infinite, the mind at once en- 
 genders a thought equal to itself, which fully represents 
 it, and which needs no second expression, because 
 the first has exhausted the abyss of things to know, 
 that is to say, the abyss of the infinite. That unique
 
 52 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 and absolute thought, the first-born and the last of the 
 mind of God, remains eternally in his presence as an 
 exact representation of himself, or, to speak the 
 language of the sacred books, as his image, the bright- 
 ness of his glory and the figure of his substance. 6 It is 
 his word, his utterance, his inner word, as our thought 
 is also our utterance and our word ; but differing from 
 ours inasmuch as it is a perfect word which speaks all 
 to God in a single expression, which speaks it always 
 without repetition, and which St. John heard in heaven 
 when he thus opened his sublime Gospel : In the 
 beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, 
 and the Word was God* 
 
 And even as in man the thought is distinct from 
 the mind without being separated therefrom, so, in 
 God, the thought is distinct without being separated 
 from the divine mind which produces it. The Word is 
 consubstantial with the Father, according to the expres- 
 sion of the council of Nice, which is but the forcible 
 expression of truth. But here, as in the rest, there 
 exists a great difference between God and man. In 
 man the thought is distinct from the mind by an im- 
 perfect distinction, because it is finite; in God, the 
 thought is distinct from the mind by a perfect distinc- 
 tion, because it is infinite : that is to say, that in man 
 * 2 Cor. iv. 4. Heb. i. 3. ' John i. I.
 
 Tlie Inner Life of God. 53 
 
 the thought does not attain to becoming a person, 
 whilst in God it does attain thereto. The mystery of 
 unity in plurality is not totally accomplished in our 
 intelligence, and this is why we cannot live of our- 
 selves alone. We seek from without the aliment of 
 our life : we need a foreign support, a thought other 
 than ours, and yet nearly allied to it. In God 
 plurality is absolute as well as unity, and therefore his 
 life passes entirely within himself, in the ineffable 
 colloquy between a divine person and a divine person, 
 between a father without generation and a son 
 eternally engendered. God thinks, and he sees him- 
 self in his thought as in another so akin to him as to 
 be but one with him in substance ; he is father, since 
 he has produced in his own likeness a term of relation 
 really and personally distinct from him ; he is one 
 and two in all the force which the infinite gives to 
 unity and duality ; in contemplating his thought, in 
 beholding his image, in hearing his word, he is able to 
 utter in the ecstasy of the highest, the most real 
 paternity : Thou art my Son, to-day have /begotten thee. 7 
 To-day ! In this day which has neither past, nor 
 present, nor future ; in this day which is eternity, that 
 is to say, the indivisible duration of unchanging being. 
 To-day ! For God thinks to-day ; he engenders his 
 7 Psalm ii. 7.
 
 54 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 Son to-day, he sees him to-day, he hears him to-day, he 
 lives to-day in that ineffable act which has neither 
 beginning nor end. 
 
 But is this all the life of God ? Is the generation 
 of his Son his sole act, and does it consummate with 
 its fecundity all his beatitude ? No, gentlemen ; for, 
 in ourselves, the generation of thought is not the term 
 where our life ends. When we have thought, a 
 second act appears : we love. Thought is a movement 
 which brings its object into ourselves ; love is a 
 movement which draws us out of ourselves towards 
 that object in order to unite it to us and ourselves to 
 it, and thus to accomplish in its fulness the mystery 
 of relations, that is to say, the mystery of unity in 
 plurality. Love is at the same time distinct from 
 the mind, and distinct from the thought ; distinct 
 from the mind in which it is engendered and in which 
 it dies ; distinct from the thought by its very defi- 
 nition, since it is a movement of drawing together, 
 whilst the thought is a simple perception. And yet 
 it proceeds from the one and from the other, and 
 forms but one with both. It proceeds from the mind, 
 whose act it is, and from the thought, without which 
 the mind would not see the object which it should 
 love ; and it remains one with the thought and 
 the mind in the same fount of life where we again
 
 The Inner Life of God. 55 
 
 find all the three, always inseparable, and always 
 distinct. 
 
 In God, it is the same. From the coeternal 
 regard interchanged between the Father and the Son, 
 springs a third term of relation, proceeding from the 
 one and the other, really distinct from them, raised 
 by the force of the infinite to personality, and which 
 is the Holy Ghost, that is to say, the holy, the un- 
 fathomable and stainless movement of divine love. 
 As the Son exhausts knowledge, the Holy Ghost 
 exhausts love in God, and by him the cycle of divine 
 fecundity and life closes. What more could be 
 possible to God ? As a perfect Spirit he thinks and 
 he loves ; he produces a thought equal to himself, 
 and with his thought a love equal to both. What 
 more could he desire or produce ? And what more 
 could you desire if, like him, you possessed unbounded 
 thought and unbounded love in the unity of your 
 substance ? But, poor as we are, thought and love 
 are in our souls only a perception and a possession 
 of a foreign object ; we are obliged to leave ourselves 
 in order to seek our life, to appease our thirst for 
 knowledge, our hunger for love. And instead of 
 turning to the only source of truth and charity, which 
 is God, we wed ourselves to nature, which is but a 
 shadow ; to the life of time, which is but death. Or,
 
 56 The Inner Life of God, 
 
 returning to ourselves in a hopeless effort, we ask 
 from our own powerlessness the accomplishment of 
 the one and triple mystery which is divine felicity ; we 
 endeavour to satisfy ourselves in the pride of a solitary 
 thought, in the delight of personal love, and, like 
 dust which consumes itself, we waste away in a 
 withering grasp of egotism which would be infinite if 
 nothingness could be infinite. 
 
 Oh ! lift up your eyes to heaven ! There is life 
 because there is true fecundity. It is there that the 
 spectacle of the laws of nature, and the study of the 
 laws of your own minds, lead you. All teaches you 
 that being and activity are one and the same thing, 
 that activity is expressed by action, and that action 
 is necessarily productive or fruitful ; that the end of 
 fecundity is to establish relations between similar 
 beings ; that relation is unity in plurality, from whence 
 results life, beauty, and goodness. And that thus, 
 God, the infinite being, the pre-eminently good, beau- 
 tiful, and living being, is infallibly the most magnificent 
 totality of relations, perfect unity and perfect plurality, 
 the unity of substance in the plurality of persons ; a 
 primordial mind, a thought equal to the mind that 
 engenders it, a love equal to the mind and the thought 
 whence it proceeds ; all the three, Father, Son, Holy 
 Ghost, ancient as eternity, great as infinity, one in
 
 The Inner Life of God. 57 
 
 beatitude as in the substance from whence they derive 
 their identical divinity. Behold God ! Behold God, the 
 cause and pattern of all beings ! Nothing exists here 
 below which is not a vestige or an image of him, 
 according to the degree of its perfection. Space 
 reveals him in its single and triple plenitude; bodies 
 proclaim him in the three dimensions which constitute 
 their solidity ; the mind shows us a nearer vision of 
 him in the production of the two highest things of 
 this world, if indeed they are of this world, namely, 
 thought and love; in fine, the very tissue of the 
 universe which is everywhere but relations, is before 
 us as it were a picture which the divine light passes 
 over, penetrates, and so gives to us above the visible 
 heaven a glimpse of the invisible heaven of the 
 Trinity. 
 
 All laws take their source in this seat of primordial 
 relations. If human society would aspire to per- 
 fection, it has no other model to study and to imitate. 
 It will find there the first social constitution in the 
 first community ; equality of nature between the 
 persons who compose it ; order in their equality, 
 since the Father is the principle of the Son, and the 
 Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son ; 
 unity, the cause of plurality ; thought, receiving from 
 above its being and its light ; love, terminating and
 
 58 The Inner Life of God. 
 
 crowning all the relations. These laws are full of 
 beauty, and if legislators could realise them upon 
 earth, they would produce a work whose privilege and 
 secret have until now belonged to the Catholic Church 
 alone. 
 
 Let us halt here. I have not demonstrated the 
 mystery of the Holy Trinity to you, but I have placed 
 it in perspective, where pride will not mistake it 
 without insulting itself. Let us forgive that satis- 
 faction to pride if it be jealous of claiming it For 
 yourselves, inspired by humbler and higher wisdom, 
 give thanks to God, who, in revealing to us the 
 mystery of his life, has not overwhelmed our in- 
 telligence by a sterile light, but has given to us the 
 key of nature and of our own mind.
 
 ( 59 ) 
 
 THE CREATION OF THE WORLD BY GOD. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 WE have penetrated even to the inner life of 
 God ; we know what he is, and what is his life. The 
 course of ideas would lead us now to seek what is his 
 character ; but two words will suffice for us on this 
 head. The character of God is perfection ; whatever 
 is included in the idea of perfection immutability, 
 wisdom, justice, goodness must be attributed to God 
 in an infinite degree, and forms his metaphysical and 
 moral character. The difficulties which may spring 
 from these divers attributes will naturally be solved 
 when we come to treat of the relations between God 
 and created beings. We pass over them then at a 
 bound, and find ourselves logically in presence of this 
 question : God being the admitted principle of things, 
 how have they emanated from him ? By what process, 
 and above all from what motives ?
 
 60 TJte Creation of tfte World by God. 
 
 Here we begin to touch more directly the secret of 
 our destinies; for they unquestionably take their 
 source in the process by which we have sprung from 
 the bosom of our cause, and yet much more in the 
 motives that led the self-existing being to produce 
 something which was not himself. What then is this 
 process ? What are these motives ? 
 
 Before I answer, I beg your particular attention to 
 the state of the question. We are not now inquiring 
 whether the world is or is not a work : that question is 
 judged. Whosoever is not a pantheist is compelled 
 to admit that the world has a cause, that it is the 
 work of a superior intelligence and power ; now we 
 have discarded pantheism, we have recognised God in 
 the very infirmity of nature, and therefore we say of 
 him with the people and the poet : 
 
 " The Eternal is his name, the world is his work." 
 
 It is worthy of attention that the philosophers of 
 antiquity who believed in the eternity of matter, such 
 as Plato, could not however help recognizing in 
 the totality of visible things the character of a 
 studied work, and they called God the great architect 
 of the universe. In fact the universe bears the visible 
 sign of its personal powerlessness, if I may so speak ; 
 and those even who do not reach the idea of its
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 61 
 
 creation, see in it the hand of the artist who formed 
 and constructed it; They see it made, although they 
 do not see it created, otherwise the idea of God would 
 have no reason in their minds. The production of 
 the world is a dogma which logically precedes the 
 dogma of the existence of God. We say : The world is 
 produced, therefore God is ; and not : God is, there- 
 fore the world is produced. It is the reasoning of the 
 ancient theist philosophers as well as of the Christian 
 philosophers, only it was less complete in the former 
 than in the latter. Aristotle, for instance, after having 
 admitted the eternity of matter, could no longer 
 mount to a supreme cause, save by discovering, some- 
 thing in nature whose presence could not be explained 
 without a higher principle. Such to him was the 
 movement of bodies. The analysis of this pheno- 
 menon led him to see the necessity of a first motor, 
 and he wrote this proposition, which is almost 
 divine in its depth and originality : There is some- 
 thing immovable which is the principle of move- 
 ment. 
 
 Once more then we are not inquiring whether the 
 world is produced, but how and why it has been 
 produced. 
 
 Two systems have divided minds outside the pale 
 of Catholic doctrine. The first affirms that the world
 
 62 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 has been produced by the co-operation of God and 
 a certain inferior substance co-eternal with God. 
 Picture to yourselves, on the one hand, the absolute 
 and perfect being : on the other, a vile, shapeless, 
 lifeless substance, unable of itself to rise from that 
 abject state, and yet uncreated like God, eternal like 
 God, self-existing like God matter, in a word, and 
 yet matter stripped of the glory in which we see it 
 clothed; that had God left it there, it would be 
 there still, a sort of empty and eternal tomb, receiving 
 neither life nor death. But God beheld it, he was 
 moved with pity at the infinite greatness of its poverty. 
 He spake a word, and the world, bursting the in- 
 flexible bonds of its conception, appeared as our eyes 
 now admire it, ancient in itself, new in form, father 
 and son at the same time, son of one more perfect 
 than itself, father of itself by co-operation. 
 
 This ingenious poesy has not satisfied all minds. 
 Many have refused to accept it. Before logic as well 
 as in itself they have seen the poverty of that singular 
 substance, half God, half nothingness God in the 
 eternity of its being, nothingness in its powerlessness 
 to give itself the mode of its existence and in order 
 to explain the birth of the world they have imagined 
 the system of emanation. In this second order of 
 ideas God has drawn the substance of the universe
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 63 
 
 from his own substance, but without communicating 
 to it his personality or his divinity. 
 
 Catholic doctrine rejects this system as well as the 
 other. For either the divine substance is entire and 
 indivisible in the world, in which case the world is 
 God ; or the divine substance is but in part in the 
 world by virtue of emanation, and then it loses the 
 absolute character without which the mind cannot 
 conceive it. 
 
 It is not necessary to make a great effort of thought 
 in order to seize the vice or rather the absurdity of 
 these theories on the origin of the world. We find 
 here a striking example of the strength and the weak- 
 ness of the human mind. It has seen clearly that 
 visible nature is inexplicable without the intervention 
 of a higher nature ; but I know not why it has not 
 been able to determine the mode and measure of that 
 intervention. Struck by the poverty of the universe, 
 it denied to it self-existence in order to make it an 
 emanation of the divinity ; then, not conceiving either 
 that God could come forth from himself, or that his 
 substance became impoverished by that emission, it 
 attributed to the world a fund of original vitality, but 
 poor and held within the most extreme limits of inca- 
 pacity. It is always the same contradiction. It 
 would seem that only a little logical vigour was needed
 
 64 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 in order to draw positive conclusions in the fulness of 
 truth ; man was unequal to this. His eye, wandering 
 between two abysses, dared neither to accept the one 
 nor the other, and sought between them an imaginary 
 resting-place. 
 
 Open now the Bible and read its first phrase : In 
 the beginning God created heaven and earth. What 
 simplicity, and what certainty ! Moses does not affirm 
 even the existence of God ; he names and defines 
 him by an action which at the same time explains 
 the universe. The universe is not eternal, nor is it 
 an emanation of the divine substance ; it was made in 
 the full meaning of the word, it was made by a pure act 
 of will. God spake, and all was made, said David, and 
 this is the idea which the human mind was unable to 
 discover, even in order to dispute it. The human mind 
 ignored it, although it was the key of all, and, since it 
 has been revealed, the human mind has rejected it as 
 an incomprehensible fiction. What, says the mind, is 
 it to make being by an act of the will ? How can 
 that magical operation be conceived ? And what is 
 an idea that offers no seizable image to the under- 
 standing? Man acts, but always upon a substance 
 pre-existing his action ; he produces, but only simple 
 modifications in the subject where he exercises his 
 power. Creation is an abyss in which he sees nothing
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 65 
 
 but a name and despair ; a name instead of an idea, 
 despair instead of a solution. 
 
 What think you ? Is it necessary for us to represent 
 an act to ourselves in order to have an idea of it ? Is 
 it not enough that the force of logic constrains us to 
 affirm its existence ? I grant for the moment that reason 
 in no way seizes the creating act ; but it sees that 
 the world is neither eternal, nor has it emanated from 
 the substance of God, and, driven to the last extremity, 
 concludes that it was made by means of creation ; for 
 what other issue remains to it? Assuredly if the 
 mind sees anything here it sees but an impossibility, 
 and therefore it takes the only road open to it, an 
 obscure one however, but enlightened at least by the 
 light contained in every logical necessity. Is it true 
 moreover that the word creation represents nothing to 
 our understanding ? Is it true that we cannot conceive 
 how the divine will is able to pronounce that sovereign 
 word : FIAT ! I should wonder if it were so ; for, if 
 we have unravelled in our intelligence images which 
 have led us even to the sacred vestibule of the 
 uncreated essence, why should not the mystery of our 
 personal will teach us something touching the mystery 
 of the divine will ? The will is the seat of power ; by 
 it man commands and is obeyed. Command ! What 
 a word ! Have you ever reflected upon it ? One man 
 
 F
 
 66 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 utters a word : it is heard, and all is in motion. 
 Another speaks, nothing is done. Both pretended to 
 command, one only has succeeded. It is because one 
 only uttered the word that contains power, the word that 
 expresses will. Many think they express it, because 
 they speak the word ; but few do so in reality. It is 
 the most rare expression in the world, although it is 
 the most often usurped ; and when a man possesses its 
 terrible secret, were he the poorest and the last of all, 
 be sure that some day you will see him above you. Of 
 such was Caesar. 
 
 Have you ever remarked the part which the will 
 plays in the occult sciences, and how no one becomes 
 master of another there save by the energy of a kind 
 of imperative fluid? Virile natures offer greater 
 resistance to the perturbations of these secret arts, 
 and this is why the ancient oracles chose the feeble 
 mouth of the pythoness for their organ. Pardon this 
 allusion to questionable mysteries; truth penetrates 
 all, even those things whose nature is veiled and 
 uncertain. Thus the clouds bear the sun in con- 
 cealing it. 
 
 Be that as it may, none will dispute that the seat of 
 power is in the will. It is by the will that man wields 
 empire over his fellow-men, and by it also he moves 
 his own body. Therefore, when Catholic doctrine
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 67 
 
 teaches us that the world has sprung from an act of 
 the divine will, it teaches us something which is verified 
 by our own experience of the seat where lies the prin- 
 ciple of our own force. In ourselves, as in God, the 
 will produces force ; but what is force ? I stand still ; 
 suddenly my arm is raised, my hand is outstretched, 
 my head is erect, my eye brightens : what has hap- 
 pened ? Has any foreign power seized upon me and 
 deprived me of my repose ? No ; within myself, in 
 a calm and immaterial chamber, an act has been 
 produced. I have said : Let my body move, and it has 
 moved. At the same time I have conveyed to my mem- 
 bers, and in an exact proportion, the quantity of force 
 necessary to their movement ; I have willed, and acted. 
 Observe ! the movement did not exist. It did not exist 
 in my body, which was still : it did not exist in my 
 soul, which is of a spiritual nature : I have produced 
 it by a simple act of my will. I have created it. The 
 proposition of Aristotle is verified in myself: Immo- 
 bility is the principle of movement. What is this, but a 
 creation ? Say you that the motive power pre-existed 
 in my will ? Be it so ; but what is the motive power 
 but the principle that produces movement ? Catholic 
 doctrine does not teach that God creates without a 
 creative power of which this will is the seat and the 
 organ. The divine FIAT, like the human FIAT, has an
 
 68 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 efficient cause, without which it would be but an empty 
 word, a fruitless desire. 
 
 Observe that the bodily movement is exterior to the 
 soul which produces it by an act of the inner will. 
 Herein lies the difference between generation and 
 creation. When the mind conceives a thought, it 
 engenders, because the thought is of the same nature 
 as itself and dwells in itself ; when the will suscitates 
 the movement of the body, it creates, because the 
 movement is not of the same nature as itself, and 
 springs from without. These two acts have nothing 
 in common. The first is the principle of the inner 
 life ; the second of the outer life. The first is the life 
 of God and of our soul ; the second is the life of the 
 world and of our body. All activity is reduced to 
 these two terms, to engender and to create, that is to 
 say, to produce within and without. No being exists 
 without this double faculty. Were the first wanting 
 it would have no inner and personal life ; were the 
 second wanting it would have no outer life. Genera- 
 tion concentrates, creation dilates ; they form together 
 the mystery of all life. 
 
 Judge now whether reason forms no idea of the 
 creating act. It is true that in God that act assumes 
 a strength which surpasses our feeble powers. Whilst 
 the movement created by us decreases and soon dies,
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 69 
 
 the things created by God strengthen into a durable 
 substance. This is the same difference which we have 
 already remarked between the production of the divine 
 thought and the production of human thought ; the 
 characteristic of the work of God is subsistency, 
 whilst whatsoever man does passes from being to 
 nothingness with lamentable speed. But this passing 
 away of our works does not destroy their reality, or 
 their analogy with the works of the infinite. We 
 really engender like God, we really create like him ; 
 we in an incomplete and a relative manner, God in a 
 perfect and an absolute manner. And we understand 
 the two mysteries of generation and creation, which 
 form life, because we are really, although imperfectly, 
 generators and creators. 
 
 This established, your place and your condition are 
 henceforth known to you ; you are not sovereigns, 
 you are servants. Sovereignty is existence by itself; 
 you do not possess it in any degree. You have been 
 made, you have been made out of nothing, according to 
 the energetic expression of the mother of the Macca- 
 bees, and at the very most you can but pretend to the 
 title of children of God. This is the extreme term of 
 your ambition. If the divine goodness has shed in 
 your soul and upon your brow some traces of likeness 
 to himself, you are his children, and he permits you,
 
 70 Tlic Creation of the World by God. 
 
 from your very dust, to address to his throne the name 
 of father. This is your highest glory. Pretend not 
 then to sovereignty ; what is sovereignty in a being 
 who lives by another ? And yet there are men who 
 would invest you with it. For this, rationalism strains 
 all its efforts to prove the eternity of the world, and to 
 seek for signs of mdefectibility in ruin and death. For 
 do you think that the human mind would rush so 
 eagerly upon these questions if they did not involve 
 consequences for the direction of the soul and life ? 
 Be sure that all is there. To say that the world is 
 uncreated is to say that man is sovereign ; to say that 
 it is created is to say that man is a servant, or at most 
 a son. The first doctrine gives us the right to define 
 ourselves like God : / am who am. 1 The second 
 places in our hearts the prayer of the Gospel : Our 
 Father who art in heaven. 
 
 Between these we have to decide ; we must live 
 here below as God or as creature, in the modesty of 
 obedience or in the pride of sovereignty. Which will 
 you choose ? Some sages will tell you that you are 
 great ; they take the sublime part of your being, and 
 would persuade you that there is nothing above you. 
 Others will place a low and dishonoured image of 
 yourselves before you ; in the lowest regions of your 
 1 Exodus iii. 14.
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 7 1 
 
 nature they will discover secrets that will fill you with 
 shame, and yet it is still but to flatter your pride. 
 Catholic doctrine alone places you in your true posi- 
 tion, without insult or adulation. It sees your great- 
 ness and proves it to you ; it sees your wretchedness 
 and shows it to you ; it supports you against the pride 
 that inflates and against the pride that dishonours 
 you ; in fine, it reveals to you at the same time the 
 knowledge of your greatness and your wretched- 
 ness, in that single phrase which it alone has pro- 
 nounced : Man is a creature, but he is the creature 
 of God. 
 
 The creature of God ! Why ? What has moved 
 that inaccessible being to look beneath himself and 
 call forth that which was not ? It concerns us to 
 know, for it is evident that the beginning and end of 
 our destinies lie in the motive of our creation. Lost 
 as we were in the cold shadows of inexistence, unable 
 of ourselves to rise from the depths of that tomb, we 
 had no other hope, no other germ of life than in the 
 will of God, and the will of God could only turn to- 
 wards us, pity, and call us, by virtue of a motive which 
 determined it. No reasonable being, in fact, acts 
 without reason under pain of acting at hazard, and of 
 ignoring what he does by ignoring why he does it. 
 Therefore St. Thomas of Aquinas, seeking before us
 
 72 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 the motive of creation, begins by laying down this 
 maxim : Every being acts for an end; and he calls the 
 end by the name of final cause, in order to show that, 
 being the motive of the acts of the will, it is really the 
 principle of that which the will produces. God, in 
 creating the world, was then moved by an end, that is 
 to say, by an object which he purposed to attain, and 
 which was the term of his thought, his will, and his 
 action. What was that end ? If, in order to learn 
 this, we study the springs of our own determinations, 
 we shall easily find among them the motive of interest 
 or of utility. We will and we act because we have 
 wants ; our movements are the efforts of a being which 
 does not live of itself, and which seeks from without the 
 support or the increase of its life. But God has no 
 wants ; he lives of himself, and in himself; nothing is 
 wanting to the plenitude of his being and his felicity : 
 how should he act from interest? How should he 
 have created man and the world to fill the void of his 
 nature, or to add to the infinite resources and delights 
 not yet to be found therein ? Evidently he possessed 
 them all, he had nothing to gain, nothing to lose, in 
 the creation of the universe. The outward manifesta- 
 tion of his omnipotence was a supremely disinterested 
 act. 
 
 It is true I have often heard, and you have heard
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 73 
 
 it yourselves that God created the world for his glory. 
 But that expression has two meanings, one which is 
 exact, and which I will soon explain to you ; the other, 
 which is not admissible, because it supposes that the 
 divine will may be moved by the reason of personal 
 utility. Let us put aside, then, for an instant, terms 
 ill-defined, and continue to seek what was the motive 
 of God in calling the world into existence. 
 
 Man does not act from interest only : he is capable 
 also of acting from duty, that is to say, of sacrificing 
 his own to the common benefit, in the name of a 
 supreme law regulating the relations between beings, 
 and imposing acts upon them which turn to the benefit 
 of others. This motive is infinitely more noble than 
 the first : it draws the soul from egotism, and, as a 
 moving principle, gives it an impulsion from above, 
 which, being no other thing than the view and the 
 sentiment of eternal justice, appears worthy to concen- 
 trate itself in God and to have commanded his resolu- 
 tion when he created the world. Nevertheless it is 
 not so. God is justice itself. As soon as he acts, he 
 acts under the empire of that law of equity which is 
 comprised in his essence ; but before acting externally 
 for the first time, before founding the universe, he 
 owed nothing to it. He was free towards it in all the 
 liberty which being possesses before nothingness. He
 
 74 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 could communicate existence to it or refuse it, accord- 
 ing to his pleasure, without affecting any right, without 
 neglecting any duty. Man himself owes nothing to 
 nothingness, and in drawing forth another man from 
 his generous bosom, he performs an act of full and 
 absolute sovereignty. He is a father because he has 
 so willed it, as God is a creator because he has so 
 willed it. 
 
 But did no motive then inspire the creative will ? 
 It cannot be so, and this we have already shown. The 
 motive exists ; let us not grow weary of seeking for it 
 in the mystery of our own deliberations. 
 
 Above duty, if it be possible, or at least in a place 
 not less elevated and sacred, lies another moving 
 principle of our actions : it is love. We advance, 
 because we love ; we suffer, we live, we die, because 
 we love. Love guides our most ardent designs, and if 
 we sometimes feel ourselves able to do all things, if, 
 urging life and death before us with a force almost 
 sacrilegious, we sometimes think that already we 
 possess the energy of immortality, it is love assuredly, 
 it is love that persuades us and bears us along. No 
 courser is more rapid, none will ever bound over more 
 abysses with greater pleasure, none will carry us 
 farther, higher, or give us a stronger sensation of a 
 being about to create. Was it then love that moved
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 75 
 
 the divine will, and unceasingly urged him to create ? 
 Was it love who was our first father ? But, alas ! love 
 itself has a cause in the beauty of its object, and what 
 beauty could that dead and icy shadow which pre- 
 ceded the universe have possessed before God ? That 
 shadow to which we can give a name only by betraying 
 truth ! What could nothingness have said to the 
 heart of God ? How is it possible to love that which 
 is not ? Or even, how is it possible to love finite 
 beauty when in possession of perfect and immeasurable 
 beauty ? Already love had produced in God its in- 
 effable fruit ; already the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost 
 co-eternally respired in the intimate colloquy of their 
 triple, and single, and infinite beauty. They saw, they 
 felt, they spake together their beatitude, and all three 
 immutable in one and the same rapture, they could 
 neither see, nor feel, nor hear anything which merited 
 from them a single sensation of their love. The 
 mystery was fully accomplished great God ! and 
 what remained then to move thy heart, and cause 
 thee to see us from afar in that complete inanity in 
 which we did not even wait for thee ? 
 
 Something remained, do not doubt it, something 
 more generous than interest, more elevated than duty, 
 more powerful than love. Sound the depths of your 
 own hearts, and if you find it difficult to understand
 
 76 The Creation of the World by\ God. 
 
 me, if your own gifts are unknown to you, hear 
 Bossuet, who speaks of you : " When God," said he, 
 " made the heart of man, he first placed in it 
 goodness." This is divine language, and had Bossuet 
 uttered but this single phrase, I should call him a 
 great man. Goodness ! That is to say, that virtue 
 which consults no interest, which does not wait for 
 the command of duty, which needs not to be solicited 
 by the attraction of the beautiful, but which leans so 
 much the more towards an object as that object is 
 poorer, more wretched, more abandoned, more worthy 
 of pity ! It is true, it is indeed true, man possesses 
 that adorable faculty. I appeal to yourselves as wit- 
 nesses. It is not genius, or glory, or love, that 
 measures the elevation of his soul ; it is goodness. It 
 is goodness that gives to the human physiognomy its 
 highest and most invincible charm ; it is goodness that 
 draws us together ; it is goodness that brings blessings 
 to misfortune, and that is everywhere, from earth to 
 heaven, the great mediator. See the poor Cretin at 
 the foot of the Alps : his eye has no lustre, he neither 
 smiles nor weeps, he knows not even his own de- 
 gradation, he seems as it were an effort of nature to 
 insult herself in dishonouring her noblest production. 
 Do not think that he has not found the way to some 
 heart, and that his abjection has snatched from him
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 77 
 
 the friendship of the universe. No, he is loved, he 
 has a mother, he has brothers and sisters, he has a 
 place by the cottage hearth, the best and most 
 honoured place, because he is the most disinherited. 
 The bosom that nourished him holds him still, and 
 the superstition of love speaks of him only as a 
 blessing sent from God. Such is man ! 
 
 But can I say : Such is man, without saying also : 
 Such is God ? If God were not the primordial ocean 
 of goodness, and if in forming our heart he had not 
 infused into it something of his own, from whence 
 should we have obtained it ? Yes, God is good. Yes, 
 goodness is the attribute which in him concentrates 
 all the other attributes, and it is not without reason 
 that antiquity graved upon the pediments of its 
 temples that famous inscription in which goodness 
 preceded greatness. But all perfection supposes an 
 object to which it is applied. An object then as vast 
 and profound as divine goodness itself was needful to 
 it : God has found it. From the centre of his fulness 
 he beheld that being without beauty, form, life, or 
 name, that being without being which we call 
 nothingness ; he heard the cry of worlds that were 
 not, the cry of unmeasured misery calling to un- 
 bounded goodness. Eternity moved and said to 
 time : Begin ! Time and the universe obeyed the
 
 78 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 will of God, as the will of God had yielded, but freely, 
 to the inspiration of goodness. 
 
 I say freely, because al] the divine perfections 
 operate within themselves in the mystery of the 
 Holy Trinity, and because their outer action is 
 thenceforth no longer necessary to their dilat'ion, but 
 a spontaneous effect of the free will of God. God 
 was good before he created the world, and his absolute 
 goodness was infinitely exercised in the eternal com- 
 munication of the three uncreated persons. There- 
 fore, when he made the universe, he made it from a 
 free impulsion of his heart, and not from any neces- 
 sity. He made it gratuitously, without the motive of 
 interest, the constraint of duty, or the inducement of 
 merited love, in the sole object of satisfying his 
 goodness by communicating life. Therefore, St. 
 Thomas of Aquinas, in treating this question, says 
 that God is the only perfectly liberal being, because he 
 alone acts not for his own benefit, but because of his 
 goodness? 
 
 This conclusion is of the highest importance for 
 the whole course of Christian dogma, and it is needful 
 to solve the difficulties which it presents, in the 
 theological as well as in the rational points of view. 
 
 Theologically, a text of Scripture is opposed to us 
 1 Sumni.i, Quest. 44, art. 4.
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 79 
 
 which is thus written : UNIVERSA PROPTER SEME- 
 TIPSUM OPERATUS Esx DOMiNUS The Lord hath 
 made all things for himself? These words possess a 
 character of precision and clearness which would seem 
 to overshadow all the ideas we have been placing 
 before you. It is however easy to explain them. 
 God could not, more than any other being, draw from 
 outside of himself the motives of his determinations. 
 He finds them in his nature, and in yielding to them, 
 if I may so speak, it is manifest that he acts for 
 himself, since he acts under the impulsion of some- 
 thing which is himself. But goodness possesses that 
 excellent and singular quality, that its object is the 
 good of others, and that in acting from goodness we 
 nevertheless act for others and in a disinterested 
 manner. Therefore it is true to say that in creating 
 the world from goodness, God has created it for 
 himself, since his goodness is himself; and yet it is 
 equally true to say that he created it freely, since he 
 intended the good of his creatures, and since that 
 good could not increase his own felicity. But even 
 had it increased his felicity, the motive of goodness 
 would still remain pure and irreproachable, for 
 nothing is more perfect than to find happiness in 
 communicating our own happiness. That egotism, 
 3 Proverbs xvi. 4.
 
 8o The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 if such it be, is that of great souls, and although the 
 creature may be profitless to God, doubtless we must 
 believe that our love is not indifferent to him, and 
 that, without increasing his happiness, it makes us 
 dear and precious in his gight 
 
 It would also be easy for me to explain that other 
 expression to you : God created the world for his 
 glory. The inner glory of God is in his sovereign 
 perfection ; his outer glory consists in being known 
 and loved by free intelligences; and it is beyond 
 question that he has in fact given being to those 
 intelligences in order to be known and loved by 
 them. But why has he willed to call them to know 
 and to love him ? Is it for their happiness or for 
 his personal benefit ? from the motive of goodness or 
 that of interest ? We have shown, with St. Thomas 
 of Aquinas, that it was from the motive of goodness, 
 and the expression under our notice decides nothing, 
 since it does not even touch the question. It suffices 
 to define the word glory in order to be convinced of 
 this. 
 
 Let us now approach the objections of rationalism. 
 
 So far from admitting that the world is a work of divine 
 goodness, rationalism does not even see in it a work 
 of justice. Is it just, say they, to dispose of another's 
 condition without his sanction ? When, in the exercise
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 8 1 
 
 of his incomprehensible omnipotence, it pleased God 
 to call intelligent beings into life, beings capable of 
 judging whether existence was a blessing or a curse, 
 had he the right to act without their consent ? The 
 Romans have written with as much eloquence as truth : 
 NEMINI INVITO BENEFICIUM CONFERTUR There is no 
 benefit without the will that accepts it. By what right 
 have we been made without our knowledge ? By what 
 right have we been drawn forth from nothingness to 
 be thrown, without our consent, into that gulf of 
 misery called life ? What ! we reposed peacefully in 
 the eternity of our sleep, when suddenly an in- 
 visible hand seized upon us, a strange voice called us ; 
 it said with power : Come forth, see, feel, think, love ! 
 And, obeying that merciless order in spite of ourselves, 
 after having spent hours or years amidst confused 
 realities and vanished illusions, suddenly, again that 
 hand which had dragged us from our first tomb, that 
 hand rejects us ! And the same voice which called us 
 cries out to us : It is enough, lie down, close thy eyes, 
 quit this world, begone ! But if we were made for 
 ourselves, should we not have been consulted in order 
 to learn when, how, and under what conditions life was 
 to be given to us ? This has not been thought of : 
 life came to us as death comes, with insult and scorn to 
 us. Ah ! let vain theology speak as it will, this is not 
 
 G
 
 82 Tite Creation of the World by God.' 
 
 the lamentation of the mind ; it is the groaning of the 
 soul, it is the sincerity of suffering and the accusation 
 of the universe. Leave us, at least, to weep over our- 
 selves, respect the desolation of ages, and do not add 
 to the misery of our destiny that other misery of 
 desiring to understand it. 
 
 I should be silent before the sound of those accents 
 which have sometimes troubled you, and which 
 perhaps still trouble many wounded hearts in this 
 assembly. I should be silent, or rather I should lend 
 my lips to the tremblings of complaint and ingratitude 
 if I took in this question the same starting-point as 
 yourselves. Yes, if this life were the life, if this light 
 were the light, if this world were the world, yes, I 
 should hide my forehead in my hands, and sink with 
 you into an abyss of despair wherein I would hear no 
 word ol consolation. But do you believe this, and 
 has Christianity so taught you? Do you believe 
 that this life is the life, that this light is the light, that 
 this world is the world? Do you believe it? and 
 who has so taught you ? I ask you again : who has 
 so taught you ? Yourselves, none but yourselves. 
 Learn then this from me: I do not believe you. I believe 
 that this life is a road, that this light is a shadow, that 
 this world is a prelude. I believe that life is God, that 
 light is God, that the world is God. And I believe
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 83 
 
 with all my soul, at the price of my blood, if needful, 
 that God has created us to live by him, to be en- 
 lightened by him, to find in him the substance of 
 which all that we see is but an incapable and a painful 
 image. This is my faith, it is this faith which I pro- 
 claim to you ; and in order to dispute it you must deal 
 with it such as it is, and not such as you make it in 
 the injustice or discouragement of your own minds. 
 
 Yes, we all suffer : woe to him who denies it ! But 
 we suffer from the road and not from life. Life is 
 abundance, peace, joy, fulness ; when we love God we 
 receive certain hallowed foretastes, certain yet imperfect 
 delights, which suffice to make us forget the present 
 world, or at least courageously to accept its passing 
 trials. Is it meet, indeed, for a traveller awaited by 
 unerring love, to complain of the road, to curse the dus 
 he treads upon and the sun that lights up his way ? Foi 
 my part, born to sorrow like the rest, charged with 
 the two wounds of my forefathers anguish of soul and 
 infirmity of body I bless God who has made me and 
 who waits for me. I ask not to be consulted by him 
 about my condition ; between the nothingness from 
 whence he called me and the eternity he has promised 
 me the choice is doubtful only to parricidal folly, and 
 God should have counted upon my virtue as he 
 counted upon his goodness. Eternal justice could not
 
 84 Tfie Creation of the World by God. 
 
 suppose the refusal of eternal beatitude : it was entitled 
 to expect from us gratitude, love, and the acceptation 
 of a trial without which love could not have been 
 shown, and at least in ingratitude itself, silence and 
 just remorse. 
 
 Nevertheless you continue, and you recall to me a 
 thought which for a long time troubled the adolescence 
 of my reason. If all of us, such as we are, intelligent 
 and free creatures, attained the life of eternity, it is 
 certain that the sufferings of the present life would 
 vanish from our minds, not being worthy, as St. Paul 
 says, to be compared with the glory to come, that shall be 
 revealed to us.* But it is not so. Catholic doctrine 
 teaches that a portion of created intelligent beings do 
 not attain to the reign of God, and thus that creation, 
 instead of turning to their happiness, turns finally to their 
 eternal woe. By their own fault, it is true, but what does 
 that signify ? God knew it, God had foreseen it. Was 
 it an act of goodness to place beings in the world 
 whom infallible foreknowledge beheld, whether or not 
 from their own fault, excluded from the benefit of 
 their primitive vocation, and hurled into a depth of 
 ruin equal to the good prepared for them ? If God, 
 in creation, had intended to act only in virtue of his 
 sovereingty, by an act of power and choice, it might 
 4 Rom. viii. 18.
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 85 
 
 perhaps be conceived that he had not looked to the 
 result, and that the final misery of a part of his 
 creatures, caused by their prevarication, might have 
 appeared to him as an accident incapable of disarming 
 the right and efficacy of his will. But you tell us 
 that the supreme FIAT was pronounced from goodness, 
 from the desire to communicate life and glory to 
 possible beings whom God perceived in the horizon of 
 his thought. Are this end and motive compatible with 
 the eternal fall of the lost intelligences ? Doubtless we 
 admit that Catholic doctrine does not teach as an 
 article of faith that it is the smaller number of man- 
 kind who are saved. Much less does it teach that in 
 the totality of intelligent hierarchies it is the lesser 
 number who maintain their titles before the justice of 
 God. But what of this ? Were there but one man, 
 but one single intelligence disinherited from the true 
 life and for ever reprobated, it would be enough to 
 accuse divine goodness, or at least not to attribute to 
 it the creation of the universe. Seek then another 
 motive for the omnipotence of God ; say that he has 
 done what he willed to do because he willed it ; that 
 he was master, that crime and ingratitude could not 
 deprive him of his sovereign rights. You may perhaps 
 be listened to, but do not talk of the goodness of God 
 in presence of that terrible image of eternal damna-
 
 86 T/ie Creation of tlie World by God. 
 
 tion : let us tremble before his justice, and be silent 
 before his impenetrable majesty. 
 
 I shall not be silent, for what you have just said 
 suffices to answer you. You admit that the creative 
 power enters into the attributes which constitute the 
 divine essence ; it is impossible for God to be stripped 
 of it by the disobedience of his creature. To say, in 
 fact, that God has no right to create a being who 
 might misuse his gifts, is to say that the wicked are 
 able to destroy God by hindering the exercise of one 
 of his essential attributes. What could be more vain 
 or more unreasonable ? Now, this admitted, the diffi- 
 culty vanishes. In fact, even when God acts from 
 goodness, he acts in the indivisible totality of his 
 essence ; he acts with his power, his wisdom, his 
 justice, and all the inalienable totality of his perfec- 
 tions. Goodness moves him, but goodness which 
 abdicates nothing of the rest of his divinity. Good- 
 ness could not hinder him from being wise, just, 
 powerful, supreme, and if by his foreknowledge he 
 perceive a creature so ungrateful as to turn his gifts 
 against himself, he will not withdraw the blessing from 
 him, since he would then take from himself the power 
 to create under just conditions ; this he should not do, 
 this he could not do without ceasing to exist You 
 will say, perhaps : One thing is power in itself, another
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 87 
 
 is the exercise of power ; God could not lose power, 
 but he is free not to exercise it. Assuredly ; but you 
 must understand that whosoever is free not to exercise 
 a power, is free also to exercise it, under pain of not 
 possessing it. If then you grant that God is free, all 
 his attributes considered, to create a being who may 
 abuse the blessing of life, why should you wonder that 
 in fact he has exercised that liberty which belongs to 
 him and which you attribute to him ? 
 
 You still say, however this may be, metaphy- 
 sically, the heart naturally rejects such a conclusion. 
 Where is the father who would place a son in the 
 world if he foresaw that life would even by his fault 
 be a fatal gift to him ? And is not God our father ? 
 Ought he not to feel more tenderness towards us than 
 is felt by a mortal man ? 
 
 Here the comparison wants force, because it is 
 wanting in justice. God has not created isolated 
 individuals, or even worlds ; he has created one unique 
 world in which all beings are linked together by rela- 
 tions of mutual dependence and service, and not one 
 of these can be withdrawn without entailing the suffer- 
 ing of all the others. In the human race especially, 
 each man contains a posterity in himself whose term 
 is not assignable, and which makes of its generations 
 one united assemblage in which no single member can
 
 88 The Creation of the World by God. 
 
 lose his place without drawing after him the multitude 
 of his descendants. To suppress a single man is to 
 suppress a race ; to suppress a wicked man is to 
 suppress a people of just men who may spring from 
 him. For good and evil are entwined together in the 
 changeable course of mankind ; a virtuous son suc- 
 ceeds to a bad father, and the ancestor but too often 
 contemplates in his distant progeny crimes which to 
 him were unknown. Now, the glance of God, per- 
 ceiving at once all the successions of life, all the 
 regenerations of good in evil and of evil in good, no 
 destiny appeared solitary to him ; so that in cutting it 
 off from the anticipated book of life, he would but cut 
 off a course unworthy to be continued. In his sight 
 Adam, a prevaricator, included the whole posterity of 
 the saints. To refuse being to him because of his 
 crime, even had that crime never obtained pardon, 
 would have been to destroy in him all the merits of 
 the human race. How could the goodness of God 
 have required such a sacrifice ? How could it have 
 required that the wicked should have been preferred 
 to the just, that life should be withdrawn from those 
 who would make good use of it, because of those who 
 would have turned it into a curse instead of a 
 blessing? 
 
 I know God, I love him, I hope in him, I bless him
 
 The Creation of the World by God. 89 
 
 in life and death : why should the fault of one of my 
 
 ancestors, eternally foreseen by divine goodness, have 
 
 intercepted my birth, and not have permitted me for 
 
 a single day to respire in the mystery of liberty from 
 
 whence my beatitude might result ? Why should I have 
 
 been condemned to nothingness because one of my 
 
 forefathers would have abused his existence ? Where 
 
 in this would have been justice, wisdom, or goodness ? 
 
 God had not to choose between creating or not 
 
 creating a wicked man, but between creating or not 
 
 creating generations of good and evil together ; and 
 
 as all presented this mixture to his prophetic glance, 
 
 he had to choose between creating the universe or not 
 
 creating anything. The question is very different, and 
 
 assuredly the most tender father would not choose to 
 
 die without posterity, if God, revealing to him their 
 
 future, were to show to him, in the transformations of 
 
 his race, the inevitable alternatives of glory and shame, 
 
 of happiness and misery. What would it be if, instead 
 
 of a single generation, it were a question of all human 
 
 generations ? What would it be if to you were given 
 
 the choice of destroying or creating the universe ? 
 
 For such is the question which was weighed in the 
 
 counsels of God. 
 
 God has judged it, and heaven and earth proclaim 
 how.
 
 90 TJie Creation of tJie World by God. 
 
 You may, however, judge it otherwise ; you may 
 complain of life and not consider it so great a gift. 
 But learn that the life of which you complain is not 
 that which God prepared for you, it is that which you 
 have made for yourselves. You have cut off God 
 from it, and you wonder that nothing remains. You 
 have produced the void in your soul, and you wonder 
 that the infinite is wanting to you. You have run 
 after every vanity, and you wonder that nothing is 
 left to you but doubts, darkness, bitterness, affliction. 
 Ah ! return, return to life, regain your rights in creation 
 by the courage of faith, the holiness of hope, the 
 divinity of love, and then, having returned to your 
 place and your glory in the universal harmonies, you 
 will repeat with all the worlds the testimony which 
 God bore to himself after he had finished his work : 
 God saw all the things that he had made, and they were 
 very good? 
 
 * Genesis L
 
 THE GENERAL PLAN OF CREATION. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 IN our last conference we sought to discover by 
 what process or from what motive the world came 
 forth from the hands of God ; we have seen that it 
 was by means of creation and from the motive of 
 goodness. Goodness is, in fact, the characteristic 
 under which the human race has always preferred to 
 conceive God, as it is also that of the men who have, 
 in the highest degree, attracted the love and venera- 
 tion of ages. Whosoever has not been distinguished 
 by this august sign has not reached the fulness of 
 glory, and neither the fame of brilliant conceptions, 
 nor the success of arms, nor scorn of life, have sufficed 
 without goodness to uphold the remembrance even of 
 Alexander or Marcus Aurelius. That of God, more 
 especially, rests upon the same basis, and nothing is
 
 92 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 more natural to us than to repeat with David : Ttie 
 Lord is sweet to all, and his tender mercies are over all 
 his works. 1 
 
 God, then, having made the world from goodness, 
 that is to say, in the design of communicating to it his 
 properties, which are none other than perfection and 
 beatitude, we must now learn the plan followed by 
 him in the realization of that generous purpose. Now 
 every plan is composed of two necessary elements ; of 
 the materials which serve to found it and the ordinance 
 to be given thereto. I have, then, to-day to treat of 
 the materials of creation and their general ordinance. 
 
 According to Catholic doctrine, God employed in 
 his work, which is the universe, two perfectly dissimilar 
 materials, namely, matter and spirit 
 
 In the first place, what is matter ? If I tell you that 
 it is something possessing weight, you will oppose to 
 me the imponderable fluids. If I say that it is some- 
 thing possessing extent, you will reply : Many philoso- 
 phers consider that it may be reduced to atoms, that 
 is to say, to points indivisible and consequently 
 unextended. If I say that it is something possessing 
 colour, you will object that it may easily be conceived 
 as colourless. So is it also in regard to taste and 
 sound. But this work of spoliation, by which we 
 1 Psalm cxliv. 9.
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 93 
 
 successively deprive matter of its apparent attributes, 
 has nevertheless a limit where the critical effort of our 
 minds must halt. Whatever we may do, there will 
 always remain to it the permanent susceptibility of 
 receiving form and movement. I say of receiving 
 them, for we see clearly that it possesses neither 
 thought, nor will, nor liberty, no personal activity or 
 command. It is at the same time active and inert : 
 active, since it is a force ; inert, because it does not 
 act spontaneously, but under the empire of an irresis- 
 tible necessity. 
 
 Spirit, on the contrary, has neither form nor move- 
 ment of translation from one place to another; it 
 does not fall under the investigation of our senses. 
 It thinks, it wills, it is free ; no necessity acts upon it. 
 In vain is it commanded, if it does not command 
 of itself, and all the assaults of power are as nothing 
 against a single soul that respects itself. 
 
 Such are the materials of the world. Catholic 
 doctrine knows none other ; the senses and reason 
 reveal to us only these. Shall we here also find 
 rationalism in our way ? Yes, we shall find it ; and 
 again I remind you that Catholic doctrine will never 
 establish a single dogma without finding that rational- 
 ism sets up a negation against it. It is so now and 
 always. It is the nature of error to create resources
 
 94 TJie General Plan of Creation. 
 
 against all truth, otherwise the liberty of our intelli- 
 gence would be but a chimera, 
 
 If anything is clearly proved it is certainly the 
 co-existence in the world of matter and spirit. What 
 is more manifest ? Matter is the object of our senses ; 
 they see, they handle, they feel it, they make use of it 
 as they please, according to invariable laws discovered 
 by science and verified by experience. No effort of 
 the will is capable of destroying the impression pro- 
 duced in the whole human race by the constant 
 spectacle of the universe. Spirit is not less evident 
 and eloquent to us, it is even more so. For, spirit is 
 ourselves. We have no need to place ourselves in 
 communication with it as with an object foreign to 
 us; it is intimately present to us; each of its acts 
 reveals it to us in its special faculties, in its empire 
 over matter and ideas, in its spontaneity and its liberty. 
 Yet, who would believe it ? two contradictory doctrines 
 have appeared in the history of human reason ; one 
 which denies the existence of matter, another which 
 denies the existence of spirit Idealism main- 
 tains that all, in nature, is immaterial ; materialism 
 affirms that all is body. 
 
 And truly, if ever error could be a noble and a 
 sacred thing, we should be entitled to say so of idealism, 
 which pretends to deny the existence only of the in-
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 95 
 
 ferior part of creation, and fails to understand what 
 relations a substance deprived of all intelligence and 
 sentiment can hold with God. Why, in fact, did 
 Mallebranche, that illustrious Christian philosopher, 
 say that, without the authority of faith, he should not 
 believe in the existence of matter, if it were not 
 because he could not explain to himself the object of 
 God in creating it ? And have we not ourselves 
 shown that the object of God in creation was to com- 
 municate his perfection and beatitude to beings the 
 issue of his omnipotent goodness? Now, in what 
 manner does matter, incapable of knowing and loving, 
 respond to that view of the Creator ? How is it able 
 to reach even the frontier of the divine order, where 
 all is knowledge, love, comprehension ? We can 
 conceive the motive and work of God in creating 
 spirits, images of his own nature, endowed with the 
 privilege of scrutinising the invisible world, presump- 
 tive inhabitants of eternal glory, vessels of voluntary 
 praise, humble yet possible companions of the most holy 
 Trinity. But who will ever conceive the office of matter 
 in relation to God, and even in relation to created 
 spirits ? If not eternal, why should it have been created 
 for a day ? If it is to outlive time, what will be its part 
 in eternity, that is to say, in the pure reign of God ? 
 Some ancient sages, endeavouring to penetrate this
 
 g6 Ttte General Plan of Creation. 
 
 mystery, had thought that the function of material 
 substance was the limitation of spirits, which, from 
 their nature, as they believed, had no barriers between 
 them and the infinite. But sound theology rejects 
 that interpretation. Created spirits have their measure 
 in the divine will that produces them ; since they 
 are created they are limited, seeing that uncreated 
 existence enters into the notion of the infinite. Let 
 us suppose, however, that the immaterial and intelligent 
 being meets with no limit in its personal essence, you 
 cannot suppose that God would impose a limit upon 
 it from jealousy from fear lest it should become equal 
 to himself and therefore imprison it in the sepulchre 
 of a body ! Can you suppose that men are but gods 
 enslaved to a sensible organization ? Ah ! had God 
 been able to create infinite spirits, be sure he would 
 have created them. He desired nothing more than to 
 extend the orbit of creation ; and you will soon learn 
 that matter itself, so far from having become an instru- 
 ment of restriction in his hands, has been one of the 
 resources employed by his wisdom to enlarge the field 
 of the universe. 
 
 Matter, like spirit, has been called to enjoy divine 
 perfection and beatitude, and the more incapable it 
 was of this the more God has willed to make nought 
 of such difficulty, reserving to himself the glory, if I
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 97 
 
 may so speak, of stamping the seal of his power and 
 mercy upon a substance in which nothingness appeared 
 to dispute the empire with him. However inert 
 matter may be, however dumb, deaf, blind, insensible, 
 it is indifferent thereto : listen to the Apostle St. Paul 
 taking up its cause and speaking to you of its destiny : 
 All flesh, he says, is not the same flesh . . . there 
 are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial ; but one is the 
 glory of the celestial and another the terrestrial. 
 The body is soum in corruption, it shall rise in incorrup- 
 tion; it is sown in dishonour, it shall rise in glory ; it is 
 soum in weakness, it shall rise in power ; it is sown a 
 natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body* You hear that 
 St. Paul is not troubled about the meanness of our dust ; 
 he does not believe in its final wretchedness; he beholds 
 it so transfigured as to become spiritual, and if you would 
 hear him again foretelling its future, listen once more : 
 For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revela- 
 tion of the sons of God. For the creature was made sub- 
 ject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that 
 made it subject, in hope : because the creature also itself 
 shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption into the 
 liberty of the glory of the children of God. 3 What language ! 
 What splendour ! What promises ! Thus the most vile 
 matter is in labour for its future greatness, as well as 
 I Cor. xv. 39, 40, 42, 43, 44. 3 Rom. viii. 19, 20, 21, 22. 
 
 H
 
 98 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 man himself; it awaits the final revelation, which will 
 distinguish the children of God and mark out a place 
 for them in the ages which have neither shadow nor 
 turning ; it will take part in the deliverance of spirits, 
 and their beatitude will, in a certain degree, depend 
 upon its own, since its own will serve to the liberty of 
 their glory. What singular expressions, gentlemen, 
 and how truly may the substance honoured by such 
 prophecies hold in contempt the premature insults of 
 ignorance and error ! 
 
 The king of Macedonia once said : " If I were not 
 Alexander, I would be Diogenes !" Let me say : " If 
 I were not spirit, I would be matter !" For I should 
 still be the work of God, the fruit of his thought and 
 of his goodness. His eye would still be upon me, 
 and, united in human nature to an immortal soul, after 
 having served it here below in its need I should one 
 day serve it in its felicity, which I should share. 
 
 In proceeding to expose to you the general ordi- 
 nance of the world, I shall, however, hope to show 
 you the part which matter fills there, and consequently 
 enable you more clearly to see the reason of its exist- 
 ence and its creation. 
 
 The other rationalist camp denies the reality of 
 spirit It aspires to convince us that there is nothing 
 in the world but the palpable, divisible and miserable
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 99 
 
 substance which falls under the investigation of our 
 outer senses, and if it acknowledges the phenomena of 
 thought and will, it attributes them to the very 
 organism of the living body. You perceive that this 
 doctrine is very different from the other. The first, 
 although false, tended to the elevation of man ; this 
 tends to his abasement. The first induced us lowly 
 to estimate the inferior part of our being ; this tends 
 to degrade, to immolate its superior part. What can 
 have led sages this is the name they bear what 
 can have led them to this parricidal act ? The natural 
 tendency of beings is to grow great ; all, even those 
 who obey only instinct, have a tendency towards 
 pride. How is it that man, the visible masterpiece 
 of creation, has employed his thought, which raises 
 him above all the others, to destroy the very basis of 
 his greatness, and to descend by his own choice from 
 the rank of immortal intelligences ? I know not 
 whether there are any materialists in this assembly, 
 and you know with what pious respect I am accus- 
 tomed to treat, not error, but individuals. On this 
 occasion, however, I cannot curb the liberty of my 
 ministration, and I shall fearlessly say that materialism 
 is a doctrine against nature, an abject doctrine, whose 
 origin can only be explained by the corruption of the 
 human heart. We are too manifestly spirits, there are
 
 TOO The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 not reasons enough against the dignity of our being to 
 lead us to depreciate our own selves, if passions of a 
 lower and dastardly order did not rise up within us 
 against ourselves, in order to dethrone, with our 
 spiritual essence, our ideas of truth, justice, order, 
 responsibility illustrious and incorruptible guests 
 whose presence wearies vice and excites revolt. Vice 
 knows no peace and wills to possess it. The soul 
 opposes to it remorse, that last crown of corrupted 
 man, that domestic and sacred voice which invites us 
 to good, that good genius of the republic which 
 inhabits ruins, and which appeared again to Brutus, 
 in the fields of Pharsala, on the eve of the day when 
 Rome was to fall. Oh ! pardon my doubts ! But if 
 you were not pure, if remorse troubled you with its 
 stern voice, in mercy and love for yourselves, do not 
 drive it from you : as long as it is the companion of 
 your soul you will not have lost the remains of your 
 greatness and your hope ; remorse precedes virtue as 
 the dawn precedes the day, and vice should respect it 
 out of respect for itself. 
 
 But when vice has no longer the instinct of its 
 rehabilitation, remorse becomes its chief and last 
 enemy, and spares nothing in order to extirpate its 
 very roots, which is our mind itself. Materialism is 
 the result of that exterminating war of evil against
 
 TJie General Plan of Creation. 101 
 
 good ; it is no other thing than the supreme effort to 
 stifle remorse. And this is why I call it an abject and 
 an unnatural doctrine. If this should seem rash, I 
 offer no excuse for it. What ! You attack my very 
 essence, you reject me to the limits of mere animality, 
 you treat me as the equal of a dog ! What do I say ? 
 you dare to write that " Man is a digestive tube 
 pierced at both ends." ... Ah ! gentlemen, do not 
 laugh ; it would grieve me bitterly to have excited 
 your laughter ; hear, hear these things with the 
 silence of scorn. What ! men dare to write that 
 " man is a digestive tube pierced at both ends," and, 
 armed in all the greatness of truth against imposture, 
 shall I not turn back in scorn and trample under foot 
 that most vile doctrine ? 
 
 I ought to say no more on this subject ; I ought 
 not to give so much honour to materialism as to ask 
 it to explain itself. We will do so, however, with your 
 permission. We will ask these proud gladiators of 
 matter what they have seen in man to lead them to 
 contest his intelligent and free nature. Do they deny 
 the phenomena of thought ? Are they blind to those 
 of the will ? No, they admit them ; they admit that 
 something extraordinary takes place within us which 
 resembles nothing that falls under the investigation of 
 the senses. But they consider that earth, having
 
 IO2 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 attained to a certain degree of perfection, is sus- 
 ceptible of producing sentiment, thought, and will, as 
 it produces roots, flowers, and fruit. Nature, they 
 say, is in a progressive labour which is nowhere 
 interrupted, and which at each degree is manifested 
 by a more perfect production. Man is the term of 
 that fertile progression ; he unites in himself all the 
 anterior progressions, and his brain, the master- 
 piece of the wisest organization, causes thought to 
 emerge from it as naturally as the tree puts forth its 
 buds. 
 
 How is it that this ingenious picture, for I will not 
 call it analysis, has excited only coldness and incre- 
 dulity in nearly the whole of mankind ? How is it 
 that the spiritualist philosophy has always obtained the 
 glory of moving the heart of the people as well as that 
 of the thinker ; whilst materialism, a doctrine of deca- 
 dency, seduces only a few souls in declining nations ? 
 Because spirit affirms itself with a presence so vigorous 
 that reasoning and analysis perish before the splendour 
 of that affirmation. How should it be otherwise ? My 
 spiritual being is myself : I feel the truth of it. I feel 
 the distinction between my soul and my body with 
 such force that my whole life appears to me to be but 
 a confronting of the one with the other, and that each 
 instant brings to me a conviction of their duality as
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 103 
 
 strong as the certainty of their union. I see that I 
 am two and one with a clearness which nothing 
 diminishes, because nothing combats against the real 
 presence of things. And what indeed is said against 
 it ? They oppose to it a progression of matter ; but 
 a progression is but the development of a germ which 
 never changes its nature in that development. Elevate 
 a force, according to the mathematical expression, to 
 the second, the third, the tenth power ; you will never 
 gather in the force doubled, tripled, decupled, any- 
 thing but the primitive element contained therein. In 
 order that matter, transfigured in its form, may produce 
 sentiment, thought, and will, the smallest material 
 particle must be a being exercising feeling, thought, 
 and volition, but in an inferior degree, susceptible of 
 increase or of perfection as it is seen in the infancy of 
 man compared with his maturity. Now, is it so ? 
 Does materialism even pretend that it is so ? It does 
 not believe that a grain of dust includes in miniature 
 the intellectual functions of man, as a drop of water 
 includes the properties of the ocean. Common sense 
 too strongly rejects such folly, consequently matter 
 elevated by organization to whatever point you will, 
 to the hundredth or the thousandth power, will never 
 produce anything but the development of what it is, 
 that is to say, more perfect forms, more complicated
 
 IO4 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 movements, sculpture and architecture more worthy of 
 admiration. 
 
 Men wonder and it is another objection against 
 spiritualism at the reciprocal influence which the 
 soul and the body exercise over each other. Why 
 not, if they are really united ? This union may 
 appear strange, inexplicable, but what of that ? It is 
 a fact The fact once proved by the certainty which 
 we have of our double nature, spiritual and material in 
 one sole personality, it is very natural that there 
 should be an action of one upon the other, without 
 which there would be no communication between 
 them ; and if there were no communication between 
 them, they would be separated instead of being 
 united. 
 
 Thus even as exterior objects, acting upon the brain 
 by the intermediary of the senses, convey to the soul 
 impressions from without, the soul in its turn conveys 
 to the brain, and by it to the rest of the sensible 
 organization, the rebound of its intimate and imma- 
 terial life. Thence arise those inveterate habits which 
 take their source at the same time in the two parts of 
 our being, both being in some manner bent thereto by 
 the repetition of the acts, and become the slaves of 
 our depraved wills after having been at first only their 
 instruments. It is this which has given birth to that
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 105 
 
 new science of phrenology, which abuses phenomena 
 
 of the correspondence of the soul with the body and 
 
 the body with the soul, in order to attack the free-will 
 
 of man. I do not examine whether aptitudes and 
 
 passions have really a representative sign in the 
 
 exterior envelope of the brain ; let us suppose it. 
 
 What does it prove against human liberty ? It is 
 
 manifest that the soul and the body are in unceasing 
 
 communication, and that every act even an inward 
 
 act of vice or virtue, resounds somewhere in our 
 
 mortal envelope and marks out traces of happiness or 
 
 misery. These subtle traces, in their turn, react upon 
 
 the profound seat of our internal activity, and solicit 
 
 there the return of the same movements, that is to 
 
 say, of the same thoughts and the same desires. 
 
 Catholic doctrine consents to this ; it does more than 
 
 consent : it is the basis of its spiritual therapeutics, or, 
 
 if you prefer it, of the medicinal treatment which it 
 
 applies to the maladies of our soul. This is why the 
 
 Gospel commands Christians to chastise their bodies 
 
 in order to liberate and purify their hearts. This is 
 
 why the Church imposes abstinences and fasts ; this is 
 
 why she commands labour, and why, after the example 
 
 of Jesus Christ, her founder, she blesses those who 
 
 weep and suffer ; because, besides the benefit of an 
 
 accepted expiation, there is in the afflictions of the
 
 io6 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 body the infallible efficacy of reforming the senses. 
 However ancient, however powerful, may be the traces 
 of sin in the mysterious recesses of the body, the soul, 
 aided by grace, fortified by penance, is able slowly to 
 efface them, and to substitute the restoring vestiges 
 of virtue. Thence, even in physiognomy, spring 
 those singular illuminations which penetrate through 
 the obscure traces of vice. The soul, after having 
 ennobled the subterranean regions which crime had 
 polluted, reaches the brow of man, and sheds upon it 
 those serene and holy rays which soften the regard 
 even of those who know not God. The gloomy 
 shadows of sin fly away before the creative glory of 
 virtue, and that which still remains of them in the 
 premature sinking of the body is only a sign of 
 mortality vanquished by the eternal beauty of Christ. 
 O visages of the saints ! gentle yet firm lips accus- 
 tomed to name the name of God and kiss the cross of 
 his Son ; regards full of kindness and love which per- 
 ceived a brother in the most poor and lowly among 
 creatures ; hair silvered by meditation on eternity, 
 sacred rays of the soul resplendent in old age and in 
 death : happy are those who have beheld them ! more 
 happy those who have understood them and received 
 from their transfigured glebe lessons of wisdom and 
 immortality !
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 107 
 
 But what am I doing ? Am I pretending to demon- 
 strate to you the existence of spirit, the reality of 
 matter ? God forbid ! . I do not stand before you as 
 a philosopher, supported by his reason alone, and 
 trusting only to the discoveries of his own sagacity. 
 I stand here as the envoy of God, as one who bears 
 his word to you, as one armed with the tradition and 
 authority of the Church, and after having established 
 the titles of my mission, I promised you only that 
 rationalism should never oppose to a single Christian 
 dogma negations more probable than the affirmations 
 of faith. Once more I have kept my promise. For I 
 ask, between the faith that affirms the presence in the 
 world of two constitutive elements, matter and spirit, 
 and the rationalism that denies the one or the other, 
 where, even humanly speaking, lies the greater proba- 
 bility of truth ? I do not say the certainty, because 
 having found certainty in the order of the divine 
 teachings, it is unnecessary for me again to seek it 
 even there, where, in so many ways, I should be sure 
 to find it. Against rationalism the semblance of truth 
 will suffice for me, and I believe I possess it, and much 
 more, in that question of the double nature of things. 
 Let us hasten now to see the ordinance which God 
 has given them ; we shall gather here some rays of 
 light upon the motives that induced the Creator not to
 
 io8 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 content himself, in the structure of the world, with 
 only one order of materials. 
 
 We have said that God, in drawing beings forth from 
 nothingness, proposed to communicate to them his 
 perfection and beatitude. Now the divine perfection 
 is of three kinds ; it is metaphysical, intellectual, and 
 moral, and consequently it should be reflected under 
 this triple aspect in the production and disposition of 
 the universe. Let us commence by the metaphysical 
 aspect, which is naturally the first. 
 
 God is infinite, he is one, he is many ; it is the 
 reunion of these three terms that constitutes his meta- 
 physical perfection. He is great in the depths of his 
 essence, by infinity, unity, and plurality ; and this also 
 should be the fount of the grandeur of the universe. 
 But even thereby, the creating thought appears at the 
 very first to meet with an insurmountable obstacle ; 
 for, the infinite is incommunicable in its nature. As 
 soon as a thing is created, however vast it may be, it 
 does not exist of itself, and therefore the radical 
 attribute of the infinite is wanting to it Nevertheless, 
 the world the work of the infinite in person, the 
 manifestation of his glory could not be wanting in 
 extent, representative of uncreated immensity. It 
 needed a projection which manifested its origin, and 
 by which every eye on beholding it revolving in the
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 109 
 
 majesty of its orbit might recognise the hand that had 
 launched it forth upon a course and in a space worthy 
 of it God provided for this. He devised if I may 
 be permitted to animate the divine action by these 
 human expressions he devised, between the infinite 
 and the finite, something intermediary, which here 
 below we call the indefinite. I will explain these 
 terms if you will allow me. The infinite is that which 
 has neither beginning nor end ; the finite is that which 
 has a beginning and an end; the indefinite is that 
 which expands between two terms infinitely distant, in 
 such a manner as continually to draw nearer to them. 
 God then resolved to construct the world upon the 
 projection of the indefinite, and thus to impart to his 
 work a figurative character of his unlimited essence. 
 
 Nothing opposed this design. Between God, who 
 was about to create, and the nothingness whence 
 being was about to emerge ; between God, who is all, 
 and nothingness, which is nothing, there existed of 
 itself an infinite distance. It sufficed to fill it by a 
 progressive creation, which, starting from an unique 
 centre, should tend at the same time, and upon two 
 different roads, towards the two extremities of things ; 
 towards nothingness by a graduated diminution, 
 towards God by a constant ascension. But this plan 
 supposed the existence of two quite dissimilar ele-
 
 no The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 ments ; one susceptible of constant diminution in de- 
 scending towards the negative pole of creation, another 
 capable of constantly perfecting itself in mounting 
 towards the positive or divine pole. You anticipate 
 me, you name matter and spirit : spirit, which is indi- 
 visible ; matter, unceasingly divided : spirit, the ele- 
 ment of the infinitely great ; matter, the spirit of 
 the infinitely little : both, in their diverse natures, 
 sufficient to fill by their calculated elevation and 
 degradation the infinite space which separates the 
 supremely imperfect from the supremely perfect. 
 It is St. Augustine who has revealed to us in a single 
 phrase this beautiful law of the Genesis of things : 
 listen to this great man : Duo FECISTI, DOMINE, UNUM 
 
 PROPE NIHIL, SCILICET MATERIAM PRIMAM ; ALTERUM 
 
 PROPE" TE, SCILICET ANGELUM Thou hast made two 
 things, O God; one near to nothingness, which is primary 
 matter ; the other near to thyself, which is pure spirit. 
 In virtue of that conception, which was as it were the 
 exordium of the world, God created two lines or two 
 series of beings ; one series descending on the side of 
 nothingness, the other ascending towards himself. 
 The one is known to you by your own senses and by 
 the instruments with which science has endowed the 
 eye of man ; the other is revealed to us by faith, and 
 also by the inductions of analogy. For how could we
 
 The General Plan of Creation. in 
 
 believe that creation stops at ourselves, and that 
 having by our bodies an inferior kindred which extends 
 even into the regions of the imperceptible, we should 
 not have by our spiritual essence a superior kindred 
 which penetrates even into the region of the substantial 
 infinite ? Faith teaches us this, reason confirms it 
 to us, the order of the universe absolutely requires it. 
 
 Launched from earth to heaven upon that infinite 
 projection, the world, as far as it was possible, had a 
 relation of greatness with God ; and by the innumer- 
 able multiplication of beings appertaining to each 
 series, and to each degree of these series, it possessed 
 also the divine character of plurality. But unity, the 
 third term of the metaphysical perfection of God, was 
 still wanting to it. There were two worlds, the world 
 of matter and the world of spirit ; the terrestrial and 
 the celestial worlds : a supreme unfitness which 
 deprived creation of all harmony and all possibility of 
 being the mirror of its author. But how was this to 
 be remedied ? How were two orders so distinct, so 
 radically separated as the material order and the 
 spiritual order, to be really united ? 
 
 God withdrew within himself; he took counsel as 
 it were, according to the beautiful indication of 
 Scripture, and in presence of all that was accomplished, 
 before the attentive heavens and trembling earth he
 
 112 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 pronounced the last creating word ; he said : FACIAMUS 
 HOMINEM Let us make man ! Man obeyed that voice 
 which should never more cease to give him life and 
 light. A being appeared participating in matter by 
 which he became united to the inferior world, and in 
 spirit by which he became united to the superior 
 world ; at the same time body and soul, the body 
 acting with the soul and the soul with the body ; not 
 as being two, but as one only ; not as brother 
 and sister, but as one single personal being called by 
 the same name, man. In man the mystery of universal 
 unity was solved ; placed in the lowest rank of the 
 ascending line of beings, and on the first step of the 
 descending line, concentrating in his personality all the 
 gifts of the mind and all the forces of matter, commu- 
 nicating by his wants with the arctic and antarctic poles 
 of things, the real centre of the creation he, by his 
 presence, stamps upon it the seal of its unity, and with 
 unity the seal of perfection. Behold man ; behold his 
 place and his glory ; behold why all the great religious 
 scenes have been enacted upon the earth which he 
 inhabits and in the very bosom of mankind. Rational- 
 ism is greatly troubled about the importance which 
 man attributes to himself ; it has not disdained to call 
 astronomy to its aid in order to deprive us of the 
 eminent position to which Providence has raised us,
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 113 
 
 and, comparing the insignificance of our race and the 
 inferiority of our planet with all the suns fixed in 
 space, it is pleased to make of us the pigmies, not to 
 say the abortions of the universe. Let us leave to 
 rationalism these pitiable gratifications of apostacy; 
 and, as we are not afraid of being kings because we 
 are not alarmed by the duties of the throne, let us 
 learn to measure greatness by the essence and 
 functions of beings, and not by their size or material 
 rapidity of motion. The earth, it is true, is not the 
 astronomical centre of the world ; it suffices for it to 
 bear mankind the real centre of creation. 
 
 It is thus that God has communicated to his work 
 the metaphysical perfection with which he is endowed. 
 As to intellectual perfection, the second term of his 
 total perfection, it was naturally to be found in man 
 and in the spirits superior to man, since all of them, 
 by their very essence, are capable of knowing. Matter 
 alone, relegated to the frontiers of nothingness, seemed 
 shut out for ever from the glorious privilege of thought. 
 For God himself cannot accomplish that which 
 includes an express contradiction, and matter, an 
 inert and divisible substance, rejects, with all the 
 force of an absolute incompatibility, the idea of 
 activity indivisible as thought, free as the will. But 
 God, without performing an impossibility, performed a 
 
 I
 
 114 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 miracle. He willed then to spiritualise matter, accord- 
 ing to the expression of St. Paul, by giving it a share in 
 the most elevated functions of the human soul, and this 
 is the secret which was faintly perceived by Aristotle, 
 when he said : " There is nothing in the intelligence 
 which was not before in the senses." Not that the soul 
 does not receive, prior to all intercourse between itself 
 and nature, a direct illumination from God, an illumina- 
 tion which is to its inner vision what light is to the outer 
 eye ; but, notwithstanding that divine communication, 
 thought does not take its form, and, so to say, its 
 outline, until the senses, by means of images and 
 language, have brought to the soul, in its inmost 
 sanctuary, the tribute of their exploration in the visible 
 world. Man thinks only by means of the totality of 
 his being, as he lives only by means of the totality of 
 his being. All idealist or materialist systems are false, 
 because they divide man by making him a simple 
 intelligence or only a body. Man, in all his opera- 
 tions, is neither a body nor a spirit ; he is man, that 
 is to say, that marvellous unity resulting from two 
 substances intimately interwoven, the material sub- 
 stance and the immaterial substance. Everything that 
 separates these destroys man. 
 
 Thus matter is raised to an incomprehensible state 
 of dignity. Contemplate that unnamed dust at your
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 115 
 
 feet, which is the last degree of abasement that being 
 reaches before your eyes. Contemplate it. You 
 bore it along but just now without deigning to notice 
 it ; a puff of air will cast it into a field ; darkness and 
 light embody it in the frail tissue of a plant. It is 
 already wheat. The same chance that cast it under 
 your feet brings it upon your table in its new form. 
 You recognise it no longer, and yet it will soon 
 become a part of yourself. See, it flows in your 
 veins ; it penetrates the tissues of your body ; it 
 mounts even to the supreme seat of your exterior 
 activity, to that calm and elevated throne, where, 
 under the protection of a powerful shield, the purest 
 elements of life are silently elaborated. There it 
 encounters the reciprocal action of the soul and the 
 body ; it comes between them ; it knocks at the august 
 portal of your intelligence ; it helps you to think, to 
 will ; it is yourself, and yet it is the grain of dust 
 under your feet. 
 
 I was then justified in calling St. Paul to bear 
 witness to the grandeur of the world even in its 
 lowest element. What if I were to advance yet 
 further if I pronounced to you that famous phrase : 
 The Word was made flesh ? If I showed you dust 
 in its eternal wedlock with God ? But let us not 
 rob the future to serve the present; let us leave a
 
 1 1 6 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 shadow upon the Thabor of truth, and terminate this 
 discourse by showing you how God has communicated 
 his moral perfection to the world. 
 
 The moral perfection of God is resumed in two 
 words : justice and goodness. In order for the world 
 to receive its communication, it was not enough that 
 man and the superior spirits were endowed with the 
 double faculty of knowing and willing, of knowing good 
 and realising it another gift was needed, that of choos- 
 ing between good and evil. For, without that free 
 choice, what, in them, would justice or goodness have 
 been ? A necessary perfection stripped of all personal 
 merit, which would have made of their life a succession 
 of acts irresistibly ordered and accomplished. Now 
 in God, whose total perfection was to be reproduced, 
 that fatality does not exist God is a free being. 
 Naturally held in the immutable order of his essence, 
 he acts without in full liberty; he creates or he 
 does not create, he gives in the time and measure 
 determined by his sovereign will ; and even when he 
 remains within his necessary operations, such as the 
 relations of the three divine persons, he is subject to 
 nothing exterior to himself. He is neither com- 
 manded nor necessitated. If, on the contrary, man 
 and pure spirits had no choice between God and 
 themselves, between the infinite and the finite, their per-
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 117 
 
 sonality would exist onlyas an absolute dependence upon 
 the divine personality ; they would be others and not 
 themselves. They would not give themselves from justice 
 or goodness, but from subjection to an empire foreign to 
 their own deliberation. They would be deprived of 
 moral perfection, because they would possess a morality 
 totally inamissible, and consequently impersonal. 
 
 In God, it is true, morality is inamissible, but it is 
 so without being impersonal, because it is not the 
 action of another that subjugates the divine will, whilst 
 in the creature deprived of free will it would be the 
 infinite who oppressed the finite. The human will 
 would become absorbed in the divine will. 
 
 It is needless to add that matter itself, raised to the 
 state of humanity, shares, by its association with the 
 soul, the honours of free will, and that it thus enters 
 into participation of the rights and perils of the moral 
 order. You will have already drawn this conclusion 
 if my words have but thrown a little light upon the 
 ways of divine wisdom in communicating to the world 
 its triple and adorable perfection. 
 
 The consequence of perfection is beatitude. God 
 is infinitely happy, because he is infinitely perfect. 
 Having then called the world to enjoy his perfection, 
 he should also have called it to enjoy his beatitude ; 
 and as beatitude terminates all in God, it is also
 
 1 1 8 The General Plan of Creation. 
 
 necessarily the final term of creation for every being 
 who has not been unworthy of his destiny. Here I 
 touch the Gordian knot of truth, and I venture to 
 believe that you have severed it yourselves. You will 
 not ask me why God has not given beatitude without 
 conditions of merit ; if I am not deceived, you know 
 the reason. If, indeed, God had willed to communi- 
 cate to the world all his properties, he should have 
 communicated them in the order in which he himselt 
 possesses them, and in the only order in which it was 
 possible for him to communicate them all. Now, the 
 divine properties are simply perfection and beatitude ; 
 perfection, the cause of beatitude ; and beatitude, the 
 effect of perfection. If God had changed the order, in 
 plunging us by the sole act of our birth into the pos- 
 session of himself, whence his felicity springs, he would 
 have deprived us of the first of his properties, which 
 is perfection. For, as we have seen, free will is a 
 necessary element thereof, which the direct and 
 beatific vision of God would not have permitted us to 
 possess, even for a single instant. Lost at the 
 moment of our birth in the abyss of an infinite 
 attraction, we should have offered to divine goodness 
 no representation of his own liberty, no virtue, no 
 merit, no return worthy of his gratuitous and liberal 
 dispensation towards us. God owed it then to us and
 
 The General Plan of Creation. 119 
 
 to himself to retard our beatitude in favour of our 
 perfection. But to retard it was to hide himself for a 
 time from created beings, to clothe himself before 
 them in the veil of finite things, in order that, choice 
 being possible to them, trial should be also possible 
 with choice, and that from trial there should spring up 
 within them justice worthy of praise, goodness worthy 
 of love. 
 
 Thus the world was given possession of a sove- 
 reignty which placed it with glory in presence of God. 
 Thus, having God for principle and end, it should 
 gravitate towards him by a voluntary and grateful per- 
 fection, even to the day when, the entire orbit of its 
 trial being achieved, it will repose in the bosom of God 
 himself in a degree of beatitude equal to its fidelity. 
 
 I have traced for you the whole plan of Creation. 
 I have shown you the materials employed therein, the 
 ordinance they received, the reasons of that ordinance, 
 and already knowing your beginning, you have learned 
 to know your end. Your end and your beginning do 
 not differ ; God is your father, and God is also your 
 end. He is the Alpha and the Omega of your des- 
 tiny ; you cannot look lower without losing yourselves, 
 rise less high without perishing. In vain, being un- 
 grateful, will you appeal to his goodness against his 
 justice. I have just destroyed that hope by showing
 
 1 20 Tfie General Plan of Creation. 
 
 you in goodness itself the root of your duties. It is 
 doubtless goodness that said : Come, ye blessed of my 
 Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from 
 the foundation of the world. 1 " But it is also goodness 
 that said : Be you therefore perfect, as also your hea- 
 venly Father is perfect? For the natural movement of 
 goodness is to communicate its properties, and God 
 having only his perfection and his beatitude, the effect 
 of the divine goodness is to communicate both to you 
 in the same order in which they are in himself. If 
 you refuse perfection because it exacts sacrifice from 
 you, at the same time you refuse beatitude, which is 
 its consequence. That order does not depend upon 
 God ; it is his proper and rigorous nature ; the very 
 nature of goodness of which justice is but the sanction. 
 
 4 Matt xxv. 34. * Matt. v. 48.
 
 ( 121 
 
 MAN AS AN INTELLIGENT BEING. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 WE already know the two terms of the mystery 
 of destinies ; we know what is our principle and our 
 end. But that knowledge, all-important though it be, 
 is far from being sufficient for us. It is a great thing 
 to be assured that God is the source from whence we 
 spring, that our end is to attain to his perfection and 
 beatitude ; it remains, however, for us to be directed 
 upon that perilous road of which God occupies the 
 two extreme points ; for if we are unacquainted with 
 its secrets, we are in danger of going astray in our 
 very way, and of descending towards death instead of 
 advancing towards him from whom proceeds all life, 
 all perfection, all felicity. Where is then the road 
 which we ought to follow ? Is it traced out ? Is it 
 known with certainty ?
 
 122 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 You cannot doubt about it ; God, who has revealed 
 to us our principle and our end, must also have 
 revealed to us the means of proceeding from one to 
 the other, otherwise the object he had in view, which 
 was to satisfy his goodness by communicating himself 
 to his creatures, would not have been realised. Here 
 we quit the universe in order to concentrate our 
 attention upon man in particular ; for it is man who 
 first interests us, and moreover, in seeking the paths 
 which God has opened to us that we may mount 
 towards him, we unceasingly encounter the rest of 
 creation either disputing the passage with us or open- 
 ing it before us ; and the theology of man, in virtue of 
 the unity that co-ordains and combines every part of 
 the divine work, will constantly blend with the theology 
 of the universe. But man himself, within his proper 
 nature, is an infinitely complex being. By his thought, 
 he belongs to the intellectual order ; by his will, to the 
 moral order ; by his union with his fellow-creatures, 
 to the social order; by his body, to the physical 
 order ; by his entire soul, to the religious order : and, 
 under all these relations, he has received means of 
 attaining his end, which is perfection and beatitude. 
 It is needful then, in order completely to unfold his 
 destiny, to study man himself, and successively as an 
 intelligent, moral, social, physical, religious being ; and
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 123 
 
 under these divers aspects to take account of the roads 
 which eternal wisdom has prepared for him, and in 
 which he must walk in order to avoid perishing. The 
 course will be long ; it will embrace not only the 
 remaining conferences of this year, but all those 
 which will follow even to the last day in which God 
 may permit me to instruct you. In a word, the 
 principle and the end of man being known to us, 
 nothing remains in the development of doctrine but 
 to expose to you, in all their historical and dogmatic 
 course, the means given to man to attain his end. 
 
 I enter at once upon this subject, and man as an 
 intelligent being will form my exordium. 
 
 Intelligence is the faculty of knowing. To know, 
 is to see that which is ; and to see that which is, is to 
 possess truth ; for truth is no other thing than that 
 which is, inasmuch as it is perceived by the mind. 
 Whence it results that truth is the object of the intelli- 
 gence, and that the function of the intelligence is to 
 seek, to penetrate, to retain truth ; to live by truth, and 
 for truth ; this is its perfection and its beatitude. In 
 the first place, it is its perfection ; for the mind out of 
 truth is in the state of ignorance or error ; it sees not 
 or sees badly, and in either case it is deprived of its 
 object and function. It is like an eye which looks 
 without seeing, or which sees that which has no reality ;
 
 1 24 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 an organ useless and dead in the first case, a false 
 and dangerous instrument in the second. 
 
 But if truth be the perfection of the intelligence, it 
 may be said without further proof that it is also its 
 beatitude. For the one is the inevitable consequence 
 of the other. As soon as a faculty is united to its 
 object, as soon as it accomplishes its mission, it attains 
 a state of repose because it attains its object ; a glorious 
 repose, because it is legitimate ; full of joy, because it 
 has been produced by God according to the pattern of 
 his own operations, wherein all ends in transport. 
 Therefore, in receiving the light of truth, the intelli- 
 gence reposes, rejoices, exults ; in fine, is happy 
 according to the nature of the vision that enlightens 
 and fills it Daily we experience this beatification of 
 the understanding. Even in the lowest regions of 
 nature there is no being or phenomenon, how imper- 
 ceptible soever it may be, how indifferent soever it 
 may appear, the discovery of which does not cause us 
 a kind of magic transport You all know the history 
 of that great geometrician who, after having long 
 battled with a problem that arrested his genius, all at 
 once penetrated its secret whilst he was in a bath. 
 Forgetting himself, he rose, and, the folly of enthusiasm 
 depriving him even of the consciousness of his nudity, 
 he ran through the streets of Syracuse, exclaiming :
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 125 
 
 I have found it ! I have found it ! This is the living 
 image of those holy nuptials between the mind and 
 intelligible light, when man has shown himself worthy 
 of that immaterial alliance by a life which lessens the 
 subjection of his double nature to the inferior order. 
 Those blissful joys depend together upon the greatness 
 of the mind and the greatness of the ideas that inun- 
 date it ; they blend with the shores of the intelligence 
 and the luminous course which flows between them. 
 
 Sometimes the mind is great without the light being 
 also great ; then come those times of mysterious sad- 
 ness whose traces you may have observed on the 
 generous brows of many of your contemporaries. 
 Victims of doubt, they have drunk from the cup of 
 knowledge without drinking from the cup of truth. 
 They have studied past ages, interrogated the seas, 
 followed the orbit of the heavenly bodies, nothing has 
 escaped the perspicacity of their meditations, and yet 
 a veil has remained before them which hinders them 
 from thoroughly fathoming what they see, and from 
 taking account of the illuminations of their own life. 
 Light itself is darkness to them ; each new discovery 
 opens to them a new abyss ; and like the labourer 
 ploughing in the fields of Thebes or Babylon, who 
 constantly strikes against unaccountable ruins, these 
 mighty investigators of worlds, at each furrow which
 
 1 26 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 they trace in the immensity of things, raise up, even 
 from the very bosom of science, great and painful 
 obscurities. They have neither the peace of ignorance 
 nor the peace of error ; they see too much not to 
 know, too little to understand, and however great may 
 be the crime that hides truth from them, they have at 
 least the honour of being unhappy because they do 
 not possess it. 
 
 But after these long torments of doubt, if the veil be 
 at last drawn aside, then the intelligence receives one 
 of those vibrations whose voluptuous pain no tongue 
 can describe. Then Augustine rises, and, for the first 
 time, finding even friendship irksome, he withdraws to 
 give current to his feelings in a torrent of solitary tears. 
 He, who was lost in the vain love of glory and 
 creatures, sees all the charms that deceived his youth 
 vanish in a moment Truth enraptures him ; the 
 azure plains of Lombardy, the hopes of renown, the 
 most tender professions of erring hearts, have no longer 
 any power to move him ; he departs, leading his aged 
 mother by the hand, and already from the port of 
 Ostia he sees the obscure solitude which he thinks will 
 hide him for ever from the admiration of the world as 
 from the dreams of his past life. Tears of great men, 
 heroic sacrifices, virtues born in a single hour, and 
 which ages cannot destroy, you teach us the price of
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 127 
 
 truth ! You prove that it is indeed the perfection and 
 beatitude of the intelligence ! 
 
 Therefore one of the most formidable crimes is that 
 of betraying and labouring against truth; for it is 
 to betray our highest good, to strike us at the very 
 height from whence our glory and felicity descend. 
 What is man without intelligence, and what is intelli- 
 gence without truth? If you deprive man of 
 intelligence, he is nothing more than the dethroned 
 king of the animal world ; if, leaving intelligence to 
 him, you withhold from him the gift of truth, you dig 
 out for him an abyss as deep as the infinite; you 
 prepare for him a torment of hunger never to be 
 appeased, an aspiration which can never attain to 
 anything but grasping shadows in an immense and 
 deceptive void. What can be more terrible than this 
 condition ! What more criminal than to be its willing 
 instrument ! Therefore, falsehood has ever been 
 abhorred by the human race ; and, even in things where 
 its insignificance would seem excusable, it brings 
 infallible scorn upon the lips which give it utterance. 
 We do not forgive the man who, knowing truth, 
 willingly substitutes for it the adulterous language of 
 error. How much less will God and mankind pardon 
 those who designedly stand up against the most holy 
 doctrines that ages have bequeathed to us, and who,
 
 128 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 despairing of conquering them by calm discussion, arm 
 themselves against them with all the resources of 
 violence and cunning ! This has too often been 
 witnessed, and we must never lose an opportunity of 
 protesting against those pusillanimous conspiracies of 
 might ; the powers instituted for the conservation of 
 all rights and possessions have been seen to declare 
 open war against the highest of all rights, the right to 
 know ; against the richest of all possessions, namely, 
 truth. Jealous of its power, which, indeed, is the 
 greatest known in the world, they strive to dethrone 
 it, in order to set up in its place and to their own 
 profit the reign of interests and passions. Anything 
 suits them better than truth ; they accept, protect, give 
 liberty to everything but truth. They pursue truth 
 so exclusively, with so much art and perseverance, 
 that they make it known by that same sign, and their 
 very persecution becomes a mark of certainty which 
 presents it to the legitimate adorations of the whole 
 earth. 
 
 But do not wonder if truth some day or other takes 
 vengeance upon its oppressors. As men are not able 
 to ruin authority without striking at the root of the 
 human understanding, sooner or later a kind of frenzy 
 urges them beyond all fear and respect, and drives 
 them with open arms against that which is. This is
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 129 
 
 the time of reprisals, the time foretold by St. Paul 
 when he wrote thus to the Romans : The wrath of 
 God is revealed from Heaven against all ungodliness 
 and injustice of those men who detain the truth of God 
 in injustice}- Then kings grow pale and kingdoms 
 are troubled; night gathers in Babylon; Baltazzar 
 sees the hand that condemns him, and the sword of 
 Cyrus waits not for to-morrow. I am not reciting 
 history ; no, it is not history. Look around you ; we 
 are in Babylon, we sit at the feast of Baltazzar ! 2 
 
 Must I ask your indulgence if I have allowed 
 myself to yield to the emotions of a time so fertile in 
 great lessons ? Have I betrayed the interests of truth 
 by showing you, in the catastrophes of our age, the 
 avenging part which truth plays therein ? If it be so, 
 may you and truth forgive me, and let us remount 
 together to the peaceful regions where nothing earthly 
 disturbs the contemplation of causes and laws. 
 
 I have just proved that truth is the perfection and 
 beatitude of the intelligence ; and, since God in 
 creating us has willed to communicate to us perfec- 
 tion and beatitude, I draw therefrom this conse- 
 quence, that he has communicated truth to us. And 
 it is, in fact, what Catholic doctrine teaches. If we 
 listen to it, it teaches that God in sending us into the 
 1 Rom. i. 1 8. 2 A.D. 1848. 
 
 K
 
 1 30 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 world did not abandon our mind to the hazard of its 
 own discoveries, but enlightened it from the begin- 
 ning with such knowledge that truth really existed 
 therein. What was that primitive knowledge which, 
 without being infinite, was nevertheless truth ? That 
 question leads us back to the definition which I gave 
 you on commencing this Conference. Truth, I said, 
 is that which is, inasmuch as it is perceived by the 
 mind. We halted there without advancing that other 
 question, which we can no longer avoid. What, then, 
 is that which is? Do we understand by this the 
 heavens, the earth, and the seas ? Is this that which 
 is ? What ? the heavens, the earth, the seas, mankind 
 even, all that we see, is stamped with such a character 
 of limit and change that we find there nothing of the 
 grandeur contained in that powerful word being : 
 human tongues have exhausted their energies to 
 express the nothingness of visible things, and however 
 pride may desire to magnify the theatre upon which it 
 acts, all that it can add to the universe is to discover 
 in it a ray of being, and consequently a ray of truth. 
 Where then is being ? Where is that which is ? Ah, 
 already I perceive, and even know it. Being is 
 absolute, eternal, and infinite unity, plurality without 
 division,the ocean without shores, the centre without 
 circumference, the plenitude that contains itself, the
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 131 
 
 form without figure ; the whole, in fine, without which 
 all that is, is but an act and a gift. But in so 
 speaking whom have I named ? I have named him 
 who has said of himself, EGO SUM QUI SUM lam who 
 am. 3 I have named him who said also, EGO SUM 
 VERITAS / am the truth.' 1 ' I have named God. 
 Behold being, and behold truth. God alone is truth, 
 because he alone is being ; he does not possess truth 
 as something foreign to himself, but he is substantial 
 and personal truth, because he is being, possessing 
 himself; because he is at the same time, and by the 
 same act, the eye that sees, the object seen, and vision. 
 Whoever knows him knows all ; whoever knows him 
 not knows nothing. What know you indeed out of 
 him ? The phenomena of the world, their laws, the 
 composition and decomposition of bodies, the science 
 of dust. You do not even reach so far ; for, to attain 
 to this, you must at least penetrate the last reason 
 of an atom, and where will you find it if you ignore 
 God, the principle and the end of all ? 
 
 From thence come those lamentations of the greatest 
 minds about the poverty of science, lamentations so elo- 
 quently expressed by Solomon, one among them, when 
 he said / have seen all things that are done under the 
 sun, and behold all is vanity and vexation of spirit* 
 3 Exodus iii. 14. 4 John xiv. 6. 5 Ecclesiastes i. 14.
 
 132 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 It is, in fact, because truth is not under the sun, it 
 is above; it is in God, without whom man knows 
 nothing, neither earth, nor heaven, nor present, nor 
 future, nor man, nor even his own heart. And the 
 more he learns without God and out of God, the more 
 he enlarges, with the circle of his investigations, that 
 of his doubts and torments. On the other hand, the 
 man to whom God is revealed finds himself at the 
 same moment in the centre and at the circumference of 
 things ; he sees their initial germ, their development, 
 their term, their reason ; if he knows nothing of the 
 detail, he measures the whole, and his mind peacefully 
 reposes in the double joy of knowledge and certainty. 
 In a word, God, being truth, is the proper object of 
 our intelligence, he is its perfection and beatitude ; 
 and wJien I said to you but now, that from the first 
 he had given to us the gift of truth, I said that from 
 the first he had revealed himself to us. 
 
 I find a beautiful confirmation of this in the first 
 page of the Gospel of St. John There was, says the 
 Evangelist, a man sent from God, whose name was 
 
 John He was not the light, but was sent to give 
 
 testimony of the light. That was the true light which 
 enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world. If 
 indeed there exist a supreme light, mother of all 
 minds, its first act, when they come into the world,
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 133 
 
 should be to enlighten them, and it can enlighten 
 them only by making known to them their principle, 
 which is God ; their end, which is God ; truth, which 
 is God. If it failed to do this, what means would 
 they have of accomplishing their destiny by tending 
 towards their end? They would have none. And 
 thus truth is not only due to them by right of the 
 perfection and beatitude of the intelligence, it is due 
 to them also as the first and necessary means, without 
 which, being ignorant even of the object of their life, 
 it would be impossible for them to advance towards 
 that object, still more impossible to attain it. It is 
 then with justice that Catholic doctrine makes truth 
 that is to say, the knowledge of God one of the 
 primitive gifts of man, the starting point, and I shall 
 add, the milestone of his destiny. 
 
 To this, what does rationalism oppose ? You shall 
 hear. 
 
 Eighteen hundred years ago a Roman proconsul 
 called a prisoner before him, and after having atten- 
 tively examined him as a man whose appearance was 
 remarkable, he spoke to him these few words : Thou 
 art the King of the Jew si The accused replied: My 
 kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of 
 this world my servants would certainly strive that I 
 should not be delivered to the Jews ; but now my king-
 
 1 34 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 dom is not from hence. The proconsul continued : 
 Art thou a king, then ? The accused answered : Thou 
 sayest tJiat I am a king. For this end was I born, and 
 for this cause came I into the world, that I should give 
 testimony to truth. The proconsul stood up and said : 
 What is truth P This terrible question is the same 
 that rationalism even now addresses to us whenever 
 we speak of the basis of all faith and knowledge. Like 
 the Roman, it asks : What is truth ? And it must ask 
 this question under pain of not protesting against the 
 very foundation of the whole religious edifice, which is 
 the idea of truth in itself. Now how could rationalism 
 avoid protesting up to this point ? How could it 
 permit truth to affirm itself without being contra- 
 dicted ? How could it refrain from digging out under 
 truth an abyss as deep as itself, and from making of 
 the intelligence a faculty without certainty and with- 
 out any other object than that of an incomprehen- 
 sible enigma ? It would be too weak on the part of 
 rationalism, or too disinterested. It has not com- 
 mitted this fault, it has advanced straight to the 
 question that precedes all others, and whilst the 
 universe proclaims the works of truth, ages repeat its 
 name, minds contemplate it, and its action is per- 
 petuated by evidence ,/md faith through the whole 
 John xviii. 33, 36, 37, 38.
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 135 
 
 course of human generations, rationalism, opposing to 
 that triumph the imperturbation of some of its sages, 
 has boldly and fearlessly asked : What is truth ? It 
 has not denied ; for to deny boldly is also to affirm. 
 It has not said : There is nothing ; but, Is there any- 
 thing ? It has not said : I know not ; but, What do I 
 know ? In a word, it has raised up against absolute 
 truth the icy arm of absolute scepticism. 
 
 Must we listen ? Must we do so much honour to 
 the reason which abdicates its throne, as to listen and 
 reply ? Yes, let us listen ; let us learn how far intelli- 
 gence afraid of God is able to annihilate itself from 
 fear of adoring him. Scepticism reasons thus : Man 
 sees in his mind something which he calls ideas, some, 
 secondary and deduced, others, primordial without a 
 generating principle, and which constitute the in- 
 scrutable foundation of his reason. All the ulterior 
 conclusions of the understanding flow from this 
 primary source, wherein analysis readily discerns the 
 notions of being, unity, the infinite, the absolute, 
 order, justice, which together take the august name of 
 truth, or a still more august name, that of God. This 
 is the fact. But because the mind possesses such 
 ideas, does it follow that out of itself there are reali- 
 ties which correspond to them ? It is not the mind 
 itself which is being, unity, the infinite, the absolute,
 
 1 36 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 order, justice ; nor does the mind directly perceive 
 these. It sees but their shadow, if we may so speak, 
 and the very word idea, in its origin, means only an 
 image. But who can assure us that the image is 
 exact, or even that it is produced by a real object ? 
 How can the intelligence, which is limited, be the 
 mirror of the infinite? How, being contingent, 
 relative, fallible, can it be the mirror of the necessary, 
 the eternal, the just, the perfect? What proof have 
 we that the ideal vision does not deceive us, and that 
 it is any other thing than the permanent dream of a 
 passing being ? We believe that it is not so, but we 
 believe this without demonstrating it, and we vainly 
 endeavour to establish that demonstration ; for every 
 demonstration supposes principles upon which it is 
 l>ased, and these very principles of the understanding 
 we have now to verify. Man encounters there an 
 invincible obstacle ; he may be able to ascend the 
 Nile of his thought even to the elements which begin 
 its course ; beyond this, he becomes lost in a contem- 
 plation which renders to him but the sterile repetition 
 of the ideas which he employs to enable him to 
 advance further. The mind becomes an echo which 
 answers to itself, and its voice appearing to it to come 
 from a greater distance adds only an illusion to its 
 j>3\verlessness.
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 137 
 
 I do not think that scepticism has said anything 
 stronger than what you have just heard ; it has per- 
 haps said this in a more scientific manner, that is to 
 say, in a more obscure manner, but not with more 
 energy and sincerity. And I confess in the first place 
 that it is impossible to demonstrate the primary ideas 
 which form, as it were, the intimate substance of our 
 reason. If they could be demonstrated, they would 
 not be primitive ; others would be so, and the same 
 difficulties would arise in regard to them. We demon- 
 strate only that which is a consequence, and not that 
 which is a principle. Now our intelligence, being the 
 faculty of a finite being, can be enlightened only by a 
 transmitted light, a light which begins at a certain 
 point and ends at another, a light which has a principle 
 and an end. As principle, light is an axiom ; as end, 
 it is a mystery. Both of these, the axiom and the 
 mystery, are indemonstrable, but the axiom is so on 
 account of its clearness, the mystery on account of its 
 obscurity. As the obscurity of the mystery is insur- 
 mountable, the clearness of the axiom is irresistible, 
 and thus the understanding, at the two extremes of 
 the horizon which it embraces, encounters a limit 
 where its power is broken, or where its liberty ceases. 
 It is powerless against the splendour of primary 
 truths, and against the obscurity of final truths ; it is
 
 138 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 exhausted before the former, and yields inevitably to 
 the latter. This is why absolute scepticism is an 
 effort against nature, 'which terminates only in self- 
 deception, and in placing the actions of the man in 
 perpetual contradiction with the reasonings of the 
 sage. " If," said Pascal, " there is an impossibility of 
 proving, which is invincible to all dogmatism, there is 
 an impossibility of doubting, which is invincible to all 
 Pyrrhonism." We make no higher pretensions. For, 
 what is certainty, but the impossibility of doubting ? 
 What is rational certainty, but the rapture caused by 
 evidence which captivates the mind ? Scepticism, it 
 is true, stands up against the evidence of primordial 
 ideas ; it accuses this evidence of being purely sub- 
 jective, that is to say, speaking so as to be understood, 
 not attaining to a vision of the object which the ideas 
 represent. But what matters it, if that evidence assures 
 us naturally and invincibly of the reality of the things 
 which the ideas represent There is none but God, 
 who as being, unity, the infinite, the absolute, order, 
 justice confounds in his vision the subject and the 
 object, the subject seeing and the object seen. For 
 us who possess truth without being truth, we have no 
 other natural means of beholding it and of being sure 
 of its presence, than the light by which it appears to 
 us, an intervening light which identifies itself with our
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 1 39 
 
 minds, and which, seizing it as a part of itself, leaves 
 it no other room for doubt than the resource of an act 
 of suicide, so much the more powerless as it is never 
 accomplished. 
 
 Indeed it may be said that there is nothing to reply 
 to absolute scepticism; because there is nothing to 
 reply to those who make objects of doubt of their 
 ideas, their words, their very doubts. To reply, is to 
 suppose a reality, were it only that of the objection. 
 Now, as the sceptic destroys all reality, his objection 
 becomes lost with him in the void which he hollows 
 out for himself. It suffices to be silent before a 
 shadow ; to live before a dead body. So much the 
 more as scepticism is but the malady of a small 
 number of depraved minds, who, notwithstanding 
 all the energy of their pride and all the glory of 
 their aberrations, have never been able to escape 
 from the chastisement of solitude. The generality of 
 intelligent men have constantly disdained their 
 sophisms, and believed with incorruptible faith in 
 the reality of truth. What need you more? Error 
 is something only by the adhesion of men ; wher- 
 ever mankind is not in a certain measure, nothing is 
 left to error but a little noise in an empty tomb. 
 It is a phantom which hopes to scare us, but the 
 laugh of God and man render justice to it. This
 
 140 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 suffices for God and mankind; it is sufficient also 
 for me. 
 
 If, however, absolute scepticism is but an unimpor- 
 tant chimera, it is not so of another kind of scepticism, 
 which, attacking truth from a lower point, and not 
 contesting its principal basis, produces a serious state 
 of mind which it is necessary for us to notice. 
 Absolute scepticism places in doubt the primitive 
 notions that form the basis of human reason, and con- 
 sequently the very idea of God ; relative or imperfect 
 scepticism gives its adhesion to these ideas, but 
 refuses its faith to certain consequences which flow 
 from them, and which embrace the nature of the 
 divine acts. Absolute scepticism is atheism under a 
 negative form ; imperfect scepticism implies only an 
 ignorance of the attributes and operations of God. It 
 believes that God exists, but it does not take account 
 of what he is, of what he does, or of what he wills 
 to do. This is vulgar unbelief, and this very expres- 
 sion teaches us that it is no longer a question of a rare 
 and chimerical condition, but a condition too real, in 
 which man, so far from abdicating his intelligence, 
 derives from it, on the contrary, forces for resisting 
 truth, that is to say, God. Now God, we have said, 
 manifests himself to man from his cradle, not in an 
 incomplete manner, but to the full extent required by
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 141 
 
 the need in which we stand of knowing our prin- 
 ciple, our end, and the means of attaining it. How, 
 then, should a certain portion of mankind be ignorant 
 of God, or are they in a state of .doubt with regard to 
 him which hinders them from appreciating and accom- 
 plishing their true destinies ? Is it the fault of man or 
 the fault of God ? It is needful for us to know this, in 
 order that obscurities may not be left in your minds, 
 which would be so much the more grievous, as it is 
 now our object and yours that you may be instructed 
 in the intellectual ways which God has opened to us 
 that we may ascend towards him. 
 
 I repeat, then : Is that imperfect scepticism such 
 as I have denned it, and in which so many reasonable 
 beings pine the work of God or the work of man ? 
 Has God been sparing of light, or is it man who has 
 retreated from it ? In order to solve this question, 
 we must seek to learn by what means and in what 
 measure God primitively communicated truth to the 
 human race. 
 
 Doubtless God could have shown himself to us face 
 to face, in all the brightness of his essence, and, 
 in this case, scepticism would never have appeared 
 upon earth. Every veil being withdrawn, truth, which 
 is but the divine nature, would have taken irrevocable 
 possession of our intelligence. Intelligible light, instead
 
 142 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 of appearing to us between the axiom and the mystery, 
 that is to say, with a principle and an end, would have 
 risen for us in all the ineffable plenitude of its own 
 immensity. Evidence would have been ecstacy, cer- 
 tainty would have taken the character of immutability, 
 truth would have become the eternal life of our minds. 
 But that state, so far from being our original state in 
 the divine plan, was precisely the supreme term to 
 which we were called. I have already told you for 
 what reason. I have shown you, in exposing to you 
 the general ordinance of the universe, that God, moved 
 by his goodness, willed to communicate to us his per- 
 fection and beatitude, and that beatitude, given without 
 the previous condition of free will, would have deprived 
 us of the merit and glory of perfection. From whence 
 it follows that a state of trial should precede the final 
 state of beatification, and that state of trial, founded 
 upon free will, necessarily included the possibility of 
 believing or not believing, of admitting or rejecting 
 truth, that is to say, the liberty of the understanding. 
 Now, the liberty of the understanding was incompatible 
 with a direct vision of the divine essence, and conse- 
 quently it was needful that God should veil himself 
 from our sight, and be for us at the same time a 
 hidden God and a God known, hidden without envy, 
 known freely.
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 143 
 
 But how are we to see that which is unseen ? How 
 are we to know that which does not fall directly under 
 the eye of the mind ? If this difficulty could not be 
 solved, the plan of God in creation would be impossible 
 to realise. Can it therefore be solved ? God pos- 
 sessed in his double nature the pattern of a double 
 vision, the intuitive vision and the ideal vision. 
 Present to himself by the intuitive vision, he discovered 
 by the ideal vision the things which he should one day 
 create. These things evidently formed no part of his 
 essence under their positive and realised form ; he did 
 not then behold them in himself under that substantial 
 form ; nor did he behold them out of himself before 
 communicating to them the being which was wanting 
 to them. Where then, and how, did he behold them, 
 if not, as I have just said, by way of image, of repre- 
 sentation, under that intelligible and mysterious form 
 which we call an idea ? St. Thomas of Aquinas pro- 
 poses this question : " Are there ideas in God ?" And 
 he answers : " Yes ; for as the world was not made by 
 chance, but by the action of the divine intelligence, 
 there must have pre-existed in the divine intelligence 
 a form or likeness of the world, and that form or like- 
 ness is the idea itself." 7 Now, if God beheld the 
 sensible world by the ideal vision, why did not man 
 " Summa, first part, question 15., art. i.
 
 144 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 see the divine world by the same kind of vision ? Why, 
 without discovering the very substance of being, unity, 
 the infinite, the absolute, order, justice all of which 
 things are God under different aspects and under 
 different names did he not receive the idea of him in 
 his mind, and with the idea a distinct knowledge of 
 him, worthy of being called truth ? Can we say that 
 we do not understand what is being, unity, the infinite, 
 the absolute, order, justice ? And if we do under- 
 stand this, if this is the very torch that enlightens all 
 the rest, what is within our soul and what is without, 
 can we accuse God of not having enlightened us, of 
 not having cast before our life the pale and uncertain 
 light of visible things? Yes, whilst hiding himself 
 from us, that is to say, whilst leaving a veil upon the 
 substantial fount of his being, God has fully given 
 himself to us, by the exact impression of his likeness 
 in the living flesh of our understanding. He has 
 traced out in it luminous furrows, and with a generous 
 hand has sown that incorruptible germ of truth which 
 teaching, reflection, experience, and even the course 
 of our years, unceasingly develope, so far as to cause 
 us to attain, save by our own fault, to divine maturity ; 
 to that glorious moment when the image of God, 
 fully formed within us, bursts the envelope which 
 covers it, and rejoins in immortality the ineffable
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 145 
 
 type which was its father, and which recognises its 
 son. 
 
 It is not then the want of light that precipitates a 
 part of mankind into scepticism and keeps them away 
 from truth, it is the abuse of their free will. The dark- 
 ness wherein they lose God, is voluntary darkness ; God 
 shows himself, and they fly from him ; God is the 
 object present to their intelligence, and they choose 
 to make of their intelligence a sepulchre or a chaos, 
 rather than adore the star that shines upon it. They 
 abandon that inner light, the only true light, to pursue 
 the obscure and powerless attractions of the material 
 universe, from which they expect the joy of apostacy 
 in the pride of false science. And yet the universe, 
 all limited as it is, all pale and silent as it rises before 
 our minds, is itself full of God. If it be not his like- 
 ness, it contains at least a vestige, a lineament of 
 him ; from the hyssop to the cedar, from the dew of 
 morning to the evening star, all nature is a reflection 
 of the divine power, beauty, and goodness. God, who 
 in the body of man has associated matter with the 
 most subtle operations of the mind, has willed, in the 
 body of the world, to associate it with the revelation 
 which his mind perpetually makes to our own. To 
 each ray of ideal light there corresponds a ray of 
 sensible light ; to each vision of the uncreated world, 
 
 L
 
 146 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 a vision of the created ; to each voice of the one, the 
 voice of the other. But man separates what God has 
 united ; enlightened by a double light, because of his 
 double substance, he does not perceive that both meet 
 in a single fount, as our double substance terminates 
 in one single personality, and, dividing truth by a 
 divorce which destroys it, he opposes the revelation 
 from without to the revelation from within, nature to 
 God, matter to spirit. Or at least he disdains the 
 superior light, as a sort of vague apparition in a badly 
 denned horizon, whilst he cleaves to the inferior light 
 as to the only one which possesses a precise and posi- 
 tive character. From that moment, all that relates to 
 God, his attributes, his acts^ becomes obscured in that 
 adulterous understanding ; even if he does not descend 
 to absolute scepticism, he clearly distinguishes only 
 that which strikes the senses, and the true, in his eyes, 
 is that alone which bears the stamp of a palpable and 
 vulgar reality. 
 
 Are there then really more obscurities in the mind 
 than in the body ? Does the sensible world possess 
 more clearness than the intelligible world ? Is earth 
 instead of heaven the great illuminator of man, and 
 has God erred in the construction of our being so far 
 as to have sacrificed the part which tends towards 
 him to that which tends towards nothingness ?
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 147 
 
 You do not think so : Catholic doctrine affirms the 
 contrary for us, and the most simple observation of 
 the exercise of our faculties will show us that Catholic 
 doctrine is in the right. Even natural science that is 
 to say, that which occupies itself only with the visible 
 order would be unable to subsist without employing 
 notions which it draws from the invisible or meta- 
 physical order. Despoil man of these fertile principles, 
 take from him the ideas of being, unity, extent, force, 
 relation, what would the universe be for him ? Pre- 
 cisely what it would be for an animal a spectacle. 
 He would behold it without thinking about anything 
 but beholding it ; so far from penetrating its laws, he 
 would not even have a confused presentiment of what 
 a law is. A purely instinctive being, rendering to the 
 world nothing superior to the world, he would stand 
 mute before it, and his hand, which now leads the 
 distant stars, would never beforehand have traced 
 out for them the inevitable course which they uncon- 
 sciously follow. It is the mind that sheds light upon 
 the obscurity of nature ; it is the mind that discovers 
 the connection and the cause of phenomena ; it is the 
 mind that measures, calculates, analyses, defines, 
 dictates orders to matter ; in fine, that unravels in that 
 labyrinth the thread left there by God, and by which 
 he still holds it suspended to the will that created it.
 
 148 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 But the mind without the idea is but an unlighted 
 torch, and the idea without a germ sown from above, 
 greater and clearer than all the worlds, is itself but the 
 powerless reflection of nature upon a faculty which, 
 possessing nothing, has nothing to respond thereto. In 
 vain materialism tells us that sensation becomes an idea 
 on falling into the intelligence ; it is as if it said that 
 limit on entering into void becomes infinite. Sensation, 
 because of the intimate union between the soul and 
 the body, may awaken the intelligible grain that 
 reposes in the depths of the mind ; it may draw it 
 forth from a kind of solitary abstraction, which is not 
 in relation with the constitution of a being at the same 
 time spiritual and material : but it is impossible for it 
 to give to the mind what it does not possess, or to 
 receive from the mind that which itself had not. Two 
 lights become strengthened by uniting ; a ray of light 
 does not become the sun by passing through dark- 
 ness. 
 
 It is then by an abuse even of the forces of the 
 intelligible and divine order, that man withdraws from 
 the exalted regions of the mind to bury himself in the 
 science of terrestrial phenomena. He draws from his 
 intelligence treasures of knowledge and harmony; he 
 scatters them with profusion upon the world ; next, 
 beholding it reinvested with that sublime beauty which
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being, 149 
 
 he has made for it, he believes that it is the world 
 which has enlightened him, that in it alone is full 
 certainty, that it alone merits the honour of assiduous 
 cultivation, and, banishing God to an inaccessible 
 throne, he is not slow to lose sight of him, to forget 
 him, to misunderstand him, to have no other notion 
 left of him than a notion vague and profitless. 
 Thus is imperfect scepticism formed from the volun- 
 tary predominance of the material order over the ideal 
 order. 
 
 But there is another cause of this, about which I 
 must not be silent, and the exposition of which will 
 fully make known to you the means which God has 
 employed to initiate our intelligence to the perfection 
 and beatitude of truth. 
 
 In depositing within us the ideal or intelligible seed, 
 in placing us by our senses in relation with the phe- 
 nomena and laws of the universe, God enlightened us 
 by a double revelation, the one interior, the other 
 exterior. This was a great gift; but it was not to 
 communicate himself to us personally, inasmuch as he 
 is truth ; had he remained there and given us nothing 
 more, we should have known him only by means of 
 nature and ideas, that is to say, indirectly. He willed 
 to advance further, and, without however revealing to 
 us his essence, to establish personal relations between
 
 150 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 our minds and his own. He spake to us then. It is 
 a fundamental point of Catholic doctrine that a word 
 of God was, from the very first, shed upon mankind, 
 and that it has never ceased to exist and to spread in 
 the world, either adulterated or in a pure state, as an 
 immortal echo of truth ; an echo often weakened, 
 often corrupted, but rising again from its ruins through 
 all generations, and recalling to us, with the eloquence 
 of perpetuity, the existence of God, his nature, his 
 acts ; that he is the principle, the end, the means, the 
 key of our destinies. Traditions, common to all 
 nations and all ages, continually attest that oral revela- 
 tion primitively made to the human race : human 
 language itself, constantly transmitted by hereditary 
 succession, and neither historically nor logically per- 
 mitting the possibility of an origin by way of invention 
 to be even perceived, bore testimony also to the reality 
 of an anterior and a divine language, from whence 
 our own issued. In the forests man has been found 
 lowered to the rank of animals, from a precocious 
 abandonment which had deprived him of all teaching. 
 Language from his lips was nothing more than a vague, 
 an inarticulate sound, a barbarous cry indicating 
 the presence of sensations and incapable of trans- 
 mitting ideas. All these facts confirm the page of 
 Scripture which shows God speaking with man ; and
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 151 
 
 by the effusion of oral light achieving that which 
 the gift of intelligible and sensible light had commenced 
 within him. But it was reserved for our epoch to 
 acquire from that truth a demonstration as marvellous 
 as it was unlocked for. 
 
 Towards the end of the last century, a French priest, 
 touched by the misfortunes of those poor creatures 
 who are born deprived of speech because deprived of 
 hearing a circumstance which again bears witness to 
 the close connection between the mystery of language 
 and the mystery of a previous instruction a priest, I 
 say, touched by the condition of the deaf and dumb, 
 devoted his life to leading them out of their sad soli- 
 tude, by seeking an expression of thought which might 
 reach their own and succeed in drawing from their 
 bosoms, so long closed, the secret of their inner state. 
 He attained this object. Charity, more ingenious than 
 misfortune, had the happiness of opening the issues 
 which nature held closed, and of pouring into these 
 obscure and captive souls the ineffable, although im- 
 perfect, light of speech. The benefit was great, the 
 recompense was still greater. As soon as these un- 
 known intelligences were penetrated, investigation 
 discovered in them nothing resembling an idea. I do 
 not speak only of a moral and religious idea, but of a 
 metaphysical idea. Nothing was found there but an
 
 152 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 image of what falls under the investigation of the 
 senses, there was nothing of what falls from a higher 
 region into the mind. Sensation was caught here in 
 the very fact of powerlessness. What do I say, 
 sensation ? the intelligence itself, although endowed 
 with the ideal seeds of truth, although assisted by the 
 revelation of the sensible world, the intelligence 
 appeared in the deaf and dumb in a state of sterility. 
 Men, already ripe in years, bom in our civilisation, 
 who had never quitted it, who had been present at all 
 the scenes of family and public life, who had seen our 
 temples, our priests, our ceremonies, those men being 
 interrogated on the intimate working of their convic- 
 tions, knew nothing of God, nothing of the soul, 
 nothing of the moral law, nothing of the metaphysical 
 order, nothing of any one of the general principles of 
 the human mind. They were in a purely instinctive 
 state. The experiment has been repeated a hundred 
 times, and a hundred times it has produced the same 
 results ; and hardly do we perceive, in the multitude of 
 documents published up to this time, a doubt or a 
 difference of opinion on so capital a fact, which is the 
 greatest psychological discovery the history of philo- 
 sophy can boast of. Has thought then received in 
 language an auxiliary so indispensable that, without 
 its help, man was condemned to incapability of emerg-
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 153 
 
 ing from the reign of sensations ? Was language, for 
 all the operations of the intelligence, the point or 
 Cleans of junction between the soul and the body? 
 Did our double nature require that sort of incarnation 
 of what is most immaterial in the world, or had God 
 willed to make us comprehend the dependency of our 
 mind by rendering it incapable of becoming fertile 
 without the exterior action of oral instruction ? 
 
 Whatever may be the explanation of this, it has 
 always been found certain that man does not speak 
 before he has heard language, and that he thinks only 
 after the ideas contained in language have awakened 
 the intelligible germ deposited in the depths of his 
 understanding. If he did not possess this intelligible 
 germ, language, in passing through the organs of his 
 hearing, would vainly solicit his intelligence ; he 
 would hear it only as a sound, and not as a living 
 expression of truth. But truth pre-exists in him in 
 the same manner as the tree pre-exists in its seed 
 and as the consequence pre-exists in its principle. 
 Just as after-teaching causes to bud forth within each 
 of us an innumerable multitude of deductions in- 
 cluded in primary ideas, but of which our mind had 
 no consciousness, so initial teaching causes the 
 primary ideas themselves to appear to our inner 
 vision. You find it natural that language should
 
 1 54 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 reveal to you mathematics, although you possess them 
 entire in the primordial notions of unity, number, 
 extent, weight : why does it appear strange to you 
 that language should cause you also to perceive 
 notions of unity, number, extent, weight, which are 
 the base of mathematics ? One of these phenomena 
 is not more remarkable than the other ; perhaps even 
 it is more easy to understand the integral and pro- 
 found sleep of a faculty which nothing analogous to it 
 had yet disturbed, than to understand why that faculty, 
 once called into exercise, halts in its way, and waits for 
 language to manifest to it the simple consequences of 
 what it clearly sees. The fact, however, remains in- 
 contestable, and that language is always the primitive 
 and necessary motor of our ideas, as the sun, in 
 agitating by his action the vast extent of air, produces 
 there the brilliant scintillation which gives light to our 
 eyes. 
 
 Thence it follows that Catholic doctrine is true 
 when it exhibits to us God teaching the first man, 
 whether in causing the truth of his intelligence to 
 emerge by the percussion of the verb, or in announcing 
 mysteries to him which surpassed the forces of the 
 purely ideal order, as we shall by and by perceive. 
 In fact, since man thinks and speaks only after having 
 heard others speak, and since, on another hand,
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 155 
 
 human generations take their beginning in God, their 
 creator, it follows that the first movement of language 
 and thought remounts to the hour of creation, and 
 was given to man, who possessed nothing, by him 
 who possessed all, and who willed to communicate all 
 to him. This movement once impressed, intellectual 
 life began for the human race, and has never since 
 ceased. The divine word, immortalised upon the lips 
 of man, has spread like an inexhaustible stream 
 divided into a thousand branches through the vicissi- 
 tudes of nations, and preserving its force as well as 
 its unity in the infinite mixture of idioms and dialects, 
 it perpetuates in the very seat of error the generating 
 ideas which constitute the popular fund of reason and 
 religion. If human liberty vitiates its teaching, it is 
 but in a limited manner ; its efforts do not attain so 
 far as to reach the lowest depths of truth. Language, 
 by that alone that it is pronounced, bears in its 
 essence a light which seizes the soul and renders it an 
 accomplice, if not in all, at least in the fundamental 
 principles without which man altogether disappears. 
 Therefore, God, by the effusion of his word con- 
 tinued in our own, does not cease to promulgate 
 the gospel of reason, and every man, whatever he 
 may do, is the organ and missionary of that gospel. 
 God speaks in us in spite of us ; the mouth that
 
 156 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 blasphemes still contains truth ; the apostate who 
 renounces him still makes an act of faith, the sceptic 
 who mocks at all employs words that affirm all. 
 
 However, if absolute scepticism is powerless against 
 the revelation of language, it is not the same with 
 imperfect or vulgar scepticism, which does not 
 disavow human reason, but contests only certain 
 applications of it relative to the superior order which 
 does not fall under the investigation of our senses. 
 This kind of scepticism rejects in particular all per- 
 sonal relation between God and us by means of 
 language; and maintains that our ideas spring of 
 themselves from the living sources of the under- 
 standing, and in supposing that language may be 
 necessary to their intimate emission, does not recog- 
 nise in that marvellous functionary any traditional and 
 divine character. God has not spoken to man ; man 
 has spoken of himself. He is the son of his own 
 works, and all that he possesses of truth he owes to 
 the success of his own investigations. 
 
 I have refuted this system, which is the corner- 
 stone of rationalism, and which explains to you the 
 blindness wherein so many creatures destined to 
 know and love God live far from him. God has 
 given light to us under three forms, which are per- 
 fected by each other the intelligible form; the
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 157 
 
 sensible form ; the oral or traditional form. Now 
 rationalism admits only the two former, and rejects 
 with tradition the invincible certainty found in the 
 dogmas affirmed by God. It opens to its adepts the 
 field of unlimited speculation, to which the best 
 disposed bring but an imperfect intelligence, obscured 
 by prejudices of birth and education, still more 
 dangerously vitiated by the domination of the senses 
 over the mind. But were all these obstacles sur- 
 mountable, there would still remain the greatest of all, 
 namely, the order established by God in the com- 
 munication of truth which he has made to man. If 
 man were a pure spirit, he would see truth in intel- 
 ligible light, without the help of any sensible element. 
 If, being unity composed of body and soul, he had 
 not been destined to hold personal relations with God, 
 he would probably have seen truth in the combination 
 of intelligible and sensible light, independently of all 
 oral tradition. But he is at the same time spirit and 
 matter, and in addition he is called to live in society 
 with God ; and this is why truth has been communi- 
 cated to him under a mode which is triple and single,, 
 corresponding to his nature and vocation. Would he 
 think as an angel thinks ? He cannot ; some exterior 
 image always intervenes in his most subtle operations. 
 Would he think as an animal ? He is equally unable ;
 
 158 Man as an Intelligent Being. 
 
 the height of his speculations elevates him even in the 
 act by which he degrades himself, and even in con- 
 cluding that he is only matter he proves that he is 
 spirit. In fine, would he think like a being separated 
 from God, independent of all personal relation with 
 him, supported by his reason alone ? Doubtless he can 
 do this, but only by losing at the same moment the 
 equilibrium of his intelligence ; he seeks, he hesitates, 
 he deceives himself, and even when he touches truth, 
 the clouds that cover it and the horizon that limits it 
 take from him the hope of lifting by himself alone the 
 immense weight of earth and heaven. The history of 
 the human mind offers on every page superabundant 
 proof of this. Two systems of philosophy dispute for 
 empire religious and traditional philosophy, and 
 rationalist or critical philosophy. The first, even 
 when it is mixed up with errors, settles minds and 
 founds nations ; the second, even when it affirms a 
 portion of truth, destroys what the other builds up. 
 
 In a word, God, who is truth, has made himself 
 known to us by three revelations which are but one, 
 by ideas, by the universe, and by language. Whoever 
 breaks the bond that unites these, confuses and divides 
 the light that lightens every man coming into the 
 world ; he condemns himself to a state of ignorance 
 which knowledge does but increase ; he will live at
 
 Man as an Intelligent Being. 159 
 
 hazard like a being without principle or end, because 
 he will voluntarily have abdicated, with truth, that is 
 to say, with the knowledge of God, the highest means 
 given to us to accomplish our destiny which is to tend 
 towards God, and, by imitating him, to obtain the per- 
 fection of his nature and the beatitude of his eternal 
 life.
 
 160 
 
 MAN AS A MORAL BEING. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 MAN is not simply an intelligence, he is not 
 simply a contemplative being. If God had given him 
 only the activity of contemplation, his life would have 
 been limited to a simple and perpetual vision, to an 
 impassible adoration of truth. But man is also an 
 affective and an operative being ; he is endowed with 
 a second faculty, which is the consequence of the first, 
 and has two acts, one expressed by the words : I love ; 
 the other by : I command. This faculty is the will. 
 We have then to learn what God did for the will 
 when he created man, and what means he has com 
 municated to us, in and by the will, for attaining ou 
 end, which is perfection and beatitude. 
 
 But before entering upon this grave subject, gentle- 
 men, I have two requests to address to you. I pray
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 161 
 
 you first, never to applaud me, whatever may be the 
 sentiment that moves your hearts. Not that I do 
 not comprehend the involuntary movement which, 
 even at the feet of the altars, causes an assembly to 
 stand up, so to say, in unanimous witness of its sym- 
 pathy and its faith. But although on certain occasions 
 these acclamations might appear excusable, so much 
 do they spring with piety from the souls of an auditory, 
 nevertheless I conjure you to respect the constant 
 tradition of Christendom, which is to respond to the 
 word of God only by the silence of love and the im- 
 mobility of respect. You owe this to God ; you owe 
 it also perhaps to him who speaks to you in his name. 
 Although he may not have been tempted into pride by 
 your applause, he may be suspected of not being 
 insensible to it ; it may be supposed, that, instead of 
 giving freely to you that which he has freely received, 
 he comes to seek its price in the glory of popularity, 
 a recompense sometimes honourable, but always 
 fragile, and still more fragile, more vain, between 
 those who receive and him who gives the lessons ot 
 eternity. 
 
 The second request I would address to you is in 
 favour of a nation to which on more than one occasion, 
 and even from this place, I have already proved my 
 respectful attachment. Yesterday, three noble sons of 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 Poland visited me ; they told me that four thousand 
 of their companions, after fifteen years of exile, were 
 about to approach their country, with the consent of 
 France, which opens to them her gates, and of 
 Germany, which permits them to pass through her 
 territory. They asked me, after having obtained per- 
 mission from the chief of this diocese, here present, to 
 beg of you in their name, a last proof of your pious 
 fraternity ; for, if time has respected their glory and 
 not lessened their courage, it has left them those 
 precious remains, and nothing more. I bent before 
 their desire as before their misfortune ; I present them 
 to you together. You will not give them alms; for 
 although that word is dear to your Christian hearts, 
 there are times when the heroism of misfortune con- 
 strains you to seek a higher title. You will not pay 
 them tribute; although that word supposes a debt, 
 and a debt of an important character, yet it does not 
 sufficiently express the unction of Christian language. 
 Therefore, borrowing a celebrated expression of the 
 middle ages, I ask you to give them a viaticum, that 
 is to say, the travelling pay given in those times to 
 the members of religious orders and to the knights 
 who went to combat in the Holy Land for the eman- 
 cipation of Christendom. You will give a viaticum to 
 those sons of another hallowed land, to those soldiers
 
 Man as a Moral Being, 163 
 
 of another generous cause ; you will give them the 
 triple viaticum of honour, exile, and hope. 
 
 This said, this double satisfaction proposed to your 
 heart and to my own, I enter at once upon the subject 
 which claims your attention. 
 
 As truth is the object of the intelligence, good is 
 the object of the will. But what is good ? What dis- 
 tinction is there between the good and the true ? Is 
 it not the same thing under two different names ? I 
 grant that the good and the true have the same root, 
 the same substantial support, since the true is being, 
 and the good is also being. But as the unity of the 
 divine essence does not exclude the triplicity of 
 persons, the unity of being does not hinder it from 
 possessing many aspects. In the first place, it is 
 light ; and under that form reveals itself to the intelli- 
 gence, and is called truth. Next it is order, harmony, 
 beauty ; and under that form it seizes the will, and is 
 called good. Our nature thus corresponds to its own. 
 Inasmuch as it is light, we respond to it by a faculty 
 destined to know the true ; inasmuch as it is order, 
 harmony, beauty, we respond to it by a faculty des- 
 tined to reproduce good in loving and practising it. 
 And as truth is the perfection and beatitude of the 
 intelligence, good is the perfection and beatitude of 
 the will.
 
 1 64 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 In the first place it is its perfection ; for outside of 
 good all is evil, that is to say, disorder, confusion, de- 
 formity : and evidently the will which loves and pro- 
 duces disorder, confusion, deformity, is in a false or an 
 unjust state, as, on the other hand, the will which 
 loves and produces good, that is to say, order, 
 harmony, beauty, is in a state of justice or perfection. 
 
 I add that good is also the beatitude of the will : 
 for thereby and therein it produces the most powerful 
 sentiment of man, that sentiment which moves and 
 fills from its very depths the vast solitude of his soul. 
 No doubt the joy of truth known is great; there is 
 in the regard that encounters the splendour of the true 
 a motionless thrill, almost ecstatic ; but if it reach 
 to ecstacy, to tears, be sure that the intelligence has 
 not alone been touched, the vision has penetrated still 
 further, man has received the supreme shock from on 
 high, the touch of love which terminates all in itself as 
 in God. In the intuition of truth, man did not emerge 
 from himself, he regarded the light present to his 
 mind, and entered into enjoyment of it as an element 
 or a part of his proper personality. By the impulsion 
 of love, he emerges from his own personality or his 
 life ; he seeks a foreign object, he attaches himself to 
 it, he embraces it, he longs to be transformed and 
 absorbed into another ' than himself. This rapture
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 165 
 
 from self to self, which may be called an attempt at 
 suicide, gives him a bound of unspeakable happiness, 
 and the abandonment of his being becomes its pleni- 
 tude. This is love. But what has caused him to love ? 
 What has been powerful enough to take possession of 
 that being, and so to subject him as even to make him 
 feel that death in another is the best and highest life ? 
 A power, gentlemen, has wrought this miracle, the 
 power of good. Behind the light where being appears 
 to him, or in that very light, man has seen order, 
 harmony, beauty, and this spectacle drawing him from 
 the sterile contemplation of his own excellence, he 
 feels that he is led to divest himself of himself in order 
 to live in the object of his vision. 
 
 Nothing is more familiar to us than this movement, 
 of all those of our nature it is the most universal, the 
 most common, and that which we most willingly push 
 to extravagance. Our life is passed in undergoing 
 or regulating it. Every being possessing a certain 
 amount of good, that is to say, endowed with order, 
 harmony, and beauty in a certain measure, there is 
 not one which is not capable of exciting within us 
 some impression of love. But from man to man 
 especially that impression appears and increases. 
 Man is here below the masterpiece of good. He 
 draws to his noble form the charm of the two worlds
 
 1 66 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 to which he belongs, the world of bodies and the 
 world of spirits. Superior in the ordering of his 
 features even to the imagination, which has never 
 been able to conceive anything more perfect, he also 
 calls to them from the depths of his soul the reflection 
 of thought and the expression of virtue. If he open 
 his eyes, a spirit looks at you ; if his lips are left 
 silent, the grace of the heart animates in closing them ; 
 if serenity brighten his forehead, the peace of an 
 upright conscience sheds upon it light and repose ; 
 every bend of his body, every movement of his life 
 contains under a single expression of beauty the 
 double empire of visible and ideal good. Thence 
 
 
 
 come those attachments which make of human life a 
 long course of sacrifices rewarded by the happiness of 
 loving and being loved. We do not seek elsewhere 
 the secret of being happy ; we know that it is there, 
 and even when we abuse it by culpable passions, in 
 the very crime we still bear witness to that law of our 
 nature. Should man refuse us the love which we 
 need, rather than renounce that precious treasure, 
 we shall seek it from beings placed beneath us, but 
 distantly preserving in their instinct some likeness 
 capable of beguiling our heart. The poor man who 
 has no other friend, makes one of some creature more 
 neglected than himself; he warms in his bosom that
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 167 
 
 obscure and faithful animal which a Christian writer 
 has so well called the poor man's dog. He smiles 
 upon him with that ineffable look of the forsaken ; he 
 confides to him those unknown tears which no tender- 
 ness wipes away ; he shares his daily crust with him, 
 and that sacrifice made by hunger to friendship causes 
 him even in his poverty to enjoy the great happiness 
 of riches, the happiness of giving. 
 
 Nor is this the last effort made by man to give and 
 receive love. The prisoner goes beyond the poor. 
 Separated from nature and mankind by inexorable 
 barriers, he perceives in the chinks of his dungeon 
 some lowly insect the imperceptible companion of his 
 captivity. He draws near to it with the trembling 
 emotion of hope and the delicacy of respect; he 
 watches the mystery of its existence, marks its tastes, 
 spends long days in teaching it not to fear him, in 
 leading it from timidity to confidence, in order at last 
 to obtain from it some reciprocal sign which will 
 lessen the solitude of his heart and widen his prison 
 walls. The dog consoles the poor, the spider melts 
 the prisoner ; man, the child of good, carries every- 
 where with him a love of it which turns into a resource 
 and a joy even the very horrors of isolation. 
 
 Need I say more ? Have not your souls passed 
 beyond my words, and do you not see that good,
 
 1 68 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 real or apparent, disposes of our will and is its 
 beatitude ? 
 
 But what, then, is good ? It is true I have 
 already told you ; I have said that good is the order, 
 harmony, beauty, which the intelligence discovers in 
 the light where being appears to it. Nevertheless, 
 this definition, all exact though it be, is not the term 
 where your minds halt. You desire a more profound 
 explanation, you ask me where order, harmony, 
 beauty are to be found ? 
 
 Where? Doubtless everywhere in nature, every- 
 where before your eyes. There is not a leaf of the 
 tree, not a blade of grass, not a cloud skimming the 
 heavens, which is not order, harmony, beauty ; but 
 not all order, all harmony, all beauty, not all good. 
 Every being, even the one perverted by his fault, 
 contains a portion of good, which is perceptible and 
 excites our sympathy; it does not contain the 
 totality of good. That is order, which includes in its 
 essence the rule from whence all the relations of beings 
 proceed ; that is harmony, which has weighed the 
 worlds, and has traced out for them in space roads in 
 which they never wander ; that is beauty, which has 
 made man, and stamped upon his visage so much 
 grace and majesty ; that is good, from whence all 
 good comes, and which has shed it so profusely in the
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 169 
 
 universe, without being able to give it all, because it 
 could not give the infinite. Order, harmony, beauty, 
 good, in one word, is God. As he is being and truth, 
 he is also good. Inasmuch as he is being, he has 
 communicated to us existence ; inasmuch as he is 
 truth, he enlightens our understanding ; inasmuch 
 as he is good, he inspires us with the love, which, 
 according to the language of the Gospel, is all the law 
 and all justice. For we can receive nothing greater, 
 give nothing greater, than love; it is the supreme 
 credit or debt, and whoever is quit towards it, is quit 
 towards all. Now the first to whom we are account- 
 able for it, the first who has a right to this highest 
 treasure of our soul, is God, since God is the only 
 good, and since good alone is the cause of love. 
 
 Whoever has not loved God is certain not to love 
 good. He may, I grant, love particular things which 
 are good, his family, his friends, his country, honour, 
 and even duty, if we take duty in the narrow sense 
 which governs the relations of men among them- 
 selves he will not love the universal and absolute good 
 from whence proceed all the other phases of good to 
 which he has devoted his heart. And this is why he 
 will not attain to the perfection and beatitude of the 
 will, which, being in the love of good, can be found 
 only in the love of God.
 
 1 70 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 You see that in the mystery of love as well as in 
 the mystery of truth, we arrive at the same conclusion, 
 namely, that in God alone lies our perfection and our 
 beatitude. And it is impossible that you should 
 wonder at this, since we have established, as the 
 foundation of doctrine, and as the knot of our des- 
 tinies, that God is at the same time our principle and 
 our end. Being our principle, he is the principle of 
 each of our faculties ; being our end, he is also the 
 end of each of our faculties. And that end identi- 
 fying itself with the divine perfection and beatitude, 
 it is necessary for each of our faculties, by the 
 way proper to it, to draw from God the life which 
 renders it perfect and happy. Nevertheless, the 
 developments through which I have led you are not 
 sterile repetitions of the points of doctrine which 
 we have before advanced and demonstrated ; for, be- 
 sides causing you to see their application to each of 
 the springs of human activity, they verify those doc- 
 trines superabundantly by the analysis of our acts and 
 of their objects. What joy do we not feel, in simply 
 denning the intelligence and the will, on meeting God 
 at the term of their operations ! What ecstacy to be 
 unable to name either truth or good, without naming 
 God himself! And, in addition, those investigations 
 lead us straight to the means which we must have
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 1 7 1 
 
 received for attaining our end. Already, in the last 
 Conference, we have proved that the first of these 
 means is the knowledge of God ; we are now pre- 
 pared to conclude that the love of God is the second. 
 In fact, that love being the perfection and beatitude 
 of our will, and God having designed to communicate 
 the one and the other to us, as we have seen, it 
 follows that, according to the order of his design, he 
 should create us in a state of love with him ; of initial 
 love, it is true, subject to the trial of our free will, but 
 preparing us and leading us, save prevarication on 
 our part, to the final and beatific union of consum- 
 mated charity. This is what Catholic doctrine 
 teaches us, when it represents to us the first man 
 being born in original charity or justice. Remark, 
 I pray you, that beautiful alliance of expression ; in 
 Christian language, charity is the synonyme of justice, 
 and justice is the synonyme of charity. I have just 
 told you for what reason. Without that divine justice 
 of love, man is separated from God, even in knowing 
 him ; and, being separated from him, he can but de- 
 scend towards misery and death, by the road directly 
 opposed to that into which the order of his creation 
 calls him. According to that order, he has received God 
 for his end, truth for his guide, charity for his motor. 
 If he wander, it is not in default of means, but of will.
 
 172 Man as a Moral Being, 
 
 Here we again encounter the intervention of free 
 will in our destinies, and, if its presence disturb you, I 
 might limit myself to repeating that without free will 
 the gifts of God would remain in us as we received 
 them, with a character of fatality which would make 
 of our perfection a work unworthy of God or of us. 
 But this explanation, all sufficient though it be, calls 
 for developments which would have been premature 
 when we exposed to you the general plan of creation, 
 and which are no longer so when we touch, in the 
 question of the will, the foundations of the moral 
 order. The will is the seat of free choice as well as 
 of love ; we love by the same organ which gives us 
 the empire of our acts, and which, with that empire, 
 imposes our personal responsibility. And these three 
 things blended together, free will, love, and responsi- 
 bility, are those which indivisibly constitute the moral 
 order. Free will presents the choice, love chooses, 
 man responds. Why is it so ? Is it arbitrary wisdom 
 that has enchained these three elements of our 
 activity ? Or is there some profound reason for this 
 which it is our duty to penetrate, in order to illumi- 
 nate with a final trait the mystery of God in the 
 creation of this world ? 
 
 You think I shall adopt the last conclusion ; I do 
 adopt it, and I ask that question which includes all
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 173 
 
 the rest in itself: Is there any essential relation 
 between love and free will which makes the one the 
 condition of the other ? To know this, it is necessary 
 for us thoroughly to scrutinise love. It plays also so 
 important a part in our souls and in Christianity, that 
 we shall not regret the thoughtful regard which we 
 shall have thrown upon its essence. 
 
 Nothing is more simple, more single, than love ; and 
 yet it includes three acts in the unity of its movement. 
 In the first place, it is an act of preference. Man, 
 however great his heart may be, cannot cleave alike to 
 all; surrounded by objects which, in divers degrees, 
 bear the stamp of good, he feels degrees in the attrac- 
 tion which inclines him towards them, sympathetic 
 degrees, whose order does not solely depend upon the 
 comparative goodness of the beings, but also upon 
 their secret resemblances to ourselves. Often even 
 we do not take account of the motives of our prefer- 
 ence ; what is certain is that we have preferences, and 
 that love begins in us by that first movement, which 
 is choice. What is also certain is that choice, in him 
 who is its author, as in him who is its term, gives the 
 impulsion to the elevated joys of^love. We are happy 
 in choosing, happy also in being chosen. Two beings 
 meet in the immensity of time and space, through the 
 numberless chances of creation ; they meet as if they
 
 174 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 had given rendezvous to each other from all eternity ; 
 they are united by a reciprocal preference which 
 honours both, and flatters in their pride that which is 
 pure and venerable. Nothing surpasses the original 
 charm of that instant which remains the first in our 
 memory, as it was the first in our heart After years 
 have weakened other impressions, that still subsists in 
 its serene youth, and carries us back to those happy 
 days when we felt the glory of choosing and of being 
 chosen. But what would choice be without free will ? 
 What would it be without the faculty of preferring 
 what pleases us ? Doubtless the motives of preference 
 exist in the perfection of the being who is its object ; 
 but they exist also and equally in the will which makes 
 the choice. It may despise, it may reject an excel- 
 lence towards which it feels no sympathy, for another 
 with which it corresponds, and herein consists the 
 value of its act, a sovereign act which confers honour 
 and produces joy only because it is sovereign. 
 
 Love, however, does not stop at the act of choice, 
 it exacts devptedness to the being chosen. To choose 
 is to prefer one being to all others ; to be devoted is 
 
 to prefer that being to ourselves. Devotedness is the 
 
 i 
 
 immolation of self to the object loved. Whoever 
 does not reach this point does not love. In fact, 
 preference alone implies only an inclination of the
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 175 
 
 soul which seeks to dilate in that which has caused it, 
 an inclination honourable and precious, doubtless, but 
 which, thus limited, results only in seeking itself in 
 another. If many affections stop at this point it is 
 because many affections are but disguised egotism ; 
 we feel an attraction, we yield to it, we think that we 
 love, we have perhaps the glimmerings of real love ; 
 but when the hour for devotedness comes, the dread 
 of sacrifice shows us the vanity of the sentiment which 
 preoccupied without possessing us. We see frequent 
 and lamentable examples of this in the passions which 
 have for their principle the fugitive beauty of the 
 body. Nothing intelligible and immortal intervening 
 between the souls which yield to these sad seductions, 
 their charm soon disappears in the very ardour which 
 produced them, and they leave in the heart nothing 
 but the devastations of egotism increased by deceptive 
 enjoyments. Virtue alone produces love, because 
 virtue alone produces devotedness. We see proof of 
 this in all the affections in which virtue mingles the 
 divine balm of its presence. It is virtue that inspires 
 the mother bent night and day over the cradle of a 
 child ; it is virtue that inspires the breast of the 
 soldier, and leads him on to death for the cause of 
 his country ; it is virtue that fortifies the martyr 
 against the threats of tyrants, and causes him to re-
 
 1 76 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 cline in the tortures prepared for him as in the nuptial 
 and joyful couch of truth. These are the signs by 
 which the world, all corrupt though it be, recognises 
 and admires love, and if love cannot always manifest 
 itself by heroic sacrifices, it constantly shows by lesser 
 immolations that it bears with it the germ which 
 renders it as strong as death? to use an expression of 
 Solomon. 
 
 But devotedness is not possible without free will. 
 To devote ourselves, we have said, is to prefer another 
 to ourselves, is to give ourselves to another to be his 
 own. Now, how can we give ourselves, if we are not 
 free ? How can we prefer another to ourselves, if we 
 cannot dispose of ourselves? A being, deprived of 
 free will, is under the fatal ascendancy of a foreign 
 domination ; he thinks, he moves only by the thought 
 and will which hold him captive, by that inner cap- 
 tivity in which nothing remains to the proper action 
 of his personality. Does such a being, thus despoiled 
 of himself, preserve the right to give himself? He 
 may die, but he dies as the stone falls, the slave of 
 death and not of love. Even then, as free will is the 
 condition of love, inasmuch as love is a sentiment of 
 preference, it is also its condition, inasmuch as love is 
 the impulsion of devotedness. 
 
 1 Canticle of Canticles, viii. 6.
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 177 
 
 There remains a third act which crowns the marvel- 
 lous drama of which our will is the theatre and the 
 author. After we have chosen the object of our 
 preference, after we have given ourselves to that 
 object by sacrifice, all is not achieved. That object 
 must prefer us, must give itself to us, and from that 
 reciprocal choice and devotedness results a fusion of 
 the two beings in the same thoughts, the same desires, 
 the same wills a fusion so ardent and so intimate 
 that it would attain even to consummating them in 
 one unique substance, if that power of joining substan- 
 tial unity to personal plurality were not the exclusive 
 privilege of the most holy and indivisible Trinity. At 
 least we feel as it were the foreshadowing of this, and 
 the limit where, with the power of union, the power of 
 created love expires, is most painful to us. Union is 
 the term of love, the term where it has nothing more 
 to produce but the perseverance of its acts and the 
 immortality of its happiness. But union, as well as 
 preference and devotedness, needs free will ; for to 
 unite it is necessary to be two, and we are two only 
 on condition of preserving on either part the plenitude 
 of our personality, and this we cannot do without free 
 will. The soul in which free will does not exist, or 
 has never existed, which has never been capable of 
 emitting a thought or an act of volition of its own, 
 
 x
 
 178 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 that soul is absorbed in another ; it is annihilated 
 by its powerlessness to be the equal of a free soul, 
 and to give to it, in reciprocal love, the preference, 
 devotedness, and union which it receives. 
 
 I know not if it be an illusion, but it seems to me 
 that nothing is more clear than this essential relation 
 between free will and love ; and consequently nothing 
 is more clear also than the reasons whence divine 
 wisdom has drawn the resolution of placing us in the 
 world with the perilous gift of liberty. God had no 
 need of us ; he has freely chosen to communicate his 
 blessings to us and unite us to himself; he has also 
 freely loved us. Now, in its nature, love exacts love ; 
 it is impossible to prefer without willing to be pre- 
 ferred, to devote ourselves without willing that our 
 devotedness should be returned, and, as to union, it 
 could hardly be conceived without the idea of recip- 
 rocity. Reciprocity is the law of love ; it is the law 
 of love between two equal beings ; how much more 
 so must it be between two beings of whom one is the 
 creator and the other the creature ; of whom one has 
 given all, and the other has received all ! God had 
 an infinite right to be loved by man, because he had 
 loved him with an eternal and infinite love, and con- 
 sequently he should place man in the only condition 
 in which he could render him preference for prefer-
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 179 
 
 ence, devotedness for devotedness, union for union, 
 that is to say, in the glory and trial of free will. It 
 was the right of God ; but, strange to say, it was also 
 the right of man, or at least his honour, since, without 
 that gift of free will, man would neither have been able 
 to choose nor to devote himself, nor, consequently, to 
 love in the true and generous sense of the word. 
 
 Ask, then, no longer why man is free ; why he is not 
 born in a state of perfection and beatitude without 
 peril of failure. He is free, because he should love ; 
 he is free, because he should choose the object of his 
 love ; he is free, because he should devote himself to 
 the object of his choice ; he is free, because in the union 
 which terminates love he should bring the stainless 
 dowry of an entire personality ; he is free, in fine, be- 
 cause God has freely loved him, and has willed to receive 
 from him the equitable recompense of full reciprocity. 
 
 I do not, however, disguise to myself the difficulty 
 which rises in your minds ; it is grave, and I will 
 endeavour to be its exact interpreter. 
 
 According to Catholic doctrine, the trial of free will 
 ceases with the present life of man ; once disappeared 
 from this world and called before the supreme judge, 
 man passes into a state of happy or miserable con- 
 summation which leaves him neither the honour, nor 
 the danger, nor the resource of choice. If, then, free
 
 180 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 will be essential to the reality of love, it follows that 
 the saints, in the beatitude of eternity, love God only 
 under the form of incomplete and impersonal affec- 
 tion, which it is absurd to suppose. 
 
 Doubtless it is absurd to suppose, and I shall 
 neither suppose nor say this. When the saints enter 
 into heaven, vanquishers of death and life, they do 
 not enter there deprived of their anterior existence, as 
 beings without past, without future, without acquired 
 habits ; on the contrary, they enter into full possession 
 of a personality laboriously perfected, with all their 
 soul and all their works, according to that beautiful 
 prophecy of the apostle St John, who, by the Spirit 
 of God, beholding the last days of the world, heard 
 from on high a voice which said : Blessed are the dead 
 which die in the Lord .... for their works follow 
 t/teM* Their works follow them because they are 
 living like them and in them, living in the love which 
 was their fruit, and which mounts with the saints to 
 heaven, not to lose there its primitive character of 
 choice and devotedness, but to preserve it there for 
 ever in the immutability of beatific vision. The 
 saints have not another heart in heaven than that 
 which they had on earth ; the very object of their 
 pilgrimage was to form in them, by means of trial, a 
 2 Apocalypse xiv. 13.
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 1 8 1 
 
 love which should merit to please God and subsist 
 eternally before him. So far from that love changing 
 its nature, it is its nature itself, it is its degree acquired 
 in the free exercise of the will which determines the 
 measure of beatitude in each elect of grace and 
 judgment. According as man brings to God more 
 ardent affection, he derives deeper ecstacy, more 
 perfect felicity from the vision of the divine essence. 
 It is the movement of his heart, as death has seized it. 
 which regulates his place at the seat of life, and it is 
 the unalterable perseverance of that movement, caused 
 by the view of God, which alone distinguishes the 
 love of time from the love of eternity. God recog- 
 nises in his saints the apostles, the martyrs, the 
 virgins, the doctors, the hermits, the hospitallers, who 
 have before confessed and served him in the tribula- 
 tions of the world ; the saints in their turn recognise 
 in God the being to whom they gave their undivided 
 love in the time of their suffering and their liberty. 
 Nothing is foreign to them in the sentiments which 
 they feel, nothing is new to them in their heart. 
 They love him whom they had chosen ; they enjoy 
 him to whom they had given themselves ; they 
 ardently embrace him whom they already possessed ; 
 their love expands in the certainty and joy of an 
 inamissible union ; but it is not separated from the
 
 1 82 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 stalk that bore it. God gathers but does not detach 
 it ; he crowns but does not change it. 
 
 It is thus that the trial of free will ceases, and that, 
 notwithstanding, love subsists entire in the soul where 
 God rewards it. But up to this point there is a 
 struggle in the heart of man between good and evil, 
 between his tendency towards God by charity, and 
 towards himself by the egotism of the passions. The 
 outer world arms itself to overcome him by all the 
 beauties which it has received in another design ; it 
 opposes the visible charm to the eternal order which 
 should obtain all our regards and regulate ' all our 
 acts. Balanced as we are between these two attrac- 
 tions, we need strength to keep us attached to the 
 polar star of real good, and that strength we call by 
 a still more illustrious name than that of love we call 
 it virtue. Love without virtue is but weakness and 
 disorder ; by virtue, it becomes the accomplishment 
 of all duties, the bond that unites us first to God, next 
 to all the creatures of God ; it becomes justice and 
 charity, two things which form but one, and which 
 were given to us on the day of our creation, to be, 
 after truth, the second means of responding to our 
 destiny and attaining our end. 
 
 I should have nothing more to say to you if, now 
 as always, we had not to seek in rationalism for the
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 183 
 
 counterproof of the doctrine I have just exposed to 
 you. This doctrine attests that there exists an infinite 
 difference between good and evil, since good is God, 
 inasmuch as he is order, and evil is opposition to 
 order, that is to say, to God ; it attests that good is 
 the object of the will, its perfection, its beatitude, and 
 that the will corresponds thereto by love, the dis- 
 interested fruit of free will and virtue ; it affirms, in 
 fine, that man, being free to love or to hate, to do or 
 not to do good, is responsible for his actions before 
 the supreme justice of God. Is this also the doctrine 
 of rationalism ? In affirming the contrary, I have no 
 need to tell you that I take the word rationalism in 
 its general acceptation, and not as representing this 
 or that class of philosophers. Rationalism has but 
 one principle, which is the sufficiency of reason alone 
 to explain the mystery of destinies, but it has a 
 thousand heads which contradict each other, and 
 which consequently never bear together the responsi- 
 bility of the same errors. This diversity discharges 
 such philosopher from such condemnable system ; 
 it does not discharge rationalism, whose starting-point 
 is the cause of all the dogmas that deceive thought 
 by corrupting truth. 
 
 I wished to give you this explanation at the moment 
 when rationalism is about to appear to you in its most
 
 1 84 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 odious form. Already you have seen it denying the 
 existence of God, the creation of the world by God, 
 the primitive intercourse between God and man, and 
 placing in doubt even the very notion of truth. After 
 such ruins, could it respect the distinction between 
 good and evil? That distinction is but a consequence 
 of the idea of God ; this overthrown, the moral order 
 disappears of itself. However, it is one thing to 
 attack moral order in its source, another to attack it 
 in front and directly. Were there nothing of God 
 there, or were he a God indifferent to the acts of man, 
 the soul might still endeavour to take refuge in itself, 
 and by its own strength create for itself sacred duties. 
 Notwithstanding the profundity of negations upon 
 which it rests, it might choose not to deny itself, but 
 by a generous contradiction, acknowledge laws and 
 impose duties upon itself. However feeble that 
 barrier may be, it is a vestige of conscience, an honour 
 for man, a safeguard for society. What a crime, then, 
 is it to dispute our possession of it, and pursue the 
 idea of good even to the ruins amongst which we have 
 formed this last and miserable refuge. Rationalism 
 has not been ashamed to do this ; after having at- 
 tacked moral order in its principle, which is God, it 
 has seized upon our soul as upon the remains of a 
 prey, and defying us in this our supreme refuge, it
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 185 
 
 contests the reality of love and the reality of free 
 will. 
 
 Ingenuous that I was, I spoke to you but just now 
 of sympathetic attractions, of disinterested preferences, 
 of voluntary sacrifices. I represented to you the 
 ascendancy of good over the heart of man; I de- 
 ceived you, if we must believe rationalism, I deceived 
 you cruelly, and myself with you. Would you know 
 the truth ? Man acts only from one single motive, 
 his own interest ; he calls good that which is useful to 
 him, evil that which lessens the value of the things 
 and enjoyments of which he is in possession. Duty, 
 if he observe it, is but a means of preserving his 
 rights ; love, if he feel it, is but a sentiment of plea- 
 sure. Egotism is at the fount of every human act, 
 under whatever appearance or whatever name it may 
 be hidden ; and those grand expressions of devoted- 
 ness, abnegation, immolation of self, serve but to 
 disguise our true inclinations under a show which 
 flatters our pride. The mother loves and seeks 
 herself in her child ; the soldier idolises himself in the 
 glory of his captain or his country ; death even is 
 atoned for by the admiration which causes us to live 
 again, as we believe, in posterity. Assuredly, if we may 
 hope to find in man a pure sentiment of personal in- 
 terest, we should seek for it in the soul of the Christian,
 
 1 86 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 since Christianity reposes upon the mystery of a God 
 who gratuitously died for us. And yet to what 
 does the Christian devote his life? To labour for 
 his salvation, that is to say, to avoid hell and obtain 
 paradise. His most heroic works are but a bargain 
 which he makes with God. He knows that they are all 
 registered, that not one falls to the ground, and that 
 he will one day find again the smallest particle in an 
 increase of felicity. Is this forgetfulness of self? Is 
 this that charity come down from heaven, immolated 
 on a cross, and raised again from the tomb to live in 
 the heart of generations ? Alas ! It would be better 
 to confess our indelible egotism, and to recognise with 
 the sincerity of true philosophy that every being, what 
 ever it may be, acts and lives but for itself. 
 
 We are asked for an avowal; let us begin by 
 making it. Yes, it is impossible for any being en- 
 dowed with intelligence and will to separate himself 
 completely from his acts. I think, I will, I love; in what- 
 ever way I may take it, it is I, myself, who thinks, who 
 wills, who loves, and it is not in my power to take that 
 I from myself. Whether I perform a good or a bad 
 action, I am present in it, and have the enjoyment of 
 it. Yet more, I should not perform it if I had no 
 enjoyment in it. For every action supposes an end, 
 and the last end of man being beatitude, for which
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 1 87 
 
 God has expressly created him, it is absolutely chi- 
 merical to imagine that he acts without having before 
 him the thought and motive of his happiness. And 
 let me ask you, was there no difference between Nero 
 and Titus ; between Nero killing his mother, and 
 Titus contributing to the happiness of the human 
 race? Is there no difference between the soldier 
 who turns his back in a battle, and the soldier who. 
 dies with his face towards the enemy and his country 
 in his heart? Leonidas at Thermopylae, Demos- 
 thenes at Chasronea, are they the same ? You may 
 say so, but I defy you to think so. You will not even 
 say so before an assembly of men who honour you by 
 listening to your words ; even if your conscience lie 
 to itself, it would not be bold enough to lie in the 
 face of mankind. If there is one individual here who 
 confounds in the same estimation and the same con- 
 tempt crime and virtue, let him stand up ! let him 
 speak ! And yet it is most true : Titus, like Nero, 
 sought his happiness ; there was no difference be- 
 tween them on this head ; and if egotism consists in 
 willing to be happy, Titus was an egotist by the same 
 title as Nero. 
 
 But does egotism consist in willing to be happy? 
 This is precisely the question. It would be very 
 strange if happiness and immorality should be one
 
 1 88 Ma n as a Moral Being. 
 
 and the same thing. Happiness is the vocation of 
 man ; it is the natural and predestinate patrimony of 
 all intelligent beings. Whoever among them comes 
 into the world comes into it to be happy. It is his 
 right : what do I say ? It is his duty. For his duty is to 
 obey God, and God has pointed out to him two equal 
 and parallel orders in calling him into life ; the order 
 of perfection and the order of beatitude. But, 
 remark attentively what I have said ; happiness is the 
 patrimony of all, of all without exception ; it is the 
 natal land and the future country of all those who 
 have not voluntarily repudiated it. And from this a 
 great consequence follows, it is that no one should 
 attribute to himself the happiness of others, and that 
 all being children of the same father, inheritors of 
 the same kingdom, we are commanded to live to- 
 gether in the divine fraternity of one and the same 
 beatitude. He who usurps the part of another, who 
 would be happy at the expense of his brethren, who, 
 by cunning or violence, divides the spotless and seam- 
 less garment of felicity, is guilty of a crime which 
 includes all other crimes ; he is guilty of egotism, and 
 since the beginning of the world he has borne a name 
 and a mark the name of Cain, and the mark of 
 reprobation. He, on the contrary, who desires to be 
 happy with all, who takes from another no part of his
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 1 89 
 
 patrimonial right to happiness, who gives even of his 
 own, he also, since the beginning of the world, has 
 borne a name and a mark the name of Abel, and 
 the mark of charity. Charity does not consist in 
 being unhappy any more than egotism consists in 
 being happy ; it consists in not troubling the good of 
 others, and in communicating to them our own ; a 
 communication which, so far from impoverishing, en- 
 riches at the same time the receiver and the giver. 
 Good has received from God that admirable elasticity, 
 that the sharing it multiplies without lessening it, and 
 that falling from the right hand, it returns to the left, 
 like the ocean which receives all the waters of the earth, 
 because it renders them all back again to the heavens. 
 
 This explanation, you will say, justifies the intimate 
 sentiment of mankind, which has always placed an 
 infinite difference between good and evil, which has 
 execrated Nero and idolised Titus ; but, in granting 
 that personal happiness is the necessary end of all the 
 acts of man, do you not destroy the very notion of 
 love and devotedness ? How can there be any 
 sacrifice, any preference of others to ourselves, where 
 we seek ourselves ? 
 
 I have not said that personal happiness was the 
 necessary end of all the acts of man ; for that word 
 personal excludes from the happiness of each the
 
 190 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 happiness of all, and I have declared, on the contrary, 
 that happiness is a universal and indivisible patrimony, 
 which no one could appropriate exclusively to himself 
 without being guilty of the crime of egotism. Learn, 
 then, that duty, love, devotedness, consist in making 
 of our happiness the happiness of others, and of the 
 happiness of others our own happiness, whilst egotism 
 consists in deriving happiness from the misfortunes of 
 others. Nero wished the Roman people had but one 
 head, that he might take it off at a single blow : this 
 is egotism. Titus considered that day to be lost in 
 which he failed to render some one happy : this is 
 love. " To love," Leibnitz has said, " is to place our 
 happiness in the happiness of another." That sublime 
 definition needs no commentary : it is understood or 
 not understood. He who has loved understands it ; 
 he who has not loved will never understand it. He 
 who has loved knows that a shadow in the heart of 
 his choice would darken his own; he knows that 
 nothing would be a sacrifice, prayers, tears, watchings, 
 toil, privations, that would bring one smile upon the 
 sorrowing lips ; he knows that he was dead to redeem 
 a compromised life ; he knows that he was happy in 
 another, happy in another's graces, happy in another's 
 virtues, happy in another's glory, happy in that other's 
 happiness, and that, had his blood been needed to
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 191 
 
 increase that other's happiness, become his own, he 
 would have given it, even to the last drop, with the 
 sole regret of being able to die but once. He who 
 has loved knows this. He who has not loved is 
 ignorant of it ; I pity him, and I do not reply to him. 
 I pity him, because he has known nothing either of 
 human or of divine life ; I do not reply to him, be- 
 cause the testimony of a dead man proves nothing 
 against the living. What is it to us, Christians, if we 
 must appeal to ourselves ? what is it to be accused of 
 indifference towards God by a man who has never 
 loved God ? Does he know what passes within us ? 
 Can he even conjecture it ? He thinks that, with our 
 eyes fixed upon heaven and hell, with our works in 
 one hand, the scales in the other, we make a bargain 
 with God for the price of our abnegation ! He knows 
 not that fear and hope are but the preliminaries of 
 Christian initiation, and that in virtue of the first 
 commandment, which includes all the others, ac- 
 cording to the words even of Jesus Christ, the 
 Christian ought to love God with all his heart, 
 with all his mind, with all his strength, above all 
 things, under the penalty, adds St. Paul, of being 
 nothing? He knows not that beyond the threshold 
 of faith the soul is touched by the invisible beauty of 
 
 3 I Corinthians xiii. 2.
 
 1 92 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 a love which the most heroic affections of this world 
 will never equal, either in endurance, depth, or sacri- 
 fice ; and that that love drawing us into the a,byss of 
 charity where God himself respires, we draw there- 
 from the desire to associate all creatures in the per- 
 fection and felicity of which we have a foretaste, and 
 of which we await the ulterior revelation. Who can 
 deny this enlargement of the heart of man in Chris- 
 tianity ? Who can deny it, save those who have never 
 known what it is, and who, abased in the narrow 
 passions of the senses, where all is egotism, measure 
 by their own souls the soul of the Christian and the 
 soul of man ? 
 
 I am ashamed to prove to you the reality of love 
 and devotedness, but rationalism compels me. It 
 compels me also to say a few words to you on free will, 
 which is, with disinterestedness, the principal condition 
 of the moral order. As the moral order is destroyed 
 if man acts only with a view to his interest, it is like- 
 wise destroyed if man be not master of his acts. 
 Therefore, rationalism has not assailed our liberty 
 with less ardour than our generosity; it needs our 
 servitude as much as our egotism; our egotism to 
 confound good with evil, our servitude to take from 
 us the responsibility either of good or evil. 
 
 Are we free ? Your conscience and mine answer :
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 193 
 
 Yes. Rationalism says : No. And does rationalism 
 give any proof of this ? None. It asks us, on the 
 contrary, to prove that we are free, and if we oppose 
 to it the testimony of our intimate conviction, which 
 knows apparently what it judges, that is condemned 
 as blind and insufficient. It fears that our intimate 
 conviction may be the victim of a superior power, 
 which, unknown to it, makes it the instrument of its 
 irresistible will. For us who believe in God, who, 
 bending the knee before his adorable supremacy, have 
 acknowledged him as the father, the master, the 
 principle, and the end of things, we do not en- 
 tertain the strange doubts of rationalism in regard 
 to what passes within us. Offspring of unequalled 
 goodness and immeasurable wisdom, we do not 
 imagine that God tortures his omnipotence to deceive 
 the heart of his work, and give to it in servitude the 
 illusion of liberty. We trust in the divine sincerity, 
 and we do not seek whether it be in his power, even 
 if he so willed, to lead us to so contradictory an im- 
 pression on the subject of ourselves and our own acts. 
 Truths, like errors, link together. God, once re- 
 jected or placed in doubt, I permit rationalism to 
 mistrust the human conscience ; the edifice being 
 destroyed at its base, how can any detached part be 
 sustained, and moreover, what interest would exist for 
 
 o
 
 194 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 so doing ? What is man if God is not ? What are 
 
 good and evil ? What the past and the future ? It is 
 
 needless for us to trouble ourselves about a dream in 
 
 a night passed in sound sleep. But if God is, if the 
 
 name that sustains all is written in the vault of our 
 
 intelligence as in the vault of heaven, then I will no 
 
 longer even listen to the rationalism which suggests 
 
 mistrust to me on the subject of that liberty whose 
 
 real presence I feel in myself. I take account of 
 
 myself and of all things with me. My conscience is 
 
 a sanctuary which gives me oracles; my life is a 
 
 power which answers for itself; the divine solidity 
 
 descends into all my being ; and doubt, to my mind, is 
 
 nothing but blasphemy and folly. I am free ; I pass 
 
 from good to evil, and from evil to good. Suspended 
 
 between these two terms which infinity separates, a 
 
 voluntary captive or a culpable rebel, at each moment 
 
 I choose and decide my condition. I choose to love 
 
 myself, or to love God above all things ; I withdraw, 
 
 I return, I obey, or I resist remorse; and even in 
 
 crime, I feel my greatness by my sovereignty. I 
 
 need but a tear to remount to heaven, but a look to 
 
 fall back into the gulf. This struggle is great, this 
 
 responsibility is terrible ; but woe and scorn to him 
 
 who descends from the throne from fear of the duties 
 
 that sit there with him !
 
 Man as a Moral Being. 195 
 
 Must I, in concluding, enlighten that other dif- 
 ficulty which rationalism opposes to the reality of 
 free will, and which it draws no longer from the 
 vanity of our conscience, but from the very attributes 
 of God ? I will do so rapidly, fearing to weary your 
 attention, and hoping to abuse it but little. Truth is 
 brief, because it is clear. 
 
 Catholic doctrine ranges amongst the divine 
 attributes, that of foreknowledge, that is to say, the 
 anticipated and infallible knowledge of the future, 
 even of the future which depends upon our free will. 
 Now, how can God foresee this last kind of future, 
 if it be not because he is master of our acts and 
 directs them at pleasure ? How does he know 
 infallibly what I shall do to-morrow if not because he 
 has decreed it, and because he possesses in his 
 omnipotence the certainty of our determinations? 
 
 I shall have replied to this if I show, in the nature 
 of God and in the nature of man, a means of fore- 
 seeing the effects of free causes which in no way 
 destroys their liberty. 
 
 Now it is manifest that no reasonable being acts 
 without motives, that is to say, without something 
 that determines his actions. Hence these avowals 
 constantly made by us : " Here is a reason, an 
 interest, a circumstance, which decides me ; in other
 
 196 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 terms, which persuades me to act." And when we 
 examine the motives whose efficacious impression 
 draws man from repose or uncertainty, we find that 
 there are but two : the motives of duty and passion. 
 Man decides either by a view of what is true, good, 
 suitable; or by the inducement of a personal satis- 
 faction independent of any idea of order. The 
 question simply is to know who will decide him to 
 the one or the other motive. If he were not free, the 
 stronger attraction of his nature would decide him, as 
 the greater weight brings down one of the scales of the 
 balance. But man is free ; between two attractions 
 equal or unequal in themselves, it is he who pro- 
 nounces sovereignly. Nevertheless he pronounces by 
 virtue of a motive which persuades him, and not 
 without cause, or arbitrarily. He knows what he 
 does and why he acts ; he knows even why he is 
 persuaded to act. Persuasion reaches him not only 
 from without, it comes to him especially from within, 
 from the intimate state of his will, from his tastes, his 
 virtues the fruit of free will, free will itself in activity, 
 such as it is formed, such as it wills to be, such as it 
 presents itself to the outer attractions which come to 
 solicit him for good and evil. It is the state of 
 volition, the seat of free will, that decides the choice 
 of man between the two motives of duty and passion.
 
 Man as a Moral Being, 197 
 
 Suppose that state known, you would know what man 
 would do in a given case, and in all the cases where 
 the knowledge of the soul would for you have pre- 
 ceded its actions. Such is the basis of human, as 
 well as of divine, knowledge. Have you never con- 
 fided your fortune or your honour to the word of a 
 man ? You have done so ; or, if you have never had 
 occasion, you name within yourselves those to whom 
 you would voluntarily give a high mark of your 
 esteem. Whence comes that assurance? How are 
 you certain that you will not expose your life to 
 treason ? You are sure of it, because you know the 
 soul to whom you abandon your own ; that knowledge 
 is sufficient for you to see that in no case, under what- 
 ever peril or temptation, will your fortune or your 
 honour be basely sacrificed. 
 
 They may be, however ; the heart to which you give 
 your faith is fallible, it is subject to unforeseen assaults ; 
 it matters not, you sleep peacefully, and no one 
 accuses you of imprudence or credulity. If it happen 
 that you are deceived, what will you say ? You will 
 say, " I was mistaken in that man, I thought him 
 incapable of a bad action." Such is the chance which 
 you would run, the chance of being mistaken ; because, 
 being a finite intelligence, you cannot read directly in 
 the soul of another, nor even in the depths of your
 
 198 Man as a Moral Being. 
 
 own. Whence it results that you possess only a moral 
 certainty of your judgments, and of your foresight 
 only an assurance of the same degree. 
 
 It is not the same with God. God, to use the 
 expression of Saint Paul, penetrates even to the division 
 of the soul and the spirit, of the joints also and 
 the marrow of our being, and is a discerner of the 
 thoughts and intents of the heart* We are eternally 
 naked before him. He sees with infinite precision 
 the state of our will, and, knowing in the same light 
 all the outward circumstances to which we are 
 exposed, he possesses an infallible certainty of the 
 choice we shall make between good and evil, between 
 the motives of duty and passion. From that 
 moment, he knows our history, which is but a 
 struggle more or less prolonged between the two 
 opposite attractions, one which bears us towards our 
 real end, another which turns us aside towards a base 
 or false end. And that anticipated knowledge of 
 ourselves being in no way the cause of our acts, no 
 more obstructs our liberty than if it did not exist. 
 
 The error in this matter is in supposing free will 
 
 to be a kind of abstract power, independent in its 
 
 proper state, having no other movement than 
 
 unlimited caprice. If it were so, man himself would 
 
 4 Hebrews iv. 12.
 
 Man as a Moral Being, 199 
 
 not be capable of foreseeing his own actions an 
 instant beforehand. His sovereignty would be but a 
 state of permanent unreason. He would choose 
 between good and evil without knowing why, and 
 passing at hazard from crime to virtue, because of 
 his liberty, we should find in him nothing more than 
 an unregulated automaton. Such is neither man nor 
 free will ; I have shown you this, and I have but to 
 leave your conscience to choose between the ethics of 
 Christianity and the ethics of rationalism. 
 
 Christianity leads to charity and liberty ; rationalism 
 to egotism and fatality. If in the preceding 
 questions, which appeal only to reason, some slight 
 cloud still obscured your need of light, that cloud has 
 vanished. The abyss of error has enlightened the 
 abyss of truth. As the speculative dogmas of the 
 existence of God, the Trinity, creation, the substantial 
 diversity of matter and spirit, the vocation of man to 
 perfection and beatitude, lead to the practical dogma 
 of the distinction of good and evil ; so the specula- 
 tive dogmas of pantheism, dualism, materialism, 
 scepticism, lead to the practical dogma of the con- 
 fusion of good and evil, the supreme term which 
 discerns all, and where darkness becomes light.
 
 ( 200 ) 
 
 MAN AS A SOCIAL BEING. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 WHEN God had made man, and when, after 
 having animated him with the breath of life, he 
 also shed in his soul light and justice the light of 
 truth and the justice of charity, he halted, if I may 
 so speak, to contemplate his work, and seeing the 
 eyes of man opening, his ears hearing, his lips 
 trembling with the first vibration of speech, that clay, 
 in fine, which he had touched with his mighty hand, 
 become a sensible and a reasonable creature, he 
 remained thoughtful, as if something were wanting 
 to the masterpiece he had just produced. In fact, 
 the mystery of our creation was not accomplished ; 
 God withdrew a second time within himself to stamp 
 our nature with the seal of a higher perfection, and 
 beforehand he declared his design by saying : " NON
 
 Man as a Social Being". 20 1 
 
 EST BONUM ESSE HOMINUM SOLUM." // is not good for 
 
 man to be alone}- 
 
 Why was it not good for man to be alone ? In 
 what manner was he to cease to be alone ? This is 
 the object which I now propose to your meditations, 
 and in which you will see that society is the third 
 primitive gift with which God has endowed us, the 
 third means given to help us in the fulfilment of our 
 destiny. 
 
 No being is alone. Whether we look above or 
 below us, in God or in nature, we see plurality and 
 association on every hand. God, who is one, is not 
 solitary; he includes three persons in the unity of 
 his substance, and the inferior world, divided into an 
 innumerable multitude of different groups, presents 
 none of which the condition and law of the creature 
 is solitude. At each degree of existence we find 
 number and union, that is to say society. Number 
 without union would still be only isolation; but 
 when beings, distinct by individuality, alike by nature, 
 approach and give each other their life, blend 
 together reciprocally, act upon each other by mutual 
 relations, then there is society, and such is the state 
 of all creatures inferior to man ; such is the state, 
 under a more perfect mode, of the divine persons in 
 1 Genesis ii. 18.
 
 2O2 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 heaven. Endeavour to imagine an absolutely solitary 
 being, that is to say a being who has no resemblance 
 or relations to anything, you will but create an 
 abstract phantom in your imagination, a sort of 
 God nothing, because it would be at the same time 
 infinite and void, infinite from want of bounds, void 
 from want of activity. Isolation is the negation of 
 life, since life is a spontaneous movement, and since 
 movement supposes relations; still much more is it 
 the negation of order, harmony, and beauty, all 
 perfection and all beatitude, since none of those 
 things can be conceived without the double idea 
 of plurality and unity. Plurality without unity is 
 positive disorder ; unity without plurality is negative 
 disorder. In the first case, the bond is wanting to 
 the beings ; in the second, the beings are wanting to 
 the bond. Now, wherever there is disorder, it is 
 evident that harmony, beauty, perfection, and beati- 
 tude vanish at the same time. It was then with 
 justice that God, regarding man in the solitude of 
 his creation, pronounced the words : // is not good far 
 man to be alone. 
 
 It is true that, by his intermediary position be- 
 tween the superior and inferipr worlds, man body 
 and spirit found himself in relation with nature and 
 God ; but that double relation did not the less leave
 
 Man as a Social Being. 203 
 
 him alone of his species, alone in the rank he oc- 
 cupied, a sort of stylite lost between earth and 
 heaven. Even had nature sufficed for the wants of 
 his body and God for the wants of his spirit, man, 
 deprived of relations with beings of the same form 
 and degree, would not have sufficed for the greatness 
 of the position which he was charged to occupy. 
 His history would have been too short, his perils too 
 limited, his virtues too restrained ; as he had a world 
 above and below himself, it was needful that he 
 should become a world, and that in this manner all 
 the parts of creation, although unequal in themselves 
 by their place and their essence, should answer to 
 each other in a certain proportion of immensity. 
 Man was to extend without being divided, to increase 
 in number in order to increase in union, and to 
 become, in the majesty of number and the harmony 
 of union, a theatre of virtues such as the perfection 
 of the universe and his own perfection required. 
 Circumscribed in isolation, God alone would have 
 been the object of his duties; member of a body 
 composed of beings like himself, his offices embrace, 
 with God, the whole of mankind. The law of love, 
 the sum of all justice, no longer radiated only from 
 the creature to the creator ; it animated with its 
 life all the orbs of creation.
 
 2O4 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 This great work is before your eyes; for sixty 
 centuries human society has covered the field of 
 history with its institutions. Stronger than time, 
 it has resisted all disasters, and has constantly 
 recovered its youth in the ruins under which de- 
 generate nations have buried themselves. It is 
 human society which has led our infancy through the 
 hazards of the primitive emigrations, which divided the 
 earth for us, and, after having dispersed us upon all 
 the habitable shores, drew us together in spite of the 
 jealousy of the deserts and the tempests of the ocean. 
 It is human society which has built celebrated cities, 
 encouraged arts, founded sciences, propagated letters, 
 raised the mind of man to perfection, and given 
 to his heart the glory of all virtues with the occa- 
 sion of all sacrifices. In fine, human society is the 
 permanent mode of our terrestrial life ; and if, in the 
 depths of forests or on the rocky shores of distant 
 isles, the traveller discovers groups of people de- 
 prived of all civilization, he still finds among them 
 some rudiments of the social state, certain vestiges or 
 outlines of relations which show how incapable man 
 is to live alone. 
 
 And yet, who would believe it? the dogma of 
 society has not been subject to fewer attacks than 
 the rest. As sages have been found to deny God,
 
 Man as a Social Being. 205 
 
 creation, the distinction of matter and spirit, truth, 
 the difference between good and evil, there have 
 also been found men who maintain that society is a 
 purely human institution, and, yet much more, that 
 it is an institution against nature. They have en- 
 deavoured to persuade us that society is the source 
 of all our evils, and that with our civilization our 
 decadency began. Who among us, in the time of his 
 youth, has not imagined himself wandering freely in 
 the solitudes of the new world, having no roof but the 
 heavens, no drink but the water of unknown streams, 
 no food but the spontaneous fruit of the earth and the 
 game which fell by his hand, no law but his will, no 
 pleasure but the continual feeling of his independence 
 and the chances of a life without limits on a soil with- 
 out possessors ? These were our dreams. Our heart, 
 recognising itself, thrilled when our eyes fell upon that 
 passage in a celebrated book, where the man of 
 civilization says to the man of the desert : " Chactas, 
 return into thy forests ; take up again that holy 
 independence of nature which Lopez will no longer 
 deprive thee of; were I younger, I would follow 
 thee." On reading these words it seemed that we 
 heard them ourselves ; our oppressed soul soared 
 with them into ideal regions, and returned but with 
 pain to the monotonous burden of reality.
 
 206 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 Were we then in the true ? Was that movement 
 of our soul out of society an aspiration towards the 
 primitive state which God had made for us, or a 
 revolt against the order established by Providence in 
 our favour? It was a revolt, a bound of egotism 
 impatient of the limits which universal communion 
 with our fellow-creatures imposes upon us, an attempt 
 to subject the universe to our individuality alone. 
 Whilst, in the plan of divine goodness, happiness is 
 the right and patrimony of all, we sought to leave 
 mankind in order to withdraw from sharing its 
 blessings and evils, and rid ourselves of the duties 
 which inevitably result from a great assemblage of 
 relations. We hate dependence and labour in 
 society. Dependence first : for society exists only by 
 unity ; unity is formed by ties ; those ties, when 
 intelligent beings are concerned, change into obli- 
 gatory laws for the conscience, and are maintained 
 by the double authority of public power and opinion. 
 This is a yoke accepted by the virtue which does not 
 separate its condition from the condition of others, 
 but which weighs upon the egotism that lives only 
 for itself; and therefore, as solitude is destructive of 
 all laws because it destroys all relations, egotism 
 seeks solitude in order to escape from dependence. 
 In no less a degree it hates labour, another conse-
 
 Man as a Social Being. 207 
 
 quence of civilization. A few men scattered over an 
 immense territory live at little cost Nature, aban- 
 doned to herself, supplies their wants, and isolation 
 lessening in them the attraction which reproduces 
 life, their number increases so slowly that it does not 
 disturb their indolence. The man of society, on the 
 contrary, has a paternity as prolific as his heart ; he 
 sees, under the blessing of God, the family changing 
 into a tribe, the tribe into a community, the com- 
 munity into a nation ; the tents are sheltered under 
 walls ; territories are defined by boundaries ; nature 
 fails before the increase of mankind. Art must 
 supply its want of space and vigour. Assiduous 
 labour must second the inventions of art Number- 
 less employments solicit the arms of men, and the 
 arms of men in their turn solicit employment Our 
 veins are filled with the fruit of our toil. Each drop 
 of our blood is purchased from the land at the price of 
 a virtue. 
 
 This is more than enough to alarm egotism, and 
 persuade it that social order is but an imposture 
 in a state of martyrdom. I do not refute it, I 
 simply explain to you how it is that the Christian 
 dogma of society has contradictors and enemies. 
 Dependence, labour, are hard words, I cannot 
 deny it ; and whoever does not accept them is
 
 208 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 necessarily in revolt against the reality of human 
 things. 
 
 But a few days ago, you engraved upon the monu- 
 ments of your capital that memorable inscription : 
 Liberty, equality, fraternity. It is, in fact, a part of 
 the primitive charter which has united men together 
 and founded the human race ; but it is not the whole 
 of it. It is the charter of rights, not that of duties. 
 Now man, living in society, can no more deprive 
 himself of duties than of rights. If liberty is neces- 
 sary, that he may remain a moral creature, that he 
 may not be overwhelmed in the pressure of an 
 exaggerated and unjust domination, obedience is also 
 necessary, to enable him to keep his place, by the 
 help of a common and sacred law, in the living home 
 which a nation makes for him. If equality is neces- 
 sary, that he may not decline from the rank in which 
 God has placed him by a common origin with all his 
 fellow-creatures, hierarchy is also necessary that he 
 may not, in default of a chief and a commanding 
 authority, fall into the powerlessness of individual 
 dissolution. If fraternity is necessary in order that 
 confidence and love might widen the narrow ties of 
 social order, that mankind might remain one great 
 family sprung from one common father, veneration 
 is also necessary, to acknowledge and strengthen the
 
 Man as a Social Being. 209 
 
 authority of age, the magistracy of virtue, the power 
 of laws, in those who possess this character whether 
 as legislators or as sovereigns. Write then, if you 
 would found durable institutions, write above the 
 word liberty, obedience ; above equality, hierarchy ; 
 above fraternity, veneration ; above the august sym- 
 bol of rights, the divine symbol of duties. I have 
 said this to you elsewhere ; right, is the selfish side ot 
 justice ; duty, is its generous and devoted side. Ap- 
 peal from it to devotedness, that devotedness may 
 respond to you, and that your work may triumph over 
 the ardent passions, which, since the origin of society, 
 have never ceased to conspire for its ruin. 
 
 Human society is not only hated for itself, on 
 account of the duties that it imposes, it is also hated 
 for another reason which it is important for you to 
 learn. God, who was the founder of society, is its 
 preserver. He maintains it by the power of his 
 name, which is perpetuated under the guardianship of 
 dogmatic traditions and religious observances. No 
 nation has been able to exist without that venerated 
 name, no community has been built up without that 
 corner-stone of the temple. And vainly will the 
 impious hope to abolish the memory of God until that 
 society be abolished which is its depository, and 
 which lives upon this hereditary treasure of mankind. 
 
 P
 
 2io Man as a Social Being. 
 
 Human society and religious society are two sisters 
 born on the same day of the divine word, the one 
 having regard to time, the other to eternity; distinct 
 in their domain and end, but indissolubly united in 
 the heart of man, sustaining one another, falling 
 together, rising again together, braving together by 
 their common immortality the hatred that pursues 
 both of them. Do not lose this point of view, if you 
 would take account of the leaven of anarchy which 
 rouses the heart of man against society. Society 
 is no other thing than order, and order has in 
 God its invulnerable root. Whoever does not love 
 God has by that alone a permanent cause of aversion 
 towards the social state, which could not do without 
 God. 
 
 Thence it comes that anti-religious epochs infallibly 
 produce anti-social theories. You witnessed this in 
 the last century. Whilst the doctors of a superficial 
 generation held up to ridicule Jesus Christ, the Bible, 
 and the Church, others, with a pen no less bold, 
 wrote against human society. The savage state was 
 exalted as the primitive state of man, and incom- 
 parably the best; the effeminate gentlemen of the 
 Trianon were invited to return to that state with bows 
 and arrows in their hands. It was demonstrated that 
 society was at least formed by a voluntary contract,
 
 Man as a Social Being. 2 1 1 
 
 and, with a gravity but too formidable, they sought 
 the clauses of that fabulous contract. ( 
 
 Is it necessary for me to prove to you that social 
 order is neither an institution against nature, nor a 
 facultative institution ? We are far removed from the 
 time when men discussed these questions, puerile 
 in themselves, but which were rendered important 
 by the decadency of the monarchy under which they 
 were treated. Now that this monarchy has dis- 
 appeared in a tempest, and the epoch of recon- 
 struction has succeeded to that of ruins, intelligent 
 minds are interested much more about the economical 
 problems of social life than about the circumstances 
 of its origin and the primary causes of its establish- 
 ment. Therefore I shall confine myself to the few 
 words which are necessary rationally to confirm 
 the dogma of society such as Catholic doctrine 
 professes it. 
 
 : A thing is natural when it is in conformity with 
 the real constitution of a being. Now the social 
 state is evidently in conformity with the constitution 
 of man, since everywhere and always he has lived in 
 society. It is true that some oppose to us the savage 
 tribes of America, and of many islands scattered 
 in the ocean ; but those very tribes, although 
 deprived of civilization, live nevertheless in the
 
 212 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 unformed rudiments of community. They are 
 branches accidentally detached from the great 
 human trunk, and which, deprived of the sap of 
 traditions, withdrawn from the law of oral instruction, 
 vegetate on the extreme confines of sociability 
 without having burst the last link that holds them 
 thereto. If truth and charity should seek them at the 
 ends of the world ; if the words of the gospel, borne 
 by the clouds of heaven, should fall upon the 
 uncultivated glebe of their souls, you will see them 
 extending their hands to the apostolate, covering 
 their nakedness, plunging the plough into their 
 forests, assembling round the wood and sign of a 
 cross, and bowing their heads before the invisible 
 presence of God, of whom they know nothing save a 
 remembrance as uncertain as their life. You are 
 not ignorant that Oceania now witnesses the accom- 
 plishment of these marvels, and those fortunate 
 islands send back even to our old continents the 
 virginal balm of a civilization which finds again a 
 cradle in the ruins of the desert. 
 
 I do not mean to say that the savage passes easily, 
 or that he always advances, to the state of social 
 perfection ; no, gentlemen, this is a difficult work 
 which requires time, a combination of favourable 
 circumstances, and which, on this account, is rarely
 
 Man as a Social Being. 213 
 
 crowned with success. An entire population is not 
 drawn in a single day out of the torpor of an 
 inveterate state of indolence and free indulgence 
 of the passions. It is enough that it has been done, 
 or even that it has been begun, for the savage state 
 to cease to be an objection against the social 
 temperament of man. The Iroquois, or the Huron, 
 is not civilised, but he is fit for civilisation, and if he 
 does not become civilised alone, by the aid of his 
 proper forces, it is for the same reason that the deaf 
 are dumb. No one is an initiator to himself; 
 every man or every tribe having left society, which 
 is the great and universal initiator, can return to it 
 only by means of a legislator bringing from the 
 common centre, truth, justice, order, and devotedness. 
 We need not travel to the Pacific Ocean to find the 
 savage ; whoever rejects the social tradition, by 
 ungoverned passions, is a voluntary savage ; so much 
 the more degraded as he touches the source of truth 
 and goodness. You have met with those beings 
 fallen by their fault below civilisation, and assuredly 
 you have drawn no conclusions from their moral 
 misery against the dignity of our nature and against its 
 sociability. The exception has never destroyed a rule, 
 and here there is not even an exception. The savage 
 is to the civilised man what an abortion is to a plant
 
 214 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 which has received a regular development ; by its very 
 deformity it bears witness in favour of the normal type 
 to the plenitude of which it has not attained. 
 
 Man lives then socially by virtue of his native 
 constitution ; he is naturally sociable, and con- 
 sequently naturally social. It is not a facultative 
 contract which has placed him in society ; he is born 
 in society. And if it happen that he leaves it by a 
 lamentable accident which separates him from the 
 common stock, it is impossible for him to return to 
 it of himself under the form of a contract or a 
 deliberation. He vegetates in that state until the 
 civilised man touches his hand, and raises him by 
 the fraternal sovereignty of language to the rank of 
 an intelligent being enlightened by God. For it is 
 God who first initiated the human race to the social 
 life, and who, after having with truth and love 
 deposited in mankind the germ of mutual attraction, 
 gave to it the first impulsion. Truth and love are 
 the basis of social order ; wherever souls meet, 
 having received these gifts, the principle of society 
 meets in, and tends to unite, them. But this principle 
 may be deadened or degraded, and this is why it 
 exacts, all pre-existing though it may be, an initiatory 
 intervention, to rouse it if it be deadened, to purify it 
 if it be degraded. So that these two things are equally
 
 Man as a Social Being. 215 
 
 true, namely, that society is natural to man, and that 
 it is nevertheless of divine institution. It is natural 
 to man ; because man, an intelligent and a moral 
 being, has received in his creation the intelligible 
 germ of truth and love : it is of divine institution ; 
 because it is God who first placed man in active 
 possession of truth and love, and who, the first also, 
 gave him the opportunity of applying truth and love 
 in relations of like to like, of equal to equal. 
 
 It is time for us to arrive at that supreme moment 
 of the drama of creation, and see human society 
 unfolding under the blessed hand to whom we 
 owe all. 
 
 When God had uttered that beautiful expression : 
 // is not good for man to be alone, the Scriptures tell 
 us that he caused a deep and mysterious sleep to 
 fall upon Adam, our first father. It would seem that 
 God, so to say, feared to be troubled by the look of 
 man during the sublime work he was about to 
 perform ; he willed that no other thought than his 
 own should intervene in the act which was about to 
 give plurality to man without destroying his unity. 
 For such was the work which his sovereign power 
 purposed to accomplish. Taking the eternal order 
 of the divine society as the pattern of human society, 
 he designed that there should not only be moral
 
 2i6 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 unity in the relations between man and man ; but 
 that those relations should take their source in one 
 substantial unity, imitating as much as possible the 
 tie that unites the three uncreated persons in an 
 ineffable perfection. Mankind was to be one by 
 nature, by origin, by blood ; and, by means of that 
 triple unity, to form but one single soul and one 
 single body of all its members. This plan was in 
 conformity with the general end of God, which was 
 to create us in his image and after his likeness, in 
 order to communicate to us all his blessings ; it was 
 worthy of his wisdom as well as of his goodness, 
 and when I think that vulgar impiety has been able 
 to laugh at the magnificent act which realised it, I 
 am overwhelmed with pity for the abasement to 
 which the intelligence falls that misunderstands the 
 intelligence of God. 
 
 Man was, then, at the feet of his creator and father, 
 overcome by the inertness of a superhuman sleep, 
 knowing nothing of what was intended for him, and 
 God looked thoughtfully upon him. Was it necessary 
 to divide that beautiful creature in order to multiply 
 him ? Was it necessary to create by his side an 
 image of himself, without other community than 
 likeness, and cause the human race to spring from 
 one primitive being associated with a second? It
 
 Man as a Social Being. 217 
 
 would have destroyed unity in the very root from 
 whence it should blossom. There would have been 
 two bloods, and only one was required. It was 
 needful that all mankind should come from one single 
 man, in order that living plurality should spring 
 from living unity, and that man, multiplied without 
 division, should recognise in his fellow creature, 
 emanated from himself, the bone of his bones and the 
 flesh of his flesh? With this thought God bends 
 towards man and is about to touch him : but where 
 will he touch him ? The brow of man, where with 
 his intelligence reposes the eminent seat of his 
 beauty, naturally presents itself to the creating hand, 
 and seems to invite the new benediction about to 
 descend upon us. God did not touch it. However 
 beautiful the faculty of intelligence may be, it is not 
 the term of our perfection. Calm as light, and cold 
 also, it was not from the point which corresponds 
 to him in the outer architecture of man that God 
 was to draw forth the miracle of our consubstantial 
 plurality. He knew a better part, he placed his 
 hand upon it. He placed it upon the bosom of 
 man ; there, where the heart by its movement marks 
 the course of life ; there, where all the holy affections 
 have their echo and rebound. God listened for a 
 2 Genesis ii. 23.
 
 2 1 8 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 moment to that heart so pure which he had just 
 created, and by a thought of his omnipotence 
 removing a part of the natural shield that covered 
 it, he formed woman of the flesh of man, and her 
 soul of the same breath which had made the soul 
 of Adam. 
 
 Man saw his fellow-creature. He saw himself 
 in another with his majesty, his strength, his gentle- 
 ness ; and with an additional grace, a delicate tint 
 that manifested a dissemblance only to produce a 
 more perfect fusion between the two parts of himself. 
 First regard of man upon his fellow-creature, what 
 was it ? First nuptial moment of mankind, who 
 shall reveal it? We will not endeavour to paint 
 it, we will not lessen by vain poesy the solemnity of 
 that wedlock whose consecrator was God ; but 
 imitating the austere simplicity of Scripture, we will 
 repeat what it says to us. 
 
 After, then, God had led to man his companion, 
 according to the expression of the sacred pages, he 
 pronounced over them in these terms the blessing of 
 inexhaustible fecundity : Increase and multiply, and 
 fill the earth. 3 And with these words, efficacious 
 like all the words of God, man received the gift of 
 producing and perpetuating the miracle of the 
 8 Genesis i. 28.
 
 Man as a Social Being. 219 
 
 diffusion of his being, in offshoots personally distinct 
 from himself, but one with him in form and blood. 
 Mankind was founded, and the man in whom it had 
 just become being, the man king, husband, father, 
 bearing in himself the innumerable posterity of his 
 sons, sang the hymn of the first nuptials, the song 
 of the first love, the law of the first family, the 
 prophecy of all generations. Listen, gentlemen, 
 listen to our forefather speaking to his race in the 
 name of God ; listen to those first words of man 
 which have traversed ages and taught the human 
 race. This, said he, is bone of my bones, and flesh 
 of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she 
 was taken out of man; wherefore shall a man leave 
 father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and 
 they shall be two in one flesh? Such is the law of 
 family, society, civilisation ; such is the oracle which 
 will for ever regulate the condition of mankind. 
 Every legislator who may despise its commandment 
 will but found barbarism ; no nation that withdraws 
 from it will ever attain to the era of justice and holy 
 morality. It is upon the constitution of family that 
 the progress or decadency of society will in all ages 
 depend ; and the constitution of family, signed by 
 man and God, is written in the charter which has 
 4 Genesis ii. 23, 24.
 
 22O Man as a Social Being. 
 
 just been proclaimed to you. Woman is not to 
 be the slave of man ; she must be his sister, bone of 
 his bones, flesh of his flesh. Wherever she may be 
 degraded from this rank, man himself will be 
 degraded ; he will never know the pure joys of true 
 love. Subjected to the domination of the senses, 
 woman would be nothing to him but an instrument 
 of sensuality ; she would not speak to him of God 
 with the authority of tenderness ; she would not 
 soften his heart by the constant charm of her own ; 
 she would not adorn his life by the innate delicacy 
 of her voice and gesture. The domestic threshold, 
 as the symbol of servitude, instead of recalling to 
 man the holy and happy hours of his terrestrial 
 passage, would recall to him only the inconstancy 
 of his pleasures, the tyranny of his passions. 
 
 But woman is not only to be the sister of man 
 by virtue of community of origin, she is to be his 
 wife; in the virginity of her body and her soul she 
 is to bring to him an inestimable gift, a gift which 
 man will not be able to receive from another until 
 death shall have broken the oath which purchased it. 
 She shall be called woman, said Adam ; therefore a 
 man shall leave his father and mother, and shall 
 cleave unto his wife ; and they shall be two in one 
 flesh. They shall be two, and not more than two ;
 
 Man as a Social Being. 22 1 
 
 they shall be two even to being but one flesh ; and 
 as death dissolves the unity of the flesh, death alone 
 also shall destroy the unity of marriage, the source 
 of life. Should the frailty of the human heart forget 
 that order, should it profane marriage by daring to 
 elevate adultery to the sanctity of marriage, woman 
 would no longer exist either as wife or as mother. 
 The infant born of her by an imperfect union 
 would recognise in her only a dishonoured victim, 
 and in his own days nothing but the fruit of selfish 
 paternity. 
 
 Therefore, fraternal alliance between man and 
 woman, exclusive and indissoluble alliance, in which, 
 however, man exercises the chief authority, because 
 he is the trunk whence his companion was taken, 
 and because she was given to him by God, according 
 to the language of Scripture, as a help like unto 
 himself. 5 Such is the regular constitution of family, 
 without which there is but oppression of the woman 
 and child, weakening of the sense of moral obligation, 
 sensuality instead of love, selfishness instead of 
 devotedness, and in fine, barbarism or decadency, 
 according to the age of the nations which have been 
 led to despise the fundamental laws of society. 
 Society is but the development of family; if man 
 * Genesis iL 18.
 
 222 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 leave his family corrupted, he will enter corrupted 
 into the community. If the community would 
 destroy family in order to regenerate itself, it would 
 substitute an order factitious and against nature 
 for the order established by God, and fall into 
 the double abyss of unmeasured tyranny and 
 licentious dissolution. It would be the high road 
 to death. 
 
 Society being but the development of family, 
 the general laws that regulate family regulate society 
 also. As at the domestic hearth woman is the 
 sister of man, the citizen at the forum is the brother 
 of his fellow citizen ; as man is only the husband of 
 one wife, the citizen belongs only to one nation; 
 as, in fine, the wife and child owe obedience and 
 respect to the father, the citizen owes obedience and 
 respect to the magistrate. If from the community 
 we survey the human race, we shall recognise there, 
 notwithstanding the difference of language, customs, 
 and physiognomy, the dispersed council of a single 
 race, the branching out of a single stem, and shall 
 say to each man : Thou art my brother ; to each 
 nation : Thou art my sister ; to all, whatever may be 
 their colour, their history, or their name : This is bone 
 of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. It is true we shall 
 no longer find in the human race the unity of one
 
 Man as a Social Being. 223 
 
 single father, common obedience, unanimous respect ; 
 that order has been destroyed. The fields of 
 Babylon saw the branches of man breaking off 
 with great noise, and heard our forefathers utter in 
 confused language the adieu of a separation which 
 still exists. But the hour of the unity prepared and 
 begun by Christ seems to draw near ; the mountains 
 bend, the seas diminish, the Christian family, with 
 the vicar of God at its head, urges on, and, by 
 its superiority henceforth assumed, enlightens the 
 nations which have not yet adored the regenerating 
 language of the gospel. The desire for peace keeps 
 the sword in its sheath ; fraternal language is 
 exchanged from one end of the world to the other ; 
 the negro sits down with the white man in the great 
 assemblies of nations ; everything forebodes to at- 
 tentive minds an era of reconciliation and the age in 
 which, without destroying the variety or liberty of 
 nations, the antique prophecy will be accomplished 
 which announces to us, one single shepherd for one 
 single fold* 
 
 I halt before this glorious hope which should 
 
 console all who are concerned about the future of 
 
 the human race. How is it that here also I find 
 
 rationalism as the adversary of the truths which so 
 
 6 St. John x. 16.
 
 224 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 greatly interest the dignity and happiness of man ? 
 Not content with having presented the social state 
 as a state against nature, rationalism has attacked 
 its constitution under three important relations : it 
 has denied the unity of the human race, the unity 
 of marriage, and its indissolubility. I shall not 
 notice the two last errors, having had occasion to 
 touch upon them in the Conference in which we 
 treated of the influence of Catholic society upon natural 
 society in regard to family, and I shall limit 
 myself to confirming, in a few words, the substantial 
 unity which makes of the human race a family 
 issued from a single love, and from one and the same 
 blood. 
 
 It seems that in the age we live in, an age 
 wherein ideas of equality and fraternity generally 
 predominate, if there is a dogma which should 
 escape from negation, it is the dogma that gathers 
 into unity all the nations that form mankind. But 
 rationalism thought to seize Christian truth here in 
 the very fact against the documents of science, and 
 could not lose the opportunity of compromising it in 
 those minds which attach more weight to the ap- 
 pearance of things than to the evidence of their laws. 
 It endeavours then to establish the absolute diversity 
 of the human races by the comparative study of the
 
 Man as a Social Being. 225 
 
 profound dissimilarities that mark their most im- 
 portant branches. These dissimilarities cannot be 
 denied ; the ignorant discover them as well as the 
 learned. The Malay, the Mongol, the negro, have 
 characteristic features which do not permit us to 
 confound them either among themselves or with the 
 European. This is true. The whole question is 
 whether the difference is substantial, or only an 
 accident, whether it constitutes a separate nature 
 having an origin of its own ; or whether it is but a 
 shade caused in a primitive uniform type by the 
 circumstances of time, place, customs, and even by 
 fortuitous events whose effect and impress are after- 
 wards perpetuated. 
 
 It is incontestable that sensible varieties appear 
 in beings of the same kind and of the same progeny ; 
 it is the result of two forces which keep life in a just 
 equilibrium, namely : spontaniety and immutability. 
 Without spontaniety, that is to say, without a proper 
 and original movement, beings would remain in the 
 monotonous mould of barren uniformity ; without 
 immutability, they would lose the type of their true 
 organisation under the force of their individual 
 action. They are, then, at the same time free and 
 restrained ; they become modified without, losing 
 their nature. Such is the cause of those changes of 
 
 Q
 
 226 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 physiognomy which have no name when they are 
 not perpetuated ; and which are called varieties when 
 they are powerful enough to be transmitted and 
 maintained. For, as the primitive form of the living 
 being resists all mutations, the secondary or acquired 
 form may also share this privilege when the causes 
 that produced it are inveterate, and have passed, so 
 to say, to the very roots of life. The father or 
 mother, and sometimes both together, communicate 
 to their children the features and expression which 
 they themselves received from their authors. If this 
 hereditary vestige promptly disappears in families of 
 little distinction, it acquires an obstinate persistence 
 in the more strongly marked races, which guard 
 their blood with more watchful care. It is above all 
 remarkable in the particular physiognomy of each 
 nation, whatever approximation of climate or customs 
 may exist between them. The Frenchman, the 
 Englishman, the German, the Italian, the Spaniard, 
 who touch each other on a soil limited in extent, 
 who drink the same waters, and are invigorated by 
 the same sun, who adore the same God, who have 
 been mingled by an uninterrupted communion of 
 from twelve to fourteen centuries, have a type of face 
 personal to each, and by which they are instantly 
 recognised by the least attentive observer. If it
 
 Man as a Social Being. 227 
 
 be so among nations subject to the influence of 
 common elements, what must it be of those separated 
 by distance, light, heat, food, religion, customs, all 
 those material and spiritual causes, in fine, which act 
 upon life and produce profound modifications? 
 And if the dissimilarity of two European nations 
 does not manifest the diversity of their primitive 
 origin, how should the dissimilarity between the 
 negro and the white man manifest anything but the 
 diversity of their religious, political, and natural 
 history ? That which makes man is an intelligent soul 
 united to a body endowed with certain proportions. 
 Now has not the negro the same soul as the white 
 man, and has he not the same body ? Who will say 
 that the soul of the negro is not human, and that his 
 body is not human ? And if the soul of the negro be 
 human, if his body be human, is he not a man ? And 
 if he be a man, why should he not have had the same 
 father as yourselves ? 
 
 A physiological law, promulgated by the illustrious 
 Cuvier, has also decided the question. It is known 
 to science that all living beings which unite together, 
 and whose posterity remains indefinitely prolific, 
 belong to the same nature and remount to a pri- 
 mordially unique stem. In order to maintain the 
 great lines of creation God has not willed that beings
 
 228 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 of diverse origin and kind should be able, by means 
 of capricious alliances, to confound all bloods. 
 Should this irregular event happen it may obtain from 
 deceived fecundity a first result ; but it never 
 advances beyond this ; order immediately reassumes 
 its empire, and sterility punishes the fruit of a 
 connection reproved by the will of the Creator. 
 Now this anathema does not reach the union of the 
 negro and the white man; their oaths received at 
 the feet of the same altars, under the invocation 
 of the same God, obtain in an indefinite posterity 
 the glory of an act legitimate and holy. Much more, 
 the two bloods recognise each other; the purer 
 elevates to its splendour the one which had con- 
 tracted an adulteration ; from degree to degree, from 
 alliance to alliance, all disparity vanishes, and the 
 sons of Adam find themselves again, as sixty cen- 
 turies ago, in the fraternal features of their common 
 father. 
 
 Away, then, with those shameful attempts of 
 fratricidal science. Let us no longer listen to the 
 voices which do not respect the inviolable unity of 
 the human race ! Rather, Christians, let us hail from 
 afar, and on every hand, let us hail our brethren 
 dispersed by the tempest on such diverse shores. 
 Let us, who have better preserved the primitive tint
 
 Man as a Social Being, 229 
 
 of our creation, who have received with a softer 
 influence of natural light a better share of uncreated 
 light ; let us, the elder sons of truth and civilisation, 
 hail our brethren whom we have preceded only to 
 lead, whom we have surpassed only that they may 
 one day equal us. Let us hail in them our past and 
 our future unity, the unity which they had in Adam 
 and that which we wait for in God. Let us stretch 
 out our hands to the Malay and the Mongol ; to the 
 negro, the poor and the leper. All together, uniting 
 our blessings and our misfortunes in one immense 
 and sincere act of brotherhood, let us draw near to 
 God, our first father. Let us draw near to God who 
 made us from the same clay, who vivified us with 
 the same breath, who has penetrated us with the 
 same spirit, who has given us the same word, who 
 has said to all of us : Increase and multiply, and fill 
 the earth, and subdue it, and rule over it. He alone can 
 bless us; he alone can open to us a veritable era 
 of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Without him you 
 will write those sublime words in vain upon your 
 public monuments. Thirty centuries ago, they were 
 written on the tables of Sinai by a more powerful 
 hand than yours, and yet the tables of Sinai fell from 
 the hands that carried them, and were broken in 
 pieces at the foot of the mountain. It was because
 
 230 Man as a Social Being. 
 
 their laws were written in stone, and not in the 
 heart of man. Write not then yours upon stone, 
 write them with the finger of God in your own 
 hearts, that they may speak therefrom to the hearts 
 of all, and so ensure a durable immortality.
 
 ( 231 ) 
 
 THE DOUBLE WORK OF MAN. 
 
 MY LORD, GENTLEMEN, 
 
 It remained for me to treat of the condition in 
 which God created man as a physical being, and after- 
 wards as a religious being. Under the first head, God 
 endowed him with immortality ; under the second, he 
 prepared him for sharing the divine life itself by a 
 gift which Catholic doctrine calls grace, that is to say, 
 the gift par excellence. This should then be the present 
 object of your attention. But having at a future period 
 to treat before you of the mystery of the resurrection 
 of the body, I reserve for that period all that concerns 
 the exterior immortality of man ; and as to his voca- 
 tion to sharing the divine life by the effusion of grace, 
 it is too vast a subject to be dealt with on the day 
 which will close our Conferences for this year. I 
 reserve it also, then, and I am consequently led to the
 
 232 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 expression which in the Scriptures closes the account 
 of creation. That expression is singular; it is as 
 follows : On tJie seventh day God mded his work 
 which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day 
 from all his work which he had done : and he blessed 
 tJie seventh day, and sanctified it: because in it he 
 had rested from all his work which God created and 
 made. 1 
 
 By this you see that the world was not the work of a 
 moment, but that God produced it in a progressive 
 order distributed in six epochs, which the Scriptures 
 call days. I shall not stop to expose or to justify that 
 order, which is already known to you. Science has 
 taken this upon itself during half a century ; each of 
 its discoveries comes unawares to prove the pro- 
 fundity of biblical cosmogony, and at length the 
 bowels of the earth, brought to light by tardy investiga- 
 tions, have revealed, in the state of their different 
 strata, the reality of the successive formation which is 
 the basis of the account in Genesis. It was necessary 
 to acknowledge either that Moses was inspired by 
 God, or that, fifteen centuries before the Christian era, 
 he possessed a science which was not to be disclosed 
 until three thousand years later. I would willingly 
 treat of this magnificent triumph of our faith, if the 
 1 Genesis ii. 2, 3.
 
 The Double Work of Man. 233 
 
 nature of my labours permitted me to add thereto the 
 weight of a personal authority, and if it were not more 
 fitting that whatever concerns scientific developments 
 should rather be treated in a book than from a Chris- 
 tian pulpit. I confine myself then to this incontestable 
 fact, that the Christian cosmogony is henceforth 
 assured of the respect of all who do not despise the 
 testimony of the most authentic realities. But this 
 testimony, which suffices to confound the reproaches 
 of the mind, does not suffice to satisfy its desire to 
 know. It still asks why God created the world 
 gradually, why he in a manner diminished his power 
 to restrain his action. It is easy to conceive that 
 time may be necessary to a finite cause ; it is not easy 
 to conceive its utility to a cause which can do all 
 things of itself. How is it that God abased himself to 
 the measure of a common workman ? How is it that 
 he began, quitted, and returned to his work ? How is 
 it that he rested from it ? All these ideas are strange, 
 and in seeing them united to the first act which has 
 revealed God to us, to the act of creation, the intel- 
 ligence vacillates and remains under the weight of 
 unappeasable wonder. 
 
 I dare to say that your instinct deceives you, and 
 that there is nothing greater in God than his abase- 
 ment. Yes, God abased himself in creation, as we
 
 234 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 shall see him at a later period abasing himself in the 
 incarnation and in the redemption ; he abased himself 
 because he laboured for us and not for himself, 
 because strength and greatness are communicated 
 only by descending. Yes, God had no need of time 
 as an auxiliary to his eternity : no motive drawn from 
 himself induced him to divide the formation of the 
 earth into six periods, and to await the help of ages 
 for that which depended upon an act of his sovereign 
 thought But if it were the same for him to act sud- 
 denly or slowly, it was not so for man. Destined, in 
 our passage upon earth, to a work which ends only with 
 itself and us, it is important for us to know the general 
 law of labour ; and God, in establishing outside of 
 himself the operation whence all ulterior operation was 
 to flow, willed that his manner of proceeding should 
 for ever contain and reveal the rule of our own activity. 
 That rule indeed has never been effaced from the 
 memory of the human race. It has outlived the wreck 
 of the most sacred traditions, and its vestiges are 
 found in the division of time observed by most of the 
 ancient and modern nations. But in order to com- 
 prehend in what it consisted, what was its object and 
 its importance, it is necessary to take account of the 
 labour even of man. 
 
 This word labour seems to awaken an idea incom-
 
 The Dottble Work of Man. 235 
 
 patible with the primitive state in which God placed 
 us ; a state of perfection and happiness which I have 
 represented to you, and which bears the image of 
 perfect repose. Does not labour imply fatigue ? Is 
 it not a chastisement imposed upon man in conse- 
 quence of a prevarication which caused him to fall 
 from the prerogatives of his primitive state? And 
 moreover, before that catastrophe had impaired the 
 harmony of our faculties and drawn down the divine 
 malediction upon earth, what would have been the 
 object of labour to us, either of body or mind ? These 
 reflections so much the more prove to me the necessity 
 of exactly denning the labour required of man in the 
 design of his creation. 
 
 To labour is to act. We may act with pain ; but 
 pain is not a part of the essence of labour. Its 
 essence is summed up in that energetic and glorious 
 word : to act. Now, you do not suppose that God, 
 who made all things, has destined man to eternal idle- 
 ness. The most insignificant being, in coming into the 
 world, brings into it a mission corresponding to the 
 end for which it was created, a mission or a function 
 which it accomplishes by labour. The very worm of 
 the earth does something, it performs its task, it co- 
 operates for an end ; it belongs to the sacred band of 
 useful creatures. How should man, raised so high by
 
 236 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 his faculties and by the place which he occupies in the 
 universe, have received no other function than that of 
 sterile idleness ? It could not so be, and it was not 
 the language of idle repose that God addressed to 
 man, when at the hour of his birth he said to him : 
 Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, 
 and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the 
 air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth* 
 It was not a lesson of idleness that God gave him in 
 bringing before him according to the history of 
 Genesis all the animals of creation, that he might give 
 them a name which should explain their nature and 
 remain to them for ever* In fine, when he led him to 
 a dwelling-place, called by Scripture the Paradise of 
 Pleasure, it was not to slumber there in the sleep of inac- 
 tion ; for it is said God placed him there to dress it and 
 to keep it UT OPERARETUR ET CUSTODIRET ILLUM.* 
 Do not then unite in your minds the idea of perfection 
 and happiness, or even the idea of repose, with that of 
 inactivity or idleness. God was infinite activity before 
 he assumed, in the creation and government of the 
 world, a work worthy of all his attributes ; by an 
 eternal action he produced in himself the Word which 
 ever speaks to him, the Holy Ghost which responds to 
 both ; by a fecundity as ancient as himself he diffused 
 1 Genesis i. 28. * Ibid. ii. 19. * Ibid. ii. 15.
 
 The Double Work of Man. 237 
 
 between three the unity of an essence whose inner 
 movement is perfection, beatitude, and repose. So far 
 from the idea of action which is that of labour 
 being incompatible with the notion of a happy and 
 perfect state, it is the necessary element which consti- 
 tutes all that we know of that state ; for, to think is to 
 act, to will is to act, to love is to act, and apparently 
 none of these acts will be rejected from the definition 
 of happiness and perfection. 
 
 Placed in the centre of created things, belonging by 
 his soul to the higher world of spirits, by his body to 
 the lower world of nature, having the earth for passage 
 and God for end, man was indebted by a double 
 labour to a double function. His first function was to 
 tend towards God who had given him truth that he 
 might know him, charity that he might love him, the 
 participation of his own life as perspective and term, 
 but with all these gifts the gift also of liberty, which, 
 raising him to the glory of a person master of himself, 
 permitted him to repudiate his legitimate end, and 
 opened before him the honourable but perilous career 
 of virtue. This was the first work, the great work of 
 man. However pure he might have been in his soul 
 and body, he was free ; he could withdraw from God 
 and perish. Prayer, reflection, vigilance, perpetual 
 care of his heart, were necessary for him to prevent his
 
 238 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 falling from the virginal splendour in which God 
 created him. 
 
 Our present state includes other difficulties, which 
 
 leave us no doubt as to the importance of the spiritual 
 
 work imposed upon the human race. The abuse of 
 
 liberty has covered every part of our being with ruins ; 
 
 our intelligence is darkened ; our love has grown cold ; 
 
 the struggle between good and evil has assumed a 
 
 character of alarming depth, with the development of 
 
 generations. God, without disappearing from our 
 
 midst, has found amongst us enemies conspiring 
 
 against the remembrance of him, and employing all 
 
 the resources of the mind and the passions to destroy 
 
 that remembrance. There is no tradition which has 
 
 not been denied, no duty which has not been outraged, 
 
 no divine institution which has not been subjected to 
 
 the violent attacks of mad impiety ; and if God has 
 
 remained visible during the whole course of ages, if he 
 
 still reigns over the posterity of his first creature, it is 
 
 but at the price of a combat rife in tears and blood. 
 
 You are engaged in this divine war, you form part of 
 
 it, and, victors or vanquished, I have nothing to teach 
 
 you on the painful price of truth. 
 
 Even had we but the work of the soul ; if man could 
 extend towards God a look free from all other care, a 
 hand free from all other burden ! But it is not so.
 
 The Double Work of Man. 239 
 
 From the first, a function and a labour of a different 
 order have been confided to us. God, because he 
 would not leave us without occupation for the forces 
 of the body by which we hold to the inferior world, 
 called us to share his temporal government. He gave 
 us the earth to guard and fertilise, not at first at the 
 price of our toil, but by an administration which 
 partook of the nature of empire and added to our 
 other prerogatives the glory of useful command. In 
 exchange for a royal and blessed culture, the obedient 
 earth rendered back to us a substance necessary to 
 sustain our immortality during its earthly existence. 
 Behold, said God to us, / have given you every herb 
 bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in 
 themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat? 
 This reciprocal intercourse between nature and man 
 possessed nothing primitively which was an obstacle to 
 the relation between our soul and God. The soul 
 rather found therein a spiritual aliment, a source of 
 joy which sprang forth without effort and reached 
 even to its author. But that state did not last, and 
 you know what temporal labour has become for the 
 posterity of Adam. A curse has fallen upon it ; the 
 earth, which yielded to our desires, refuses to us all 
 that we do not pay it for beforehand in toil and 
 5 Genesis i. 29.
 
 240 Ttie Double Work of Man. 
 
 fatigue ; it doles out its gifts to us with avarice that 
 nothing can move, with uncertainty that nothing can 
 disarm. Nearly the whole of the human race, with 
 brow bent towards it, implores it with assiduous 
 devotedness, and gathers for recompense only the 
 bitter bread of hard poverty. Now poverty of the 
 body easily entails that of the soul : it has created 
 modes of servitude which draw all the human faculties 
 together in their many folds, and, by pressing upon 
 their action, plunges them into a state approaching to 
 death. Man descends towards the instinct of the 
 animal; absorbed in his material wants, he forgets 
 his origin and his end ; he throws to the winds 'the 
 divine life whose germ is within him, and his only care 
 is to force the earth to render to him the blessings of 
 eternity. 
 
 We can only accuse ourselves ; God is not respon- 
 sible for our faults and our blindness. He foresaw 
 them, doubtless ; and I have told you why, notwith- 
 standing that prevision, he did not refuse us the 
 blessing of liberty. But, since he foresaw them, his 
 wisdom and his goodness commanded him to come to 
 our help, and, by a primitive, fundamental, and impre- 
 scriptible law, to regulate the relation between temporal 
 and spiritual labour, both necessary to mankind, the 
 one as the principle of its divine life, the other as the
 
 The Double Work of Man. 241 
 
 principle of its terrestrial life ; both of which should be 
 reciprocally limited in an equitable proportion. Now, 
 who should have discovered this, and who should have 
 established that proportion, if God had not done it ? 
 Who should have had wisdom to determine the 
 time which man owed to his soul, and that which he 
 owed to his body ? Who should have possessed the 
 authority necessary, in so difficult a matter, to obtain 
 the sanction of universal respect ? Who should have 
 saved man from the tyranny of his own cupidity, and 
 from the tyranny, not less to be feared, of one stronger 
 than himself? In the question of labour lies the root 
 of all servitude ; it is the question of labour which has 
 made masters and servants, conquering and conquered 
 nations, oppressors of every kind and oppressed of 
 every name. Labour being no other thing than 
 human activity, everything necessarily has relation to 
 it, and according as it is well or ill distributed, society 
 is well or ill organized, happy or miserable, moral or 
 immoral. We have now before us a proof of this 
 which the most blind are obliged to comprehend. 
 What has agitated the world during the last twenty 
 years ? What is the cry of the civil wars which we 
 now witness ? Is it not : Organization of labour 1 ! Is 
 it not also : Live by labour or die fighting 1 And, if we 
 examine the chain of historical revolutions, shall we 
 
 R
 
 242 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 ever find for them, whatever may be their name, 
 another primary cause than the question of labour ? 
 The migrations of nations, the invasion of the bar- 
 barians, the servile wars, the troubles of the forum, all 
 the great human agitations, hang directly or indirectly 
 upon that terrible question, which rises again from 
 its own ashes with obstinate immortality. It is the 
 axis upon which the destinies of the world turn. 
 
 And, consequently, the first religious and civil law is 
 the law of labour. Now who should, who could, lay it 
 down ? Who, save He who owes nothing to any one, 
 but who, having from love made himself the father of 
 minds, willed to be the light whence they should derive 
 their direction ? Who, save He who has created the 
 soul and the body of man, who knows their wants, 
 who has measured their powers, and who alone 
 possesses the secret of limits, because he has none ? 
 It was just that, in the act of creation, God should 
 promulgate all the bases of the physical, moral, and 
 religious orders, and that he should promulgate them 
 by acts sufficiently powerful for the remembrance of 
 them to bear their commandment even to the last 
 generations. Language alone would not have sufficed ; 
 God was not content to proclaim his laws by language 
 alone, at the origin of things any more than on Sinai 
 and Calvary. He has constantly graven them in acts
 
 The Doiible Work of Man. 243 
 
 whose eloquence is more enduring than brass. The 
 cross of Calvary, the tables of Sinai, the waves of the 
 deluge, the days of creation, are the four great monu- 
 ments of divine legislation ; imperishable monuments, 
 which, after so many ages, exist in all the vigour of the 
 first day. The cross of Calvary covers the five 
 divisions of the world ; the tables of Sinai are read in 
 all the places crowned by the cross ; the waves of the 
 deluge have left their traces from the Alps to the 
 Caucasus, from the Caucasus to the Himalayas, from 
 the Himalayas to the summit of the Andes : and the 
 days of the creation, religiously preserved in the 
 strata of the globe, in the furrows of our ploughs, revive 
 that magnificent law of labour which has preceded all 
 others, and which we must now more clearly define to 
 you. 
 
 You have already heard the terms of this law ; God, 
 it is said, ended on the seventh day the work which he 
 had made, and he rested on the seventh day from all his 
 work which he had done, and he blessed the seventh day 
 and sanctified it, because in it he rested from all his work 
 which God created and made. Such is the proportion 
 of temporal to spiritual labour, of the labour of the 
 body to the labour of the soul, according as God 
 determined it by the sovereign example of his own 
 work. And, indeed, if the question had depended
 
 244 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 upon man, we may be sure that it would not have been 
 solved in this manner. Knowing the law, are we even 
 capable of explaining it to ourselves ? Why should the 
 number seven express the totality of the two kinds of 
 labour? Why should spiritual labour amount only 
 to a seventh part of temporal labour ? Why should 
 the one occupy six consecutive days, and not a 
 longer or a shorter time? Is there nothing in the 
 powers of the body and the soul that leads us to this 
 proportion of six to one ? Or is it nature that reveals 
 it to us by the general harmony of its laws ? No, 
 gentlemen, neither do the phenomena of nature, nor 
 the necessities of the body, nor the wants of the soul, 
 give us the elements of such an induction. When the 
 rationalist dictators of the French Revolution, from 
 hatred of all traditional and sacred origins, resolved to 
 efface the ancient period of seven days from the 
 calendar of a great people, they knew not where to 
 take the basis of a new calculation, save in the con- 
 venience of a system of numeration. They decreed 
 that the week should be ten days, in order to introduce 
 the uniformity of the decimal mode into labour, as into 
 weights and measures. The French citizen was to 
 labour for nine days and rest on the tenth, simply 
 because a like division had been established in things 
 of number, and because it is easier to compute figures
 
 The Double Work of Man. 245 
 
 by this mode than by any other. No one troubled 
 himself to learn whether the body of man would bear 
 such an increase of labour ; and, had they done this, it 
 is manifest that every precise limit would have been 
 the result of an arbitrary choice, and not the fruit of 
 experience or reasoning. 
 
 The number seven, chosen by God, has no relation 
 to any mathematical fitness. Nor is it justified by the 
 degree of the bodily forces ; for it is not easy to see, 
 for instance, that man would not have been able to 
 labour for seven days and to rest on the eighth. It is 
 a number taken from a higher region than physical 
 order, and so it should be, since it was a matter of 
 regulating the relations of two kinds of labour, one 
 material and the other spiritual. Evidently, between 
 two kinds of things so completely diverse, the mediator 
 could come only from a point which governed both, 
 that is to say, the soul and the body. Now, God 
 alone governs all the beings which compose the 
 hierarchy of the universe ; he alone, in his universal 
 and creating essence, possesses the pattern of their 
 own, the reason of their existence, the law of their 
 relations, the principle of their harmony. It is then 
 in himself, in the higher and mysterious mathematics 
 of his own nature, that God has chosen the number 
 suitable as the rule of our double activity. This
 
 246 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 number does not appear in the work of cosmogony 
 only, it plays an important part in all the rest of the 
 divine operations, as the Scriptures show us. We see 
 it shining in the seven weeks of years of the Hebrew 
 jubilee, in the seven branches of the candlestick of 
 Jerusalem, in the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, in the 
 seven sacraments of the Church, in the seven seals of 
 the Apocalypse, and in a multitude of occurrences 
 which it would require too much time to enumerate. 
 In almost every page of the sacred books its im- 
 portance is manifested, by the use which God has 
 directly or indirectly made of it. 
 
 In short, to the eyes of pure reason the number 
 seven is an arbitrary number ; to the eyes of reason 
 enlightened by faith it is a divine number ; to the 
 eyes of history it is a traditional number ; to the eyes 
 of experience it is a number which has reconciled the 
 wants and duties of the body with the wants and 
 duties of the soul. Six days of temporal labour have 
 sufficed for man in all times and under all climates to 
 gain his subsistence without weakening his strength, to 
 fertilise the earth without compromising his health or 
 his happiness ; the seventh day, consecrated to repose 
 in the worship of God, has also sufficed for him to 
 refresh his soul, to preserve truth, to rekindle his love, 
 and, in fine, to advance peacefully and joyously
 
 The Double Work of Man. 247 
 
 towards the august end of a creature blessed by God. 
 Whatever metaphysical judgment you may pronounce 
 upon this memorable division of temporal and 
 spiritual labour, there are two things which you 
 cannot deny, namely : its universality and its effica- 
 city ; so much the more remarkable, as we do not see 
 any rational cause for it, whilst we are forced to 
 conclude that that cause exists. Would you destroy 
 the balance of human activity, engender the degrada- 
 tion of souls, the oppression of the weak, the cupidity 
 of all, and the misery of the greater number ? Would 
 you do this ? It is easy ; touch the law of labour as it 
 was promulgated by the work of creation; increase 
 temporal labour ; lessen, by violence or artifice, 
 spiritual labour ; abandon man to the inspirations 
 of his covetousness and the will of his masters ; do 
 this, and you will be sure to gather its fruit in a genera- 
 tion which will satisfy you, if you like the moral and 
 physical degradation of mankind. 
 
 I say the physical as well as the moral degradation ; 
 for the observance of the seventh day was not esta- 
 blished simply with a view to religious sanctification, 
 but also and directly with a view to terrestrial preser- 
 vation. This is why Scripture employs two remarkable 
 expressions at the same time ; it says that God rested 
 on the seventh day, and that he sanctified it. And as
 
 248 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 the object of God was to trace the rule of our activity 
 by his example, it follows that he recommended two 
 things to us at the same time, repose and the sanctifi- 
 cation of the seventh day. And if you doubt this, if 
 you do not think that God has so great a regard for 
 the equitable well-being of the body of man, hear it 
 again proclaimed by Moses, at the foot of Sinai, in the 
 great law of the Sabbath : Six days shalt thou labour, 
 and shalt do all thy works; the seventh day is the day 
 of the sabbath, that is, the rest of the Lord thy God; 
 thou shalt not do any work therein, thou nor thy son nor 
 thy daughter, nor thy man-servant nor thy maid-servant, 
 nor thy ox, nor thy ass, nor any of thy beasts, nor the 
 stranger that is within thy gates* This is the law. 
 Now listen to the reason which God immediately 
 gives for it ; that, he says, thy man-servant and thy 
 maid-servant may rest ei'en as thyself} And going still 
 further, he said on another occasion to all the assembled 
 people : Six days thou shalt work ; the seventh day 
 thou shalt cease, that thy ox and thy ass may rest, and 
 the son of thine handmaid and the stranger may be 
 refreshed.* Here God stipulates in favour of the 
 animals who share the labour of man ; he associates 
 them in the benefit of his merciful providence, and 
 
 6 Deuteronomy v. 13, 14. 7 Ibid. 
 
 8 Exodus xxiii. 12.
 
 The Double Work of Man. 249 
 
 since they are fatigued with the reasonable creature, 
 he -wills that the repose of the reasonable creature 
 should extend even to them. You recognise here the 
 heart of God, and if your intelligence still doubted of 
 the temporally philanthropic sense attached by Scrip- 
 ture to the law of the seventh day, there remains no 
 longer any excuse for you before texts which from 
 their clearness defy interpretation. Listen again, 
 however. After God had recommended to his people 
 the observance of the seventh day in favour of the 
 poorest and most laborious, he terminates by this 
 solemn adjuration : Remember that thou also didst 
 serve in Eg)'pt, and the Lord thy God brought thee out 
 from thence with a strong hand and a stretched-out arm : 
 Therefore he hath commanded thee that thou shouldst 
 observe the sabbath day? Thus it is in remembrance 
 of the bondage in Egypt, and in recalling it to them, 
 that God imposes upon the posterity of Jacob the 
 charter of rest from labour, that is to say, the first and 
 fundamental charter of all liberty. For what is the 
 liberty of a man attached to the glebe of unremitting 
 labour ? What is the liberty of a body never uplifted 
 towards the vault of heaven, and the liberty of a soul 
 never raised towards the light of God ? 
 
 It is to you, gentlemen, to all generations of 
 9 Deuteronomy v. 15.
 
 250 Ttie Double Work of Man. 
 
 masters, that these formidable words are addressed, 
 which, three thousand years ago, resounded in the 
 deserts of the Red Sea: Remember that thou also 
 didst serve in Egypt ! All of us, in our forefathers, 
 have served ; all of us, in our posterity, shall serve in 
 Egypt In vain do we wear the signs of emancipa- 
 tion, and ask from the future the fidelity which it 
 refuses to kings ; we are of a blood which servile 
 labour has formed, which servile labour will form 
 again. See in your hands the trace of earth ; we 
 come from the earth, and to it we shall return. 
 There is no exception for any one of us, for the 
 child of the palace any more than for the child of 
 the cottage. Sooner or later the long hand of mis- 
 fortune will again seize upon us and bring us back to 
 the obscure labour which was our cradle. And if it 
 was so in the ages of stability, how much more now 
 when every corner-stone has been destroyed, and we 
 build in the tempests of equality the shifting edifice 
 of our destinies. Harken then to the words which 
 remind you of the bondage of Egypt, respect in your 
 brethren living in service the service which was your 
 own, and which will return to you again. Take 
 not away from them the day of relaxation which was 
 prepared for them from the beginning as the liberty 
 of their souls and bodies, and with a degree of
 
 The Double Work of Man. 2 5 1 
 
 munificence of which you do not perhaps form an 
 idea. 
 
 For remark that God has not made of the seventh 
 day a private institution, a day to take at hazard by 
 each of us in any particular course of occupied days. 
 No, he has made of it the great social institution; 
 he has convoked the human race on the same day 
 and at the same hour in the whole course of ages, 
 inviting it to repose, to rejoice, and be exalted in 
 him. In a word, he has founded a periodical and 
 perpetual festival for mankind. For man needs 
 festivals. Withheld far from the permanent city 
 which is the term of his pilgrimage, and bearing in 
 his heart the sadness of this trial of absence, he needs, 
 by certain emotions, to leave the monotonous shadow 
 of his life. Like Saul, he needs to hear the sound of 
 the harp, or like David, to dance to music before the 
 ark of God. But who will give these festivals to the 
 poor of this world? Who will give them palaces, 
 statues, paintings, voices, and lights ? Who will give 
 them emotions worthy of them, and that rare joy in 
 which the conscience is enraptured as well as the 
 heart? The people are. poor and without art; they 
 possess nothing great but themselves and God who 
 protects them. The people and God come together 
 and form the festival of mankind. For sixty centuries
 
 252 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 these two have been faithful to this meeting, and enjoy 
 together without interruptions that festival which costs 
 nothing to the people but their assembling, to God 
 but looking down upon them. 
 
 The legislators of nations have recognised this 
 popular want of common and public enjoyments; 
 they have sought to satisfy it by religious pomps, by 
 spectacles, triumphs, games, and combats. But 
 instead of instructing and elevating man, nothing 
 has helped more to degrade him ; the most shameful 
 passions came there to seek gratification and applause. 
 Sensuality and blood met together there before the 
 sacred images of country ; and publicity, the mother of 
 modesty, is there for the multitude only an additional 
 debauch. This is because, in fact, the pleasures of 
 the crowd turn easily towards all the vices. A 
 celebrated politician has said : " Whoever assembles 
 the people makes them factious." It may with no less 
 truth be said : Whoever amuses the people corrupts 
 them. In modern times rationalist legislators have 
 been seen endeavouring to create festivals in order to 
 replace that of the seventh day which they had 
 abolished. They have only succeeded in inventing 
 imitations of antiquity with the addition of ridicule 
 and without the people. Public common sense was 
 too just and too profound, under the inspiration of
 
 The Double Work of Man. 253 
 
 Christianity, to enjoy these puerile renovations. 
 It then became necessary, in the great occasions of 
 civil life, to limit them to vulgar amusements, and 
 God alone remained to give to the human race grave 
 solemnities which draw men together, move, ame- 
 liorate, and bring them repose. 
 
 Is there any one among you who has not been 
 touched by the spectacle which a Christian population 
 presents on the day consecrated to God ? The public 
 places covered with a multitude of beings dressed in 
 their best apparel ; all ages appearing there with their 
 hopes and fears, each tempered by a sentiment higher 
 than life. The eyes that meet each other are 
 animated by fraternal joy ; the servant is nearer to 
 his master ; the poor less removed from the rich ; 
 all, by the community of the same duty accomplished 
 and the same grace received, feel more fully that they 
 are sons of the same Father who is in heaven. The 
 silence of servile labour is compensated for by the 
 joyous and musical sound of the bells, which make 
 known to thousands of men that they are free, and 
 prepares them to endure for God the days when they 
 will not be free. No austerity clouds their features ; 
 the idea of observance is moderated by that of repose, 
 and the idea of repose is embellished by the image of 
 a festival. Incense burns in the temple ; lights shine
 
 254 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 upon the altars ; music fills the vaults and speaks to 
 all hearts ; the priest goes from the people to God 
 and from God to the people ; earth mounts upwards 
 and heaven descends. Who does not leave the 
 temple more calm ? Who will not return to it better ? 
 Oh ! for my part, gentlemen, this day has never 
 passed without having moved me ; and even here, in 
 this capital, where so many souls do not respect 
 it, I never witness its popular effect without lifting 
 my heart towards God in an aspiration of gratitude 
 and love. 
 
 Such is then the sense, such is the result of that 
 great law of labour which God willed to promulgate 
 and to hallow in the very act of creation. After 
 having interpreted it to you, can I withhold a painful 
 sensation which oppresses me ? Can I refrain from 
 complaining that there is a Christian people which 
 despises this law, and that people is our own ? Is it 
 really France that, in this point, neglects the most 
 sacred of duties between man and man ? Is it 
 France that tears in twain the fundamental pact of 
 mankind, that delivers over to the rich the body and 
 soul of the poor to use at their pleasure, that tramples 
 under foot the day of liberty, equality, fraternity, the 
 sublime clay of the people and of God ? I ask you, 
 is it really France? Do not excuse her by saying
 
 The Double Work of Man. 255 
 
 that she grants to each the free exercise of his own 
 worship, and that no one, against his consent, is 
 constrained to work on the seventh day. For it is 
 but to add to the reality of servitude the hypocrisy of 
 freedom. Ask the workman whether he is free to 
 abandon his labour on the dawn of the day that 
 commands him to rest. Ask the young man who 
 consumes his life in a daily lucre of which he does 
 not profit, if he is free to breathe only once in the 
 week the air of heaven and the still purer air of truth. 
 Ask those withered creatures who people the manu- 
 facturing cities if they are free to save their souls in 
 comforting their bodies. Ask the innumerable victims 
 of personal cupidity and of the cupidity of a master, 
 if they are free to become better, and if the gulf of 
 toil without physical or moral reparation does not 
 swallow them up alive. Ask those even who repose, 
 but who repose in the degradation of unregulated 
 passions, ask them what becomes of the people in 
 that rest which is not given and protected by God. 
 No, gentlemen, liberty of conscience here is only a 
 veil that covers oppression ; it covers with a golden 
 mantle the cowardly shoulders of the most vile of all 
 tyranny, the tyranny that abuses the toil of man by 
 cupidity and impiety. If liberty of conscience were 
 a reality here, doubtless Protestant England would
 
 256 The Double Work of Man. 
 
 have perceived it; doubtless the democracy of the 
 United States of America would have learned it : and 
 where in the world has the right of the seventh day 
 been more respected ? Learn, then, those who know 
 it not ; learn, enemies of God and of the human race, 
 whatever name they bear, that between the strong and 
 the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the 
 master and the servant, it is liberty that oppresses, 
 and law that gives freedom. Right is the sword of 
 the powerful, duty is the shield of the weak. 
 
 It is high time for us to remove from France this 
 lamentable error, which has lasted but too long. The 
 tempests also warn us that it is not good to violate 
 commandments which were promulgated with the 
 creation, renewed in the thunders of Sinai, and re- 
 invigorated by the blood of Calvary. Whosoever is 
 against God is against mankind, and if a few unhappy 
 men, armed with what they call reason, fear not to 
 make these two enemies, we may trust to the 
 vengeance of the future alone that future which is 
 already the present, and which warns us all to think 
 of our faults and generously to combat them by a 
 salutary reparation. France will do this ! Yes, 
 Lord, France will do this ! We see its foreshadowing 
 in the respect she pays to thee in the midst of the 
 ruins she has so suddenly made. She will listen to
 
 The Double Work of Man. 257 
 
 the forewarnings of experience, she will rise again 
 towards thee by the difficulties which surround her, 
 she will recognise the principle of her salvation in 
 that beautiful saying which thou hast pronounced to 
 all nations of the earth by Jesus Christ thine only Son : 
 Seek first the Kingdom of God, and his justice, and all 
 other things shall be added to you. 10 Hearken, O God, 
 to that voice which speaks to thee from France ; and 
 when another year fallen from thy eternity upon our 
 short life shall bring us again together in this temple, 
 grant that we may find here more steadfast, stronger, 
 and more glorious than ever, our country and truth ! 
 
 10 Matt. vi. 33.
 
 259 
 
 DECLARATION. 
 
 ALTHOUGH I have constantly taught under the autho- 
 rity and in the presence of the archbishops of Paris, 
 and my doctrine has never been criticised or called in 
 question by them ; although that same doctrine, pub- 
 lished by the press, has excited neither reproach nor 
 discussion : yet, lest in treating so many theological 
 questions some involuntary error may have escaped 
 me, and this I must and do readily presume from my 
 weakness, I declare that I submit my Conferences to 
 the Catholic Church, whose son I am, and in parti- 
 cular to the Holy Roman Church, the mother and 
 mistress of all Churches, wherein resides the plenitude 
 of the authority founded upon earth by our Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 
 
 I also declare again that I do not acknowledge the 
 pretended reproductions of my Conferences which
 
 260 Declaration. 
 
 have been made by various periodicals, whatever be 
 their form or name. I once more protest against that 
 violation of literary rights, whose result is to place 
 under the name of a preacher discourses imperfectly 
 reported amidst an immense auditory, and not less 
 imperfectly corrected by the authors of such specu- 
 lation. Should the doctrine contained in these pub- 
 lications be attacked, I decline the responsibility 
 thereof as of a work which is not mine, and for which 
 I can be held accountable onlyjty a violation of all 
 right and equity. 
 
 FR. HENRI-DOMINIQUE LACORDAIRE, 
 Prov. des Fr. Prhhatrs. 
 
 NANCY, at the Convent of Notre-Dame-du-Chene, 
 the i$th October, 1851. 
 
 LONDON I PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, 
 STAMFORD STRBET AND CHARING CROSS.
 
 A 000098106 8
 
 
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