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BELIEF IN THE DIVINITY OF
JESUS CHRIST

BELIEF IN THE DIVINITY
OF JESUS CHRIST

THE REV. FATHER DIDON

OF THE ORDER OF SAINT DOMINIC

LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Ltd.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1894

TO
THE PUPILS OP THE SCHOOLS
OF
ALBERT LE GRAND,
LA PLACE
AND
LACORDAIRE

PREFACE
My Friends, — I dedicate these lectures to you.
They were not specially composed for you, but I
publish them mainly for you, and to you I dedicate
them with the ardent desire that you may share
my hopes, my convictions, and my faith.
As a priest of Jesus Christ, nothing is nearer
my heart than to reveal Him to those committed
to my charge, and to aid them to become His
loving and intelligent disciples, faithful in spite of
trial and persecution, even unto death.
To be a disciple of Jesus Christ, is to make a
free choice of Him and accept Him as a Master, to
submit the reason to Him that He may enlighten
it, conscience that He may direct and command it,
liberty and will that He may sustain and stimulate
them by His spirit, to give up our life to Him that
He may model it upon his own, to place our des
tiny in His hands that He may accomplish it.
The disciple accepts as truth all that Jesus said
and taught ; he receives all that He has com
manded as the law of absolute perfection, and he

viii PREFACE
endeavours to do all that Jesus did, following His
example as the spotless ideal of sanctity. Every
human word contrary to His word is in error,
every law in contradiction with His law is evil,
every life in opposition with His life is corrupt.
Open your hearts to the Spirit of Christ that He
may become the divine principle of universal
activity in you.
Call no man on earth master ; you have in the
order of eternal life only one Master, Christ. No
other name under heaven is given to men to save
them, free them from evil, uplift them to good.
Jesus Christ remains for all humanity what He
said that He was : the Way, the Truth, and the
Life. Whosoever does not know Christ does not
know where he himself is going, he is not on the
road, he struggles in the darkness or lies inert in
the shadow of death ; and he who, having known
Him, forsakes Him, strays in blindness and loses
eternal life.
No human science can show us our supreme
destiny ; how could it clear the way for us ? No
philosophy can instruct us about divine truth, and
how shall it give light to the soul which hungers
for God ? No created force can raise us to God,
to the Infinite ; how can it give us that life of
which God is the eternal nourishment ?
The disciple of Jesus Christ escapes from the
fatality of that weakness against which every

PREFACE ix
living soul struggles and revolts, or under the
weight of which it sinks at last in saduess and
despair. He is freed from the service of false
masters, for he knows their radical incompetence
in the domain of destiny. If God exists they are
incapable, with all their science and philosophy, of
translating for us His impenetrable will. But,
they say, there is no God. They have never
proved it, nor even weakened the unshakable
testimony by which all healthy and steadfast
reason demonstrates God.
The Divine Master, on the contrary, opens to
the believer the way in which he must walk and
iuto which our Master first entered ; He reveals to
him the infinite truth of which He is the incarna
tion, and pours into his will the Holy Spirit as a
source of life springing from the bosom of God.
All that was in Christ, who was substantially
full of divinity, shines in His disciple ; his reason
has thenceforth the only guide which does not
deceive ; his conscience, the sole counsellor who
does not lead astray; his liberty, the only force
which lifts him to the level of all duty and main
tains him at the height of all sacrifice. The
disciple of Jesus belongs no more to himself ; he
makes one with Christ, and in this intimate and
ineffable communion his own mind is supplanted
by the mind of his Master in him.
Faith, my friends, accomplishes this prodigy ;

x PREFACE
it creates in us the new man, the man of God, the
eternal man, the man free from all slavery to
matter, from all the grossness of animal life, from
all the weakness and limits of reason and liberty.
This new man created by Christ is concealed
under the veil of our infirmities and our sorrows ;
but he grows in secret, in contact with the invi
sible Spirit ; those in whom he dwells know that he
will appear one day full of glory when God frees
him and opens His eternal kingdom to him.
Hence, in this world and on this earth where he
is only a sojourner, comes the indefatigable vitality
of the true believer ; he has the knowledge that he
carries Christ living in him, he feels himself with
Him in the light, the force and the power of God.
His hope is never wearied, his noble ambitions
never satisfied, his power of sacrifice never ex
hausted or discouraged. Always assailed, never
subdued : always persecuted, never vanquished ;
always despised by the false wisdom of this world,
yet enforcing the respect of the most malicious ;
always treated as a relic of the past, yet never
dying ; abiding, on the contrary, and ever growing
younger in a hostile, unquiet, variable and fading
world. He will not turn to scepticism ; the sceptic is
detached from his basis ; he succumbs under the
weight of his own sorrow, his weakness and his
nothingness; he has committed suicide of the

PREFACE xi
mind. While the disciple of Jesus is rooted by
his heart, by his will, by his reason, by all his
being in the full faith in Him who is ; he, above
all others, lives. He will not become a prey to
pessimism, nor ask himself if life is worth living.
More than any other he knows its infinite value.
This vile earth is dear and precious to him, for it
has seen the sweet light of the invisible God in the
Word made flesh. And he himself was framed
of the dust of earth that he might grow to the
height of God who has created and saved him.
What, then, do the sorrow, the misconception,
and the anguish of earthly existence matter to
him who feels quicken within him the germ of
eternal life ? And for those in whom this germ
has not been sown or who have allowed it to die,
not all the pleasures, all the powers, all the
victories of this earth can ever fill the fearful void
which is the punishment of souls without faith,
without God and without hope ?
In the school of such a Master, my friends, you
will not live as strangers to your time ; you will
love it without flattery, for it is not exempt from
sorrow ; you will judge it without bitterness, for
its faults deserve pity ; you will serve it with
self-denial and hope, as the disciples of Him who
is the Saviour of all, and for whom no wound is
incurable, no progress impossible.
The majority of cultivated men are dazzled,

xii PREFACE
puffed up, intoxicated by science ; it is for you to
keep cool and calm. Estimate this earthly light
at its real value ; excellent for the understanding
of matter, but powerless to know the things of
the Spirit — that Spirit which is the beginning of
all things, which rules all things, which animates all
things ; that Spirit whose breath sways all things
and on whose attraction everything depends.
Science is good for this life, for time, for our
earthly span ; but it cannot make us live in the
Infinite, in the Eternal, which is our true life.
The vain systems of philosophy — pantheism,
materialism, subjectivism, idealism, positivism,
scepticism — whose ephemeral reign leads astray
many simple intellects who believe that frail com
binations of thoughts and theories, of hypotheses
and facts, can measure the Universal, the Infinite,
the Absolute — these vain systems take no hold on
the disciple of Christ. He judges them and
cannot be judged by them, for he is above them.
His reason is enfranchised by the word of his
Master ; he holds this word by faith, he attempts
not to measure it, knowing that it is unsearch
able ; human systems amuse and interest him,
but they do not tyrannise over him. He treats
them with independence and a good-natured
eclecticism, without narrowness and without en
thusiasm. He knows that they are all incomplete ;
why should he then submit to them ? He re-

PREFACE xiii
cognises in each more or less truth ; why then
should he disdain their varied hues and sparkling
facets ? This proud emancipation of the mind has
become for every free man the first intellectual
virtue of the day ; it has always been the honour
of Christ's disciples.
When in this spirit of manly independence you
have taken your place in the modern world, my
friends, you will soon see that it is given up to
hot, eager, and universal conflicts. It is not solid
earth, nor even a calm sea with a rippled surface ;
but rather an ocean where rapid currents meet, and
whose waters boil with fury and great noise.
Everywhere is there antagonism ; between
science and metaphysical philosophy, between
these two lights of earth and the divine light of
faith, between Church and State, between the
governors and the governed, between conservatives
and the partisans of progress, between the class
which has and that which has not, between
capital and labour, between the middle class and
the workman, between nations and races, between
interests and ideas.
I know that strife is the great law of the
universe, and that it works more cruelly in the
human kingdom than in the other kingdoms ; but
I would not have you surprised nor scandalised,
nor, above all, discouraged at the view of these
increasing conflicts of which our time and our

xiv PREFACE
country show us many examples ; for I know also
that the strife is only a passing state which must
finally resolve itself into a perfect equilibrium.
The sole and eternal antagonism is that between
good and evil ; all others will end in the effective
harmony of opposing forces, or — if these forces are
intelligent — in mutual tolerance.
The true disciple of Jesus Christ has for evil an
absolute and implacable hatred ; he knows no
shameful compromises ; he never submits ; he
protests. Were he alone against a world, he
would keep his faith intact like those valiant
soldiers whose hands still clasp the flag and who
die still guarding it, wrapped in its folds.
Except in the strife with sin, he is everywhere
the man of peace, faithful to the spirit of his
Master who praised the peace-makers, saying of
them that they should be called children of God.
He works in harmony with the great intellectual
forces of the world : science, philosophy, and faith.
Light cannot be contrary to light. However
diverse may be its rays, they are fused in the
same brightness and they come from the same
sun. In opening his soul to the eternal Word he
sacrifices neither science nor philosophy ; he re
mains the man of experience who studies visible
phenomena ; the man of reason who scrutinises
the causes which transcend experience ; and, if he
corrects by faith the aberrations of philosophy, if

PREFACE xv
he forbids science to go beyond its limits, he knows
also how to throw upon faith the lights of science
and philosophy in order to render faith more human
and more accessible.
You, my friends, will accomplish this work of
enlightenment, each according to his own gifts, and
you will disperse the darkness gathered by those
narrow minds who are deceived by inferior science,
or whom false systems enslave, thrown back upon
themselves, powerless to see and to hear the bright
and vibrating realities of the divine world.
Mingle in the same spirit of conciliation and
peace with the social and political world.
The Church and the State should not be ranged
in hostile camps, only endeavouring to enslave and
destroy each other. The one, the Church, is in
destructible by divine right ; the other, the State,
is indestructible by natural right. Both were
ordained by God, the Creator and the Saviour,
for the progress and the salvation of man. Their
domains are inseparable, although distinct and
subordinate ; the one bears sway over the con
science, over the soul and its eternal destiny ; the
other is limited to matter, to the external man, to
his manifestations in his social environment, to his
right to live there, to grow and to act, to implant
himself there in truth, right, justice and peace.
The true believer endeavours to be the upright
citizen of both these realms. As a submissive son

xvi PREFACE
of the Church, he knows how to obey all the just
laws of his country, and even to submit to unjust
laws ; he knows how to keep the wise and honour
able mean between base servility and noisy revolt.
His robust faith in justice teaches him long-suffer
ing and patience. You will not find him either
among anarchists whose savage temper seeks only
to destroy, nor among slaves whose cowardice
and fear encourage every tyranny. He is of the
race of those who resist and die rather than soil
their hands by any baseness. The freed-man of
God, he chooses the storms of liberty rather than
the deadly calm of oppression. His faith needs
freedom to live and expand ; he asks it from all
human powers till he obtains it. And if liberty, in
spite of some imperfections, reigns in modern
societies, we owe this privilege to Jesus Christ
who frees men's consciences, the First-bom of the
free sons of God.
Defend, my friends, this conquest of Christ every
time that it is menaced by any tyrant, whether
popular or aristocratic, parliamentary or monarchic.
Arouse yourselves at the first clink of chains.
Sleep not, for this conquest is never final ; it must
always be defended and increased.
I will say nothing, my friends, of the antagonism
of political parties. It falls into the background,
is effaced and disappears before the conflict of
classes, of which the sound fills the closing years

PREFACE xvii
of the century. Carry there also the same spirit
of conciliation and of peace ; reprove violence and
hatred, which are always sterile and homicidal ;
resist selfish oppression, which is always corrupt
ing; these are the things which provoke bloody
revenges. Injustice consecrated by custom and
opinion begets disorder ; no society can live in
peace if the rights of all are not safeguarded.
Do not imitate those whose words are high and
whose action is low ; those who speak or write,
and do not act ; those who give themselves out as
censors of public morals and who act like these
sinners against whom they launch their anathemas.
Are you rich ? Use your fortune not only for
your own good, but for the good of all ; place it at
the service of thinkers and workers ; do not be
content yourselves in the mere comfort of per
sonal wealth, and if you cannot yourself create or
act, associate yourselves with those who think and
work. The capital which belongs to you should not
remain unproductive ; you have not the right to
keep it unused. It is a power of God, and if you
restrain it, it will explode like thunder.
Have you workmen under you ? Treat them
like men; let not one suffer by your fault, nor
his wife, nor his children ; above all, let none be
in want or suffer hunger.
And if strict justice did not oblige you to
b

xviii PREFACE
ameliorate the lot of your workmen, charity im
poses it on you as a sovereign duty. For charity
is the supreme law of all the disciples of Christ,
Work, justice, charity, that is the pacific code of
new societies.
Put it in practice, my friends, in order to do
honour to your Master; publish it, propagate it
henceforward. The curse lies on the idle, the
unjust, the unfeeling. The conscience of the age
is in arms against all those who do nothing and
rest content in selfish opulence ; against the
violent who in their iniquity take advantage of the
weak ; against the powerful, who, able to lessen
want, allow it to extend like a devouring leprosy.
And, in order to do what is right, do not wait
till this peaceful code has been sanctioned by
parliament and until the State renders it obliga
tory ; you might have to wait a long time.
The need is urgent, and, moreover, conscience
is enough for Christ's disciples, and your Master
long ago bound your conscience.
Exterior laws lend sanction to good rather than
produce it. Evil men know how to avoid them,
and upright men do not wait for their promulga
tion to do right. Though I do not regard- laws
as absolutely useless, I consider them insufficient ;
it is not legislation which can pacify our society
which is agitated by class antagonism, but justice
and kindness flowing like two sacred streams over

PREFACE xix
the whole of humanity. But learn that the two
streams have their infinite source at the Cross on
which Jesus died for righteousness' sake, the victim
of eternal justice.
In so doing, you are sure to glorify Jesus
Christ, your Master, to extend His kingdom,
which is the kingdom of God, to work for the
good of your country and of humanity ; for you
will work for the progress of truth, justice and
peace. This progress is slow, hardly perceptible in
our short human lives. The disciple of Jesus
Christ knows neither hasty impatience nor
discouragement. Let others, worn out by strife
and the apparent vanity of their efforts, fall
a prey to their want of faith, deny good, and
despair of the future; he who has given his
full confidence to the Lord of life, knows how
slowly God works, and is not astonished nor
dismayed by it ; he knows that Christ has
conquered evil, that the grain of mustard-seed
sowed by Him in humanity increases in secret —
whether man wills it or not, whether he sleeps
or wakes; and his conscience in which divine
progress is fulfilled opens his eyes to perceive
that which the Spirit of God has brought about
in human society.
This view brings him peace and renders him
strong against evil. Why should he tremble and

xx PREFACE
fear since he triumphs over it every day by his
Master's help ?
. This is the secret of his gentle and unfailing
tolerance. He does not call down the fire of
heaven on the wicked, on inhospitable cities
and nations; he does not root up the tares
roughly in the field of the householder lest he
should pull up with it the wheat also ; he does
not fear to be perverted, and, God helping him,
he hopes to convert others. The infinite gentle
ness of his Master has taken hold of him, he
remembers the words, "Blessed are the meek,
for they shall possess the land." He dislikes
all violence, for he knows that it has no hold
on conscience, and that a conscience that is closed
cannot be subdued. He feels that he is the
son of the Father whose sun .shines on the just
and the unjust ; he is kind to all, after the
example of the Father ; and if his kindness is
unavailing, there remains to him at least the joy
of having loved.
The world, sooner or later, will belong, as Jesus
said, to the race of the Sons of God, of the
pacific and tolerant. The virtue of gentleness
and tolerance is such that perfidious oppressors
wear them as a mask, and they always commit
acts of violence and tyranny in the name of
liberty. Yet you should not give up power; acquire

PREFACE xxi
it, possess it, if it were only to gain the glory
of not using it.
Jesus had the infinite power of God ; it pleased
Him to give us an example, to display it only
in the service of man, to heal them and raise
them from the dead ; He would not employ it
for His own defence, for it was His divine destiny
to fall a victim to His enemies.
But we who have to defend our hearths and
our country in a world where peoples watch
each other jealously, in the threatening attitude
of wild beasts, our duty is to strive to win for our
country all intellectual, moral, and material
forces, that we may defend our national honour,
inspire fear in the people, who menace us, defend
and avenge oppressed rights, and raise an impass
able barrier between Justice, holy Justice, and
the sacrilegious attacks of power. The honour
of the disciple of Christ is to carry the sword not
as a weapon of offence and attack, but as a
weapon of defence against the human beast and
to reduce it, by terror if necessary, if not to
submission, at least to impotence.
Be good and gentle knights, my friends, re
membering your ancestors and the genius of your
race, ever ready, for battle against the insolent and
strong, in defence of the weak, oppressed and
calling for help.
As you are about to enter the life of liberty,

xxii PREFACE
you must put on the armour of the militant and
the strong.
The best-tempered, the most impenetrable to
blows, the most triumphant against evil, is the
faith in Jesus Christ. Put on, then, the armour
of God, and, so protected, you need fear nothing.
Your reason will remain imperturbable in the
midst of the seductions of error, your conscience
will not yield to cowardly compromises, and your
liberty will know neither failure nor revolt.
Take your place boldly among those who act
and strive.
Open your hearts to a manly and holy indig
nation against evil, whatever be its form, whether
error, corruption, venality, violence or cunning,
selfishness, hatred or luxury.
Avoid idlers and gamblers.
Let the herd rush upon pleasure, carried away
by its foolish passions. Modern luxury ought
not to corrupt you; it ought only to spare you
the fiercer struggles for life, to emancipate your
activity, and allow it to give itself to the great,
the high, and the noble battle of the mind.
The Master whom you serve is the great
renovator of humanity. He has broken the
vicious circle in which for ages its wounds, its
errors and corruptions turned. Show yourselves
worthy of Him.
Appear in the first rank of true reformers and

PREFACE xxiii
unwearied apostles of progress. Never be satis
fied. May you be devoured, as was Christ, with a
burning and unquenchable thirst for truth and
virtue, justice and charity.
Man must be always learning; learn, study,
seek, work for the extension of light ; widen the
boundaries of its kingdom.
Societies are always, in some degree, oppressed
by evil and injustice. Never resign yourselves
to the reign of evil and injustice; work and
suffer, strive and agonise, that their dominion
may grow less ; and since, in our democratic age,
a divine impulse carries consciences towards a
more equitable division of wealth, open your
heart and allow it to throb with the hope of the
new order in which might shall not be right, but
in which the right will govern force.
Do not listen to those who preach to you of a
life of pleasure. Young people who allow them
selves to be charmed by the voice of Circe, fall
into the abyss of sensuality.
Those whom pleasure has intoxicated are in
capable of the great struggles for truth and
justice. They squander their vital force and
become impoverished ; the source of heroic will, of
unbounded enthusiasms, of steadfast resolution, of
holy daring, of vast hopes — the source of all these
treasures of life without which nothing great can
be done, is dried up within them.

xxiv PREFACE
They may attempt, and they may succeed in,
poor, fragile and ephemeral enterprises ; they can
never do anything really great. They seek what
is polished, elegant, pretty, fantastic ; but they
never even dream of what is strong, sublime,
eternal. Their whole nature is ansemic, and so is
all that comes from them — their science, their
philosophy, their politics, their art, their religion
even, are all stricken with languor. Their very
virtues, if they have any, are those of the sick or
convalescent. I write for you, my friends, who are young,
that you may be strong ; and I give you the secret
of all strength — resist evil in the shape of the
passions. Sacrifice them, tame them by faith, and
you will store up within you that holy power
which the Spirit of God will guide towards all
good. You hear howling all around you the wind of
incredulity, enveloping the masses in its whirl, and
even drawing into it a crowd of literary and
scientific men, the masters of opinion and of
power. Stand calm in the tempest ; your strength
is not in numbers, in talent, in power, in science
or human philosophy, in money, the god of faith
less and decadent societies ; no, your force is in
Christ, who has chosen and who keeps you, in His
word, wherein are all the treasures of wisdom and
intellect ; in His law of justice and love, without

PREFACE xxv
which all is given up to ruin ; in His irresistible
Spirit, which has seized the world, and against
which nothing earthly and human can prevail.
The first disciples of the Master were few ; they
had, humanly speaking, neither fortune nor
power, neither science nor wisdom. They pre
vailed by the power and the virtue of God with
which Christ had clothed and armed them. And
this handful of poor and ignorant men, these
weaklings who were disdained as the lowest of
their nation, saved humanity and overcame uni
versal corruption.
What they did, the same Spirit by which they
did it, can renew.
May this Spirit give you all hope.
The modern democratic world may be conquered
as was the ancient world of paganism ; be of the
number of believers who seek to conquer it for
the faith, who work in secret or openly for this
conquest, who know that it will be brought about
at the hour determined by God ; for they hear in
their spirit the words ever present, ever stimu
lating, ever encouraging, of the Master to His
disciples of all time : " Fear not, little flock, it
is the will of your Father that you should have
the kingdom."
Even in this world, the triumph and the king
dom belong to good.
In spite of partial defeats, the victory rests

xxvi PREFACE
with those who know, with those who will, with
those who love, with those who die.
We know, we to whom Christ has given definite
teaching about humanity, about His law and His
doctrine. We will, we whom faith animates and
draws towards the Infinite. We love, whom God
has loved even unto death, and who have been
baptised in His blood poured out for love. We
die, we who throughout all ages, on all shores and
under all skies, give our life with Christ in witness
of our fidelity and the truth of His words.
Read these pages, my friends, with your heart
and your conscience. If my cold and pale word
can bring to your faith any light and any energy,
can clear and re-affirm it, if it can raise among
you more ardent and more resolute disciples of
Jesus Christ, my greatest ambition will be satisfied,
and I shall have received from God, through you,
a true recompense, the only one worthy of the
desire of an apostle. Fr. h. DIDON.
Arcueil, February 12, 1894.

CONTENTS

I. THE PRESENT STATE OF THE BELIEF IN THE
DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST  I
II. THE DENIAL OF THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST
IN OUR DAY  28
III. THE WORTH OF THE DENIAL OF THE DIVINITY OF
JESUS CHRIST IN OUR DAY  56
IV. THE CHIEF REASON FOR THE BELIEF IN THE
DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST . . . . 86
V. THE WORTH OF THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS AFFIRMING
HIS DIVINITY  II4
VI. THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE ACT OF FAITH IN THE
DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST  I43
VII. THE SEVEN WORDS OF JESUS ON THE CROSS . 169
VIII. THE PRACTICAL MEANS FOR BELIEVING IN THE
DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST  2IO

BELIEF IN THE DIVINITY OF
JESUS CHRIST

i
THE PRESENT STATE OF THE BELIEF IN
THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST.
I SHALL treat, during this Lent, of the Divinity
. of Jesus Christ, or rather of the belief in the
Divinity of Jesus Christ.
This belief is one of the most remarkable facts,
the most prodigious phenomenon, of psychology
and history.
It is the centre of Christian dogma, the life of
a multitude of believers, for it is professed by
four hundred millions of human beings on the
surface of the globe. It is the life-giving
principle of modern civilisation, the impregnable
fortress which defends morals and culture, the
corner-stone of that great pyramid raised by God
in the midst of time and on the moving sands of
humanity — the Catholic Church.

2 BELIEF IN THE
JNow, at this day, where is this belief, this
divine faith ? Of what attacks is it the object ?
on what proofs does it lean ? what are its effects
on the inner conscience and on the public life of
humanity ? what is its future and what may we
expect from it ?J Must we abandom it as a
shaken cliff which crumbles under our footsteps,
or shall we cling to it as an immovable rock which
cannot be submerged, and remains as a supreme
refuge in case of storm, of cataclysms, of earth
quake and of deluge.
These questions are to be the subject of our
Lenten lectures.
You see that we shall take our stand on dogma,
great Catholic dogma; but I am bound to say,
even while I insist on the strictest dogma and the
most Evangelical morality, even when I confine
myself to the most ethereal regions of Faith, it
will be impossible for me not in some degree to
trouble your minds. For I cannot treat these
problems as a preacher without touching into the
very quick of the religious question, and I cannot
touch it without stirring your souls and awaken
ing your consciences.
The religious question is mixed up with all our
political and social strifes, all our interior divisions ;
it is like a flame which the least breath can
revive and fan, and it infallibly provokes both en
thusiasm and hatred.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 3
Formerly, when I was young and when I felt
my claws growing, I was taught to use them in
order to get rid of indifference of opinion, and
now I have to moderate the ardour of opinion and
its susceptibilities. It is a new art and a difficult,
for there is more danger in moderating a fire than
in kindling it.
Those who practised the old tactics will know
henceforth that the pursuit of good demands
new methods ; but no obstacle, no labour ought to
stop the preacher who knows how to join the
simplicity of the dove with the wisdom of the
serpent. When sent by his Master as a lamb
among wolves, he must not be afraid ; sooner or
later the gentleness of God gets the better of the
violence of men. No longer do the wolves subdue
the lambs, but the lambs transform the wolves
— the world is changed.
Thus armed by Him who gives us power to
break every obstacle, and gentleness to transform
each into a fulcrum — this is the better way —
we will endeavour to accomplish our task, what
ever it be, with complete self-denial, sure that we
shall conquer if only we remain faithful.
Is the belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ
living or dead ? is it declining or advancing ? Has
it finished the phase of its evolution or does it
describe a trajectory of which the term is infinite ?

4 BELIEF IN THE
These questions are all the more interesting that
we live in a time when, among those who consider
themselves the chosen sons of literature, philo
sophy and the higher science, it has been, and it
still is, the fashion to declare that dogmas are
vanishing, that faith has received its death-blow,
that it is in its last agony, that its disappearance
is a matter of years, it may be of centuries, but in
any case a matter of time, and that emancipated
reason and positive science will take charge of its
obsequies. What are we to think of these prophets of woe
with their mournful, disdainful and insolent
prophecies ? I ask all believers — I ask you
especially who have not the simple, tender faith
of children and women, but a masculine and
reasoned faith, you, intelligent Christians initiated
into the science, philosophy and literature of the
day, you, militant Christians who strive and suffer
for the defence and triumph of Faith.
My own profound conviction is that at this day,
in the civilised world, in Europe, and especially in
France, in spite of all attacks, belief in Jesus
Christ, the Son of God made Man, remains en
dowed with indomitable vitality. We are alive,
we are the progressives, we who believe in Jesus
Christ. They who prophesy our ruin, decay and
die. I wish to prove this above all to the unbelievers

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST $
who hear me. If they have done me the honour
to come here, they are certainly not only drawn
by a feeling of curiosity, but by the desire of
hearing a word superior to the word of man — the
Word of God. For whatever man may be, he
will never attempt with a light heart to shake the
human conscience, if a superior force and impulse,
a divine vocation, do not constrain him, aud if the
Spirit of God do not put the word into his lips.
Would that I might discourage and disarm
aggressive incredulity by showing how vain are
all attacks against a faith which does not yield,
rather springs up stronger and more active after
every blow.
I would develop in believers a reasoned convic
tion of the indomitable vitality of their belief — I
would redouble their courage ; and certainly more
than any others they have need to be brave, for
in this age of incredulity and scepticism, no one
is assailed with more fury than God, Jesus Christ
and the Church ; but let them know that so also
no one is more able to resist attack and despise
blows than that sacred battalion which is the
body-guard of God, Jesus Christ and His
Church. Here, then, in a few words, is my answer to the
question. A belief or a faith attests its vitality
by two signs — its power of lasting, and its vigour
for expansion and resistance.

6 BELIEF IN THE
Whenever a living being shows signs of lasting
you can say of it, "It is a strong thing and a
vigorous." Whenever you see a living being mani
fest in its own sphere a power of expansion and
advance, say boldly : " The soul of this being is
riveted to the body."
Now, belief in Jesus Christ is endowed with
the greatest power of lasting and the greatest
power of expansion and resistance ; therefore when
I shall have demonstrated these two propositions
I may draw the conclusion that the Christian
faith is truly living, and that if believers may
rejoice, aggressors must renounce all hope of
destroying it.
The lasting force of a belief is recognised by
one certain phenomenon : its harmonious correla
tion with the essential principles of human nature ;
for human nature, like all nature, being immutable
in its essence, it is evident that if a belief corre-
ponds to its essential elements and its indestruct
ible hopes, it will participate in the immutability
of that nature. We ask, then, what is human
nature ? What are its essential elements and its
living constituent and characteristic forces ?
Human nature has its indomitable aspirations
which put its energies in movement. The weight
of our body attracts us to the earth and knits us
to it by close relations and an indestructible

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 7
affinity. The strictest spiritual doctrine will never
be able to suppress either these relations or that
affinity, for they constitute the very essence of our
earthly life. Earth claims us in some measure —
it is the lower part of our being. It belongs to us
even more than we belong to it, and yet we are
condemned to seek in it that which strengthens
our body and to beg from it in order that we may
live. Our attraction to those who are like ourselves is
equally indestructible.
Whatever be our spiritual tendencies, whatever
attraction lies for contemplative minds in medita
tion and solitude, man will never cease to obey
his social instincts, the need of grouping his like
around him, of founding families, civilisations,
peoples and races.
An aspiration greater than the two others,
and not less essential, raises us above our
selves. Man is an intelligent being, and as such he
necessarily seeks to know the cause of phenomena,
to discover the essence and the reason of things.
He goes from phenomenon to phenomenon, from
cause to cause, ever mounting higher, drawn
towards supreme truth by that insatiable curiosity
which is the witness at once to infinite need and
infinite power, to be satisfied only in Him whom
the great philosophers of Greece called, now

8 BELIEF IN THE
"Him who is," now "The Pure Act," now the
" Cause of Causes."
Now we say the "Beyond," the "Ideal,"
" Logic," "Number," "Law," colourless words, sure
indications of distrustful and languishing thought.
What ! number ! logic ! transcendent logic — as the
Germans would have said fifty years ago — sove
reign law. What is a law without a law-giver ?
An ideal ! What is an ideal without a reality ? A
name, a figment of the brain. But then how can
the intellect be set in motion by that which has
no reality ?
No, man is drawn towards first truth, sub
stantial truth, which is identical with Being.
Let us say it plainly : man is drawn towards
God. Just as by his intellect he aspires after truth,
by his will he cries after, good. To be more
comprehensible to the people, let us say that
man desires happiness. That is to say, the good
which satisfies blesses ; and he seeks it with a sort
of frenzy.
This force is one of the great levers of modern
civilisation. Never perhaps has happiness, so
often confounded with comfort, more deeply
stirred the human soul and kindled its desire.
Take science : it is moved by the hunger and
thirst after comfort and happiness, when by it's
researches and bold invention it endeavours to

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 9
make a ray of better light beam upon you, when
armed with its magic sceptre it dreams of embel
lishing our earth more and more, so as to give
it an eternal spring and make us find in it again
the paradise we have lost. But even in this eager
search for comfort, science seeks for God, and
man desires God.
Now the man of science may adorn my house,
and endeavour to transform earth into a paradise ;
but such a paradise can only be framed of created,
that is to say, of finite things. These cannot
suffice us ; the thirst for happiness which consumes
us is a thirst which nothing can slake but God,
the Being absolutely perfect, eternal, unchange
able, and infinite. The more our horizons extend
under the brightness of scientific discovery, the
more are we consumed by this thirst.
Savages are content with anything ; with a little
palm wine and a few fruits ripened in their burn
ing sun; but civilised men are more exacting.
Even when earth is embellished and transformed,
it remains a prison from which we must needs
escape ; man's thirst is slaked by happiness, he
cries after it, he wishes for it without measure ;
but that for which he is ever seeking is infinite
happiness. Another of our hopes will show us what we
are. Man is oppressed by evil; let us say by

10 BELIEF IN THE
injustice ; for evil— I take a definition not meta
physical, but popular and accessible to the merest
child — evil is injustice. We are drawn towards
primary truth not only by our intellect, not only
by our will and our sensations towards happiness,
but in so far as we are free and oppressed by evil,
we thirst for deliverance and hunger for justice.
From this point of view I render true praise to the
present age which more than any other is a prey
to this devouring hunger and thirst.
Thus I can hold out my hand to more than one
unbeliever who hears me, even to Socialists, and
say to them : " Just as science is urged onward
by the desire for well-being and happiness
which we ask it to produce, so humanity which
suffers, which is oppressed by evil, is moved by
injustice and cries with a piercing accent, Who
will show me any good ? "
But just as there is a counterfeit of true happi
ness in material happiness, there is a counterfeit
of justice in brute equality. Our country is at
this day the victim of this coarse confusion — at
every price and with all its power it will have
justice, and it is at the same time devoured by a
passion for equality. There are those who declare
this to be a crime. "You Frenchmen," they say,
"are never moderate, you have a rage for
equality." This is true and must be recognised, and he who

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST u
declares it false, lies. We are a race demanding1
equality : the passion for equality is in our blood
like a burning fire; we can only moderate the
vehemence and the violence of this passion by
tranquil force and the sanctity of justice.
Now, the essence of justice does not consist in
giving to each man a mathematically equal part,
but in giving to each man a proportional share.
There is a hierarchy of rights as of beings, and
this right must be respected. The rights of men
and the rights of women balance each other, but
the rights of the father and of the children are
certainly not equal. Just so, the right of the
priest, the magistrate, the ruler are not the rights
of their subordinates. If we had the religious and
moral sense of justice we should no more be the
plaything of passions capable of setting volcanoes
alight, we should be guarded by its virtue.
Justice may trouble and intimidate the bad and
provoke their revolt, but she is always benefi
cent to those who serve her: she is the salt of
human societies which preserves them from cor
ruption. Frenchmen, restrain your zeal for equality by
zeal for justice, and you will see how many diffi
culties are levelled, how many questions are
resolved or suppressed in this world where the
rage for equality multiplies conflicts and lights up
revolutions, while the worship of justice inspires

12 BELIEF IN THE
wise laws and reduces every force to perfect
harmony. If it be established that man desires absolute
truth, unlimited good, impartial and uncorruptible
justice, I conclude that man is drawn towards
God by the very weight of his high and immortal
nature ; for the first name of God is that of Truth,
substantial, essential, and supreme; His best name
is that of Sovereign Good, Absolute Perfection :
His most sacred name is that of Justice, perfect
and substantial Justice, not only immanent but
transcendant. Such aspirations which ennoble and dominate
our miserable and changing life and make man
a citizen of eternity, demand an answer. Jesus
alone has given this answer ; and to prove this to
you, I will first give you a notion of the belief in
His Divinity of which you have perhaps not
thought ; I do not say only you who believe, but
, you also, above all, who do not believe.
According to the Christian and Catholic faith
Jesus Christ is Very God taking manhood into
Himself by the Incarnation of the Word of God
in human nature. Just as we believe that God
was made Man, so we believe that infinite truth
put Himself into relation with us so as to answer
plainly to our aspirations towards supreme truth.
Yet more, in placing Himself in relation with
us by the means of that humanity to which He

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 13
united Himself substantially, the Word of God
has brought to us at the same time absolute
perfection under a form suited to us, and with
absolute perfection, the power of justice. For if
God is incarnate, it is with the sole end of giving
to man the truth which he seeks in vain by his
faculties alone — Truth to which, were he left to
himself, his spirit could never attain completely ;
with the sole end of giving the dominion to His
holy, unspeakable, and victorious Justice in this
world given over to corruption and slavery ; the
sole end of manifesting eternal love and eternal
perfection to us in a human reality, of flesh and
bone, in a reality living, palpable and sensible, and
of thus revealing to us the Ideal Man, as those
are willing to call Him who have studied Jesus
Christ, that only Being on whose brow history
has placed a glory and can only contemplate on
its knees.
That is the Incarnation : the mystery of Truth,
moral perfection, love and justice, which scientific
Institutes disdain to-day as though its reign were
over, a mystery unspeakable and touching, at
which a sceptical and critical literature may smile
when it hears that the divine Being in whom this
mystery was accomplished was born of a Virgin's
womb. Yes, indeed, a Virgin! for if God descended
upon this earth, in this humanity, we may

14 BELIEF IN THE
not think that God made Himself like the
common herd.
God chose a pure and holy being — a being with
out spot, the Virgin ; He appeared to the people,
to women, to little children, to the despised and
humble of this world ; He appeared to all. But
He concealed Himself from sceptical, proud, and
disrespectful spirits, who do not know how to
bow down before that which is holy and pure,
whose reason is always ready to take offence and
harden itself before the designs of God.
If He has appeared even for these in His infinite
mercy, they have despised and insulted Him, and
would have none of Him. But in spite of the re
bellion, stubbornness and blindness of men, the
plan of God is carried out ; and to all those who
receive Christ in the faith of a docile conscience
Jesus shows Himself, filling them with hopes
which satisfy their infinite aspirations.
And here when I speak of man, I do not mean
only the modern man as he is called, nor the
man of antiquity ; I mean man in all times, in all
countries, in all races, the abiding man ; the man
who is in you and in me, in all of us.
The modern man is he who brings with him the
mutability of things in this changing world and
their incurable nothingness, the worn-out polished
man of letters, who believes in a phrase and forgets
the idea, who seeks for the harmony and the ring

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 15
of words rather "than the harmony of thoughts ;
the ordinary man of science, who allows himself to
be intoxicated by ideal knowledge and by the
illusion of indefinite progress ; the critic, who says
that he can measure all reality by the standard
of his brief reason rather than raise his reason to
the measure of things and the heights of God.
The modern man is he who allows himself to be
dazzled and absorbed by this material life, whereof
the impetuous whirlwind stifles and paralyses our
divine aspirations.
The abiding man, on the contrary, is he who
remains invariable under the mobile and restless
shape of this world, who desires truth and hungers
after perfection, who cries for justice and seeks it
even at the peril of his life, who would give his
very blood to obtain it.
The abiding man ! Jesus Christ was incarnate
to crown his aspirations, and it is he who in the
calm of satisfied aspirations attests the perpetuity
of this faith against which nothing modern will
prevail, neither the modern life of the Renaissance,
nor the modern life of the French Revolution,
nor the modern life of the end of the nineteenth
century. The second sign by which the vitality of a belief
is shown is the power of expansion or of resistance.
Keep these two words in your mind, for, though
they are contraries, they are inseparable.

16 BELIEF IN THE
The law which rules every living creature and
consequently every belief, since every belief may
be likened to a germ, is this : A creature endowed
with vitality manifests itself at once by its power
of expansion in favourable surroundings, and by
the force of its resistance in unfavourable surround
ings. This double phenomenon must be present to'
our minds if we would judge soundly and surely
of the vitality of Christianity and of the faith in
Jesus Christ which is its essence.
If it be asked in what manner, at the present
day and in the modern world, the belief in the
Divinity of Jesus Christ shows its vitality, I answer
that to the eyes of every impartial observer this
belief attests its vitality by turns or simultane
ously, according to its surroundings, by the power
of expansion and the power of resistance.
It may be said that the surroundings most
favourable to Christian belief, and consequently to
the belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, are those
in which it has, I do not say the protection of
authority, but the fulness of liberty. In modern
civilisation the two countries where that liberty is
largest, England and the United States, are pre
cisely those two countries where the belief in Jesus
Christ declares its vitality by its most vigorous
expansion. It is notorious indeed that in England, a
country of great individual autonomy and much

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 17
public liberty, where religions long respected may
unfold themselves freely under the calm eye of
authority — it is notorious, I say, that in England
the Catholic faith, faith in Jesus Christ, is extend
ing and developing.
In the United States this phenomenon is
still more manifest, still more astonishing. That
classic land of individual independence, where
men are free as trees in the virgin forest, is the
land of exuberant expansion. So when I chance
to meet with American bishops or missionaries,
I seem to see a new world where faith is living,
where barriers are removed, where each has his
own place in the sun and may develop without
hindrance. When I see them I feel as it were
intoxicated with holy independence. Well may
you be happy, Americans, who have not to reckon
with any one in the expansion of your living
force ; and it is good to be active and to have free
elbow-room, to be outside the old civilisations
which have reached a point where, in their fixed
and narrow grooves, men can go neither to the
right nor to the left, neither forwards nor back
wards, especially forwards, without finding a
fence on which is written " No thoroughfare ! "
To such a civilisation I prefer the silence and
liberty of the desert or of the barren plain.
There, at least, I can speak to God, to Him who
never betrays, and I need not fear either the
B

1 8 BELIEF IN THE
corrupt multitude or irritable authority, nor
opinion suspicious as the venomous serpents of
which Jesus said to His apostles, " You will
take them in your hands, and they will not kill
you " ; nor the poisoned cup of which Jesus said,
"You will drink of it, and it will not hurt
you." The American Church is happy in having her
liberty, her entire liberty, and I envy her ; her
churches are built, her faithful are multiplied like
the sands of the sea; her example is a comfort
for us worn-out men of Europe, who feel
the weight of the ages. It is good to see her
vigorous youth, her power of expansion! But
fifty years ago she counted only two or three
million Catholics ; to-day more than twelve
million. What an example for the unbeliever !
America is cultivated by us who believe and we
plant in the midst of this free people great trees
of faith, as in France we have planted trees of
liberty, which are indeed the same. It may be
said that the expansion of Catholicism in the
United States is due to the emigration of Catholics
from the Old World. I answer that this fact is a
new proof of the vitality of our belief, and is
an equal evidence of the fecundity of the
American soil, where faith is planted so easily
and grows with so great vigour.
Such is the lot of faith in free surroundings;

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 19
we shall see with what energetic resistance it
declares its robust vitality in unfavourable con
ditions. Take, for example, our own country, France : I
may confess, for none will doubt my love for her,
that France, without being absolutely hostile to the
faith, by no means displays the great respect with
which England and the United States honour it. I
do not speak here of the question of government — •
that would be to touch on politics, which I do not
intend ; but putting every political question aside,
it may be said that even when the Government
shows us the most impartial and the most strict
neutrality — which is very difficult — we have not
yet the fair Anglo-Saxon or American freedom ;
for neutrality is not goodwill, and without good
will is no tolerance, no respect, no complete
liberty. But if, leaving on one side the situation in
which we find ourselves in this country through
the attitude of Government, we consider what
results from the state of doctrines, we shall easily
recognise how uncongenial are the circumstances
in which Christian faith is condemned to live.
Consider the philosophical systems which guide
opinion — materialism, pantheism, naturalism, ideal
ism, criticism, scepticism ; fundamentally and in
various forms negation, doubt, forgetfulness of
God. If we attempt to discover the dominant

20 BELIEF IN THE
intellectual tendency in the mass of minds
we shall recognise a sort of unconscious or
reflected positivism, a vehement inclination to
hold nothing as true but those things for which
there is material evidence, positive facts arid
figures, phenomena of sense, which can be seen,
touched, weighed, measured, labelled. In a
word, the more profoundly we study the reason
ing of the day the more surely we shall perceive,
though sometimes concealed by false modesty, a
very marked disposition which may be called
critical individualism.
In France there are thirty-eight million people,
among whom it is impossible to say how many
thousand there are of writers, philosophers, men
of science, literary men and politicians — no
statistics give these numbers with exactness.
Now, the dominant feeling among them is the
lively sense of their individuality and the absolute
right of criticism. All consider themselves as
competent and supreme judges of everything.
Tradition has no more weight with them than the
last opinion taught at the Sorbonne, an opinion
which may be dismissed or changed from day
to day.
It is clear that this is no favourable soil for
faith. You who deny God cannot believe in the
Incarnation of God ; you who are inclined by a
habit of exclusion to admit only the truths of sense

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 21
cannot believe in the invisible and the immate
rial, even were it incarnate in Christ. Oh, Christ !
.... you admit that He was man, but not that
He was God ; and, yielding to evidence, you give
Him the fairest human names, but you deny to
Him that one which He merits, that one which
expresses Him in his entirety. Nor can you,
who accept no testimony, even when supported
by authentic documents, if it offend your
private judgment, accept the Divinity of Jesus
Christ attested by Himself and by the unin
terrupted testimony of his disciples, from St.
Peter, who confessed Him on the road to Cassarea,
down to Pope Leo XIII., who proclaims Him to
the world in identical terms.
You will object, perhaps, that I refuse to private
judgment the right of critical examination. I
do not object to your use of reason, but I desire
that you should not be the slaves of a vain system
of philosophy, variable and false. I desire that
the modern man should steep himself in Eternity
by raising himself to the reason which does not
pass away, and seek thence light for his re
searches and the sanction for his decisions.
When you appeal to these eternal principles
you will be on the road to faith ; then I shall no
longer fear to see faith in the Divinity of Jesus
Christ founder in my country before the tempest
of pantheist, materialist and positivist doctrines,

22 BELIEF IN THE
doctrines of contemporary Sophists who have
rediscovered the art of playing with all things,
affirming and denying by turns, wrapping
themselves up in a perfidious and shifting
dilettantism for which opinion makes cowardly
concessions, when it ought to assail it without
mercy. He who, instead of submitting himself
with docility to reason, prostitutes it in every
case to find in it the theme of oratorical or
literary argument is but a sophist : he dishonours
and insults reason, and by his attacks on faith
he overthrows and ruins reason herself.
But in this human soil, so sterile and un
congenial, I will show you what, in spite of
atheistic doctrines, in spite of the positivist
spirit, in spite of critical individualism blended
with dilettantism, is the vitality and the force
of resistance of faith in the Divinity of Jesus
Christ. You have but to look about you : there are
more than forty thousand secular priests in
France who obey a hundred bishops, themselves
pledged to one chief, the Pope. There are forty
thousand monks, a hundred and thirty thousand
nuns. These are most eloquent figures which
cannot be explained away; and among thirty-
eight million inhabitants — I do not count
simple believers, that is to say, three-quarters
of the women and children — I do not speak

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 23
of indifferent persons who do not practise their
religion, nor of the valiant and militant believers ;
I speak only of the corps set in array, monks and
nuns, priests and the hierarchy.
What an army is this ! I know only two sorts
of armies — those which attack and hold the field,
alert and active, ready to fling themselves on all
points where the needs of the strife call them ;
and armies concentrated for defence, in impene
trable phalanx, firm, vigorous, invincible. Such
is the great Catholic army in our land of France,
It is compact in the hands of the chiefs it obeys ;
it is fair to see — fairer than that of the great
Jewish nation which covered the summits of
Moab with its tents in line and called forth a
cry of admiration from the prophet who came to
curse it.
Now this army, which shows everywhere a
resistance that no attack can subdue or resist,
does not remain immovable, inert, with grounded
arms ; these valiant legions still attest the
intensity of their faith by a marvellous and apo
stolic zeal for the diffusion of truth, by an irre
sistible, indefatigable, and energetic effort of
charity to communicate the benefits of this truth
under all forms.
Mark well those nuns who give their lives
to succour the suffering members of humanity :
nothing rebuffs them; the splendid courage

24 BELIEF IN THE
of woman and the radiant love of God animates
them. A man can go to shed his blood and be
shot through the breast by the enemy's bullet;
but women's courage is shown in staunching
wounds, in undertaking the most ungrateful and
repugnant tasks ; in these she finds a superhuman
joy, like that of a mother in nursing her sick son.
She succours all who suffer — old men, forsaken
children, and the homeless poor, to whose bodies
and souls she ministers alike. Her pity extends to
every kind of woe : she has a word for the wounded
heart, for shameful poverty and bitter need, for
despair in the depths of conscience ; she knows
how to draw a tear from those who are stifled by
anguish and cannot weep. How wondrous is her
art ! These poor and holy women are verily
miracles of Christian faith in the nineteenth
century. Therefore I am astonished and saddened that
in this country, whose chivalry excites the
mockery of her neighbours, the unbelieveis do
not rival believers in recognising and exalting
these heroines, whose ambition and divine genius
only desire to fly to the help of the outcast.
But the spirit of sect knows neither generosity
nor justice : it is compounded of passion, of blind
ness and of violence. Goodness itself, if it does not
bear its stamp, finds no grace in its sight. It has
dared to proscribe those holy women and to say

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 25
to them : " You shall not tend the sick, because
you will bring them to confession ; I will not
give you my outcast children, because you will
make Christians of them and will nurse in them
outworn superstitions." In its eyes it is no
doubt a superstition to develop in the child its
eternal soul and to nourish the hungry with
perfectness and righteousness. Nothing better
reveals the secret, perverse, and impious intentions
of those sectaries. They attack faith in the
Divinity of Jesus Christ, they attack God himself
through the veil of the Sister of Charity.
If those who are so daring as to attack the
Pope die of it, what will be the fate of those who
have the sacrilegious boldness to attack God and
His Christ ? They will die without honour and
without hope, admired perhaps by men, but
cheerless as they quit this world, which escapes
them against their will, blaspheming the unknown
force which has flung them into life, and which
doubtless delights, they say, to behold unmoved
the torture and the death-agony of miserable
humanity. Leave, then, these noble women, who have found
an answer to your blasphemies, to communicate
their faith and their serenity to the weak and
the outcast, the old and the sick, who are about
to go down to the grave.

26 BELIEF IN THE
Do what you will, not all your philosophy, all
your literature, all your science, all your socialism
can teach you how to die and enter into eternal
life. One only Being can give this necessary and
supreme knowledge : God, God incarnate in Jesus
Christ, who was crucified to teach us the secret
of sorrow and of death.
In conclusion, when a belief is in profound
harmony with human nature, whose essence
is ever the same ; when it declares itself by an
organisation that resists in unfavourable and
expands in favourable surroundings — this belief
has every guarantee that it will endure, and can
defy all things. Such is faith in Jesus Christ.
Since it has existed it has always increased.
In the course of its progress and its evolution,
false prophets, from the great philosophers of
Imperial Rome up to those at the end of
the eighteenth century and in our own age
also, have never ceased to prophesy its ruin ; but
it has never ceased solemnly to give the lie to
these speakers of oracles. Christian believers,
you will not allow yourselves to be intimidated
by this line of augurs and by the audacity of
their lies ? Cling rather to the word of Him
who has said, " The powers of the world shall
not prevail against Me," and whose infallible
word has been confirmed by history through
all ages. -

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 27
Fear nothing ; let not your faith be troubled, let
your reason be reassured. Vain systems rise like
mists which conceal the stars from us and obscure
the sky; but God, who guards humanity, sends,
at his pleasure, great winds to sweep through
space, and the night which weighed upon us is
soon transformed into the full clearness of the
stars. Human doctrines of to-day will be swept away
by the breath of God, and those who lift up their
heads will see the stars in the clear firmament.
But as for me, I want one only star, and that is
the faith in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the same
yesterday and to-day, and the same for ever.

28 BELIEF IN THE

II

THE DENIAL OF THE DIVINITY OF JESUS
CHRIST IN OUR DAY
We have established that the belief in the Divinity
of Jesus Christ is intimately and profoundly corre
lated with the essential aspirations of human
nature. Whence it follows that this belief ought
to find the whole world on its knees ; for if it be
true that it answers to the higher aspirations of
man, why does not man pass at a bound to Jesus
Christ, the manifestation of eternal truth, the
incarnation of absolute perfection in human flesh,
the living and moving expression of that justice
which we need in this world, where the greatest
evil is the sin which oppresses and devours us.
Yet humanity is not on its knees before Jesus
Christ, humanity is divided before Him. Let not
this scandalise you, it would perhaps be unfortu
nate were it otherwise ; for the fate of this divine
belief is the common fate of truth, virtue, justice,
beauty, and even of health. Man is made for truth,
but the greatest among men pass their life in

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 29
doing violence to it. Man is made for justice, but
the masses revolt against it. Man is made for
virtue, but, I ask, where are the virtuous ? Man
by his physical nature is made for health, the
secret of all force and of all well-being ; but he
passes his life in poisoning and killing himself.
The doctors and statisticians who hear me will not
contradict me, for it is they who have formulated
the frightful saying, "Man does not die, but
commits suicide."
Be not, then, astonished or scandalised if to-day,
as in old time, belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ
finds not only believers and disciples, but also
sturdy unbelievers and furious enemies. Infidels
exist, and the history of humanity since the
coming of Christ is the history of a violent move
ment which separates into two camps and sets
against each other those who believe in Him and
those who believe not.
I have spoken to you of the camp of faith, of
the vitality of that intrepid phalanx and the in
destructibility of that belief which lies at the
heart and is involved in the very nature of man.
You expect, perhaps, that I should immediately
give you a proof that the Divinity of Christ is
strongly established, and that it has invincible
methods for impressing itself on the reason. I
must, however, occupy myself for a while with the
unbelievers, who are, perhaps, numerous here.

30 BELIEF IN THE
Every time that I see a crowd below the pulpit I
always seek out my adversaries. I wish they could
disclose themselves by holding up their hands as
if they were voting. In every strife it is necessary
to know who are our friends and who are not, to
discriminate the first from the second, to put some
on the right and the others on the left if we would
avoid the peril of confusion, and not run the
chance of firing on our own troops in face of
the adversary's army. Only in the hour of an
inextricable melee have the combatants the right
to remember that celebrated order, "Strike! strike!
and God will know His own."
Therefore, before giving you proofs on which the
belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ rests, I will
to-day closely study with you the different denials
formulated by unbelievers. Now, as in our first
lecture we examined, not the belief in general, but
the present state of the belief in the Divinity of
Jesus Christ, so to-day I will examine with you
the present state of the denial of this divinity.
It will be enough to answer the three following
questions : —
What character distinguishes contemporary
denial from all those which have preceded it ?
On what doctrine does this denial rest ?
What is the value of the methods which it
employs ?
I think these first two questions will be enough

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 31
to fill the present lecture, and that we may well
reserve the third for our next meeting.
The denials of the Divinity of Jesus Christ
which have been brought forward in the course of
ages may be reduced to six : the first, contem
porary with Jesus Christ, is the denial by the
Jews ; the second, which occupied the end of the
first century, still continues, arid is the Gnostic
denial; the third, also still continued, is the
Arian denial, which appeared in the fourth century.
Then, in the seventh century, came the denial of
Islam, which is perpetuated by Mohammedanism
in the midst of our European world, without,
however, mingling with it. Then the Socinian
denial of the seventeenth century, and lastly, the
Deistic denial of the eighteenth.
We now encounter the seventh denial of the
Divinity of Jesus Christ ; and we may note this
number. Truth is one, error is manifold and
changing, and I select this characteristic as a
mark of its weakness and vanity. You are
not, then, so strong, you great minds, since
you have so much need to change while truth
remains. We need the voice of Bossuet and his vigorous
words to stigmatise these incessant changes of
thought among the adversaries of the Divinity of
Jesus Christ.
One thing strikes me in their successive denials :

32 BELIEF IN THE
they are ever at the mercy of the spirit of the
age, always inspired and modelled by the doctrine,
ethics, and interests of the moment.
Thus, the first denial which occurred in the life
and in the presence of Jesus Christ when He
affirmed His divine Sonship, appealed to the unity
of God, the fundamental doctrine of the religion
of Israel. The Jews, placing themselves at the
superstitious point of view of divine unity, refused
to admit — in spite of the numerous and trans
parent allusions of the Prophets — that the inner
life of God in more persons than one was
compatible with the unity of His nature, and
when Jesus affirmed His Divinity they never
failed to answer Him as if scandalised : " Thou
blasphemest ! Thou makest Thyself the Son of
God, equal to God: are there then more gods
than one?" The blasphemy was all the more
revolting in their eyes because they argued with
the narrowness of all sectaries, and because death
was the penalty of such blasphemy. Thus, Jesus
was not condemned as a revolutionary, although
modern criticism chooses to say so ; the documents
on this point are plain and irrefutable. He
was condemned as impious and sacrilegious, for
having blasphemed the unity of God as under
stood by the Jews, saying that He was the Son of
God. The denial of the Gnostics, which was at its

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 33
height in the second and third centuries, is still
perpetuated in a timid fashion under the form of
Esoterism, whose partisans are in fact only neo-
Gnostics — Orientals who have strayed into our
Western world.
The reason is plain why the Gnostics deny the
Divinity of Jesus Christ.
Carried away by that extraordinary movement
which led all minds towards the marvellous East,
where all great things originate, the Gnostics
desired to see God — who indeed would not desire
to see God ? — and in the hope of penetrating the
mystery they turned to the doctrines of Persia,
Egypt, Chaldea, Eastern India, and to the Jewish
Kabbah This mixture of doctrines and of strange
dreams has given place to two fundamental errors,
which form the basis of all Gnosticism : dualism
and emanation. There is not a truth of Christian
dogma which has not been perverted or destroyed.
The Incarnation above all was repugnant to the
dualist gnosis, which saw in Jesus Christ only a
special eon which it called the Saviour, whom it
considered as inferior to the Supreme God, and
never would look upon as having become really
man — -that is to say, united to matter, the principle
of evil.
This doctrine, which agitated the world for three
centuries, is still fermenting in the minds of men,
for the great theogonic and cosmogonic problems

34 BELIEF IN THE
against which the Gnostic East threw itself can
hardly fail to excite the eager and curious reason of
modern man. The false gnosis which pretends to
instruct it changes its error with the ages, and
those whom it leads captive, instead of accepting
the words of Jesus transmitted by His apostles,
deny or change them, wishing to explain them
according to the needs of their own systems.
After the Gnostics, in the fourth century came
the Arians, who are, in a sense, their descend
ants. Among the subtleties in which the specu
lative genius of the Easterns delighted, when the
doctrines relating to the Trinity excited those
minds that were curious in the mysteries of the
divine life, certain of them stubbornly refused to
recognise the substantial equality of the Persons
in the Godhead, and notably those of the Father
and the Son. They would, indeed, accept Jesus
Christ as the Son of God, but not as equal to the
Father. Arianism has been one of the great
schisms of the unity of the Church, one of the
most dangerous crises of faith. Its over
whelming triumph drew from St. Jerome the
historical saying: "The world woke for a
moment in a sort of stupor to find itself Arian."
There are, indeed, invasions more terrible than
that of the Goths : the invasion of error was one
of these.
Then in the seventh century came the Moham-

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 35
medan denial. Like all the others, it was the re
sult of a momentary attraction which carried away a
period, a race, a civilisation. Mahomet gave him
self out as the great prophet of God, rendering the
Arab people fanatical by a clever mixture of faith,
lust of conquest, and tolerance of evil ; and it is
evident that Jesus Christ could not be for him
the Son of God, equal to the Father. He con
sidered Jesus indeed as a prophet, but inferior to
himself ; he crowned Him with flowers, but took
away His glory, and overset the throne on which
the adoration of Christians had placed Him. If
God is God, if Mahomet is the Prophet of God,
Jesus Christ is neither God nor the great Messiah.
The proposition is simple and trenchant as the
edge of a scimitar.
Docile under the impulse of their master, their
chief and their teacher, the Mussulmans have
suppressed the Divinity of Jesus Christ, and when
Mohammedanism cast itself upon Europe it at
tacked chiefly those who believed in Christ. But,
thank God, there is in the faith implanted by God
in the heart of His children not only humble
adoration but bold and defensive courage. The
Cross was transformed into a sword. Christians
come of a race gentle and free, but robust and
warlike; they handle the sword, not as the
Mussulman, to impose their creed, but to resist
victoriously those who menace their faith and

36 BELIEF IN THE
insist on forcing them to choose between apostacy
and slavery. If the enemy should again invade
us, to subdue that humanity which Christ has
touched, Christians will know how to make him
feel the weight of that hammer which has re
duced to dust all men who have had the audacity
to dream of universal empire.
After the Mohammedan denial there was an
interval of tranquillity, for man cannot be always
at war and armistices are necessary. Then came
the tempestuous blast of the Reformation. In
that whirlwind, in that confusion of all errors
unchained, I will point out to you the doctrine
of the Socinians as the new denial of the Divinity
of Jesus Christ.
These persons were called after the name of
Socinus, their founder, and had, like the Jews,
the fanatical worship of the Unity of God. This
is a state of mind for which I can only account
by the native eagerness of the reason to cri
ticise the Word of God. After denying the
Trinity they denied the Incarnation of the Second
Person of the Trinity. This was logical : the
very essence, the very ground of the Socinian
heresy. Moreover, the Reformation, tearing away
a part of Europe from the living authority of
revelation, sowed the germ of religious dissolution
and threw men's minds on the steep slope of
denial.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 37
At the present day you will still find, among
Protestant theologians, the Socinian denial ; it is
true that it is continued in another spirit and in
another form, but it is always the same denial
which fears not to invoke the patronage of those
sacred books which, when once withdrawn from
the authority of the Church, hold indeed all that
fantastic interpretation can desire.
With the eighteenth century appears the
Deistic denial. The philosophers and the men of
science of that time accepted God, His divine
attributes of truth and wisdom, power and good
ness, of justice and providence : but they muti
lated providence, denied revelation and miracle,
the positive intervention of God in humanity,
and consequently the greatest work of God, the
Incarnation of the Word. For them, Jesus Christ
is only a man more perfect and more wise than
others whom ignorant people have deified. Such
is the character of rationalistic denial.
But we no longer rest there, and those who
remain in the rationalism of the eighteenth
century are older than we.
They recognise in us a certain youth, because,
coming from great distances, there shines on us
a reflected light of eternity ; but those who date
from the eighteenth century date only from
yesterday, a short time, and they have already
grown old.

38 BELIEF IN THE
They are like those stuffs which have lost
their colour and their gloss ; they are rags. Who
listens to-day to the Deists of the eighteenth
century, and yet how much in favour they were
then! Were Voltaire to return he would now
be out of fashion, and were the Encyclopaedists
to return they would seem as out of date as
their wigs.
A great and terrible novelty has come upon us :
we are carried away by a movement of Atheism
unexampled in the history of man since the
Deluge ; it is by this that the contemporary denial
of the Divinity of Jesus Christ is distinguished
and characterised. I know not what took place
before the Deluge, it may well have been some
thing analogous ; but in our time, the world —
I say the world in the sense in which Jesus used
the word — is carried away by an Atheistic move
ment of. unexampled violence.
This movement consists in suppressing God
everywhere — the suppression of God as the origin
of things, the suppression of God in their evolution,
the suppression of God in their end, the sup
pression of God at the origin of life, the suppres
sion of God at the origin of species and genera,
the suppression of God at the origin of man, the
suppression of God in the evolution of the human
race, the suppression of God in the conscience,
the suppression of God in human society, the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 39
suppression of God in the soul of the child, the
suppression of God in the heart of woman, the
suppression of God in the law, the suppression of
God in an oath — an oath, an old thing, an old
rusted weapon ; the suppression of God every
where, both in the universe which we tread under
our feet and in the heights to which our best
aspirations would raise us.
God is refused to us, but they leave us still the
ideal, the phantasmagoria of the ideal, and men
who follow this movement make themselves into a
Church — a Church which they raise in opposition
to the ancient, great and holy Church. These
men understand each other, they have a common
spirit ; I do not say that they have a common plot.
We are not simple enough to believe that the
spiritual affairs of the human race are determined
by plots prepared in advance. The only true
plots are the secret and tacit understandings of
mind with mind.
This Atheistic spirit carries away a certain
number of individuals, as in the ocean a whirl
wind scatters both great ships and little fishing-
smacks. This new Church has its pontiffs consecrated by
opinion. It has its lay priests, its lay professors
and preachers ; it has its directors if you wish for
another word, its men of action, its apostles — a
complete organisation. And in our country, as I

40 BELIEF IN THE
said, between men who believe in the Divinity of
Jesus Christ and those who deny it the op
position is ardent, invincible, irreconcilable.
This lay Church — I stick to the word — has not
lived in the catacombs ; no, it never knew them ;
the catacombs are our property, our honourable
privilege as becomes martyrs. But it has had its
hours of sorrow in which it has asked for a little
liberty for all, and it has obtained it. This
Church has a stubborn perseverance, and now that
it has obtained its liberty it asks for authority — I
would even say exclusive authority. It is possible
that it may obtain it, and then woe to those who
are not in that Church and who would defend
their faith and their rights ; they will have some
terrible days.
The denial of the Divinity of Jesus Christ
rests on this Church; it is only one result of
the epidemic of Atheism which now flourishes
among men.
But as God holds His fort in the humanity of
Christ, it is certain that, if He be not expelled
therefrom, He will retake all the countries which
have been torn from Him. Now Jesus is this
impregnable fortress. Fear not, therefore ! I
told you recently how great an army is still
ranked around the Crucified. Let the denial
which is now prevalent by the fashionable triumph
of Atheism find you firm. Look your adversary

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 41
in the face, look at him without fear ; take to
you your armour, the armour of the Spirit ; stand
fast in the faith ; there are still victories to be
won !
Whatever be the men who serve a cause, what
ever their talent, their genius, their number, their
vehemence and their power of fight, they must be
beaten in the end if the cause which they defend
is evil. Therefore Christians never lose hope,
because they have a conviction in the goodness of
their cause and in the sanctity of their faith.
Look to the past. There was a moment in
which they were a very small flock; they had
against them the whole force of Jewish opinion
organised in a compact hierarchy ; they had also
against them the disdain of the great men of old
times and of all men of power, and yet the humble
disciples of the Crucified were victorious.
The talent of men who defend a cause is of
little consequence ; the cause is all. Victory will
rest in the end with Truth.
We have, then, to see whether the denial of the
Divinity of Jesus Christ rests on solid foundations,
and it is that which I now have to examine.
The Atheistic movement, to which is allied the
denial of Christ as God, is concentrated in a
doctrine which declares itself to be the last word
of science and human thought. I mean the
doctrine of universal evolution without God.

42 BELIEF IN THE
This is the prevailing doctrine. Books of
philosophy and science, great works of poetry
and history, popular novels, all the literature of to
day is deeply impregnated with it.
In declaring what this doctrine is I shall speak
with great simplicity before the general public,
not an academic public, but a public worth more
than this, for the academic public is bounded and
restricted — yours are not. All kinds of elements
are mingled here : here is intelligence, I cannot
doubt it, here are culture, art and religion, here is
sensibility in the heart of those women who hear
me, and with sensibility those feelings which are
even more clear-sighted than genius and more far-
reaching than learned philosophy. There are the
common people also ; and the people, in spite of
prejudices, understand simple, eternal, and uni
versal reason, which is greater and wiser than all
vain systems. There are priests and monks, there
are young people whose imagination is open and
vivid. The doctrine of evolution may be summed up
in a few fundamental propositions which are its
Credo :
Universal reality is a great and complete whole
possessed and moved by immanent force.
This immanent force is so called in order to
lay it down plainly that nothing exists above, nor
beyond, nor outside of created reality.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 43
It is impersonal, unconscious and blind. All the
movement of things has within it its inexhaustible
source. All chemical and physical energies, all
natural energies are active and in conflict in this
great crucible of nature. Immanent force
throughout space and time disaggregates, reas
sembles and combines as it pleases, according
to caprice, which we call law. It produces that
majestic drama of which we are the witnesses
and to a certain degree the actors. At a given
moment you see the origin of life, immanent
force manifesting itself under a new aspect.
In life you find the appearance of sensation —
again immanent force which reveals itself in a
higher form. Then in animate life you see reason
give its light, which is thought — again immanent
force in evidence.
But this movement tends nowhere ; evolutionist
doctrine knows no finality.
What is there at the end of this progress which
continues for ever and never attains its close ?
There is the thought of man ; man himself, the
last step attained by evolution.
But if you search for God, there is no more a
God. For you cannot call an immanent, uncon
scious and blind force God. You seek God in
evolution and you find only fate.
In fact, fatalism, determinism, is the universal
law of production.

44 BELIEF IN THE
Do not ask whither the world is tending. It
rolls unconscious towards an unknown goal.
But, you will say, man remains, man with his
conscience and his science.
That is the doctrine of evolution, in its great
outlines, in its sum. Were I to draw up its cate
chism I should sum it up in these few words,
and I believe the evolutionists would accept it.
Now, if by the aid of this doctrine we are to
proceed to suppress the Divinity of Jesus Christ,
I have a right to demand if it can be accepted by
essential reason, as reason exists in every human
being, before he is perverted or lessened by a sys
tem of philosophy.
Reason is a great power, a great instrument, a
great faculty.
If we see anything real, the reason is, 'by its
own essence, irresistibly driven to seek out and to
know the cause. A phenomenon is produced,
and -we ask its cause ; something appears to the
eye of a child, it asks whence it comes : that is
reason. The men of old made theories, but without
upsetting them. At the present day philosophers
proceed in a different manner. They begin by
doubting their reason, by analysing it, by de
composing it, and when they have decomposed it,
it works no longer, and then they say, " There is
nothing in it."

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 45
Instead of using this master faculty they give
their minds to its destruction.
Yet I will ask the evolutionist doctrine if it has
any respect for reason ; for reason thus under
stood. It suppresses God, the infinite Spirit, at
the origin of all things, and thenceforward it gives
no further account of this origin. Movement, for
instance, in matter : my reason says that it has
always existed, it is inherent in matter. How
can we demonstrate this ?
Science is obliged to affirm that matter is inert,
yet we recognise the fact that it moves. I ask
you, and reason asks you, whence comes this
movement. I have always thought, and I shall reiterate it
without ceasing, that movement is a property of
the mind, and that movement in matter comes from
a mind which transcends matter. Matter is in
itself inert ; if, then, it moves at all, it moves by
mind. You suppress the reason of the existence
of things in suppressing the mind which is
superior and transcendent to matter.
You see life and thought appear and wish to
explain them.
You say matter produces life ; it then produces
more than itself ? The principle of causality rejects
this ; the greater cannot come from the less, nor
the perfect from the imperfect. Life is more than
matter, therefore matter has not produced life.

46 BELIEF IN THE
You say thought is produced by life and man
is produced by the animal. This cannot be. The
animal has its instinct, its fatality, its particular
knowledge ; but the animal has no universal
cognisance, no will, no freedom.
We, however, are free, and we have the perception
of universals. You cannot get from instinct that
freedom which belongs to every man, you cannot get
from the knowledge of particulars, which animals
have, the perception of universals. I speak here
in a common-sense way which will probably excite
the profound disdain of all masters of philosophy.
But these may be as scornful as they will ; as for
me, I am altogether with the people — popular in
my tastes, popular in my sentiments, popular in
my philosophy. I leave on one side those philoso
phers who cannot live outside the four walls of an
institute; you will not move the world in that
way. Academicians may philosophise as they
please, they may be left to walk in their quiet
gardens, taking care that the shock of a pebble
against their feet does not interrupt their imagin
ings of what is beyond the grave. But the people,
endowed with strong common-sense, will keep far
from you, and recognise a principle which explains
the origin of thiugs and a law of evolution which
explains progress. It will leave you to your dilet
tantism, and its powerful life will furnish new and
great pages to history.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 47
If by chance you succeed in persuading the
people that its reason is but a dream, that the
world is but a vast drama, conscience but a vain
word, then will begin a bloody game ; it will take
from your laboratories the practical secrets that
your science has discovered, and, armed with the
terrible weapons it has found, it will frighten not
only a quarter by blowing up a house on the
Boulevard St. Germain, but it will terrify towns
and, if need be, states, parliaments, republics,
and the most solid monarchies.
This doctrine not only renders false and un
natural the original principles of things and their
law of evolution, it suppresses also finality. Its
partisans cannot persuade sound and simple reason,
that great reason of Frenchmen which comes from
the highest inspiration of the Greeks purified by
the Gospel ; you cannot persuade it that the
movement which is lifting beings ever higher, and
makes them into an increasing hierarchy, has no
end in view. To tend towards an end is to go
out of self ; but no one can go outside self with
out being drawn, no one can be drawn unless
something draws him. Men have spoken of
an effort, of an interior struggle which urges
onward the course of things. It is a vain subter
fuge ; this effort necessarily supposes something
beyond, for there can be no tendency towards
nothing.

48 BELIEF IN THE
I know and I will tell you why you do not wish
for finality.
It is possible to deceive simple minds by con
ceding to them the existence of an immanent
principle, although we have still to seek how this
principle becomes active; but to admit finality
brings with it consequences which Atheism dreads.
If there be a goal for the evolution of the universe,
this goal is necessarily outside the universe and
therefore it transcends all that is. It needs, there
fore, only one further step to recognise God in His
highest idea as the end of the universe. Atheisti
cal evolutionists will not make this step, and they
suppress in their theories all finality because that
would lead them to God.
But they cannot suppress the thinking being,
nor the essential laws which rule him; there
fore I am always surprised to see sophists dedi
cate their powers to the attack on these laws,
in defiance of human reason and of human con
science. To what end is this strife ? Is it for a wager ?
There are certain strange proceedings proper to
those men who boast of their superiority, and who
imagine that it is clever to go out of the beaten
track which has been worn by good sense and
eternal reason. Would it not be better to respect
nature, instead of outraging her by propagat
ing the diseased philosophy of the dilettanti?

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 49
Evidently the multitude does not understand
your philosophy, but it may adopt your con
clusions. I do not wish to frighten those who enter
upon a pathway where error may become homi
cide, yet it is well to look to the consequences.
As for us, we cling to the doctrine of finality,
and as we admit that the universe has a trans
cendent principle who is God — transcendent, that
is to say, containing beyond all others all the
ends which creation presents to us ; so also we
recognise a legislator who is a living law of pro
gressive and universal evolution, a legislator who,
dealing with matter first, at its origin, produces
movement, then with matter in movement pro
duces life, and, when life has entered into certain
determined conditions, produces animal nature by
virtue of an act which we cannot comprehend,
any more than we can comprehend the transmis
sion of force from one being to another.
And we say with Aristotle that all beings have
a desire for universal good — in other terms, for
God — and that they are drawn to Him by an
irresistible attraction.
We thus maintain God in the reason as an
unassailable fortress, where He is guarded by the
immutable principles of causality and finality.
Evolutionists are free to misunderstand eternal
reason in order to follow the reason of to-day, a
D

50 BELIEF IN THE
variable reason which was not yesterday and which
will not be to-morrow.
But if this doctrine of evolution, which says
that it has ousted God from the universe, and
consequently from the humanity of Jesus Christ,
has against it universal reason, the denial which
is based upon it is of no avail. I have the right to
call such a denial irrational and to repudiate it in
the name of reason.
All that is contrary to true reason is inevitably
destined to sink and disappear ; consequently all
those vain systems which, in order to deny the
Divinity of Jesus Christ, have openly broken with
reason, such as we have described it to be, must
expect to founder. Their momentary fashion
endures but for an hour ; they will end as they
have begun, and having no past they cannot look
for a future.
Therefore, in spite of the talent of the men who
defend them, in spite of their number, in spite of
their power over opinion, we need not fear for
the fate of the cause which they attack; their
arms are made of untempered steel, and they will
fall of themselves from their failing hands.
You will ask me, doubtless, how a doctrine so
purely irrational could take such hold on opinion
as to become one of the most popular theories.
Fashion is a fugitive thing ; and it is easily ex
plained, in men and their doctrines, by the art

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 51
with which they know how to flatter the humours
and prejudices of the time.
One of the needs, which trouble almost all the
minds of our day, is to unite in a synthesis the
daily multiplied discoveries of science. Now, the
evolutionist doctrine declares that it corresponds
to this general tendency, and brings the universe
into unity by the law of universal development
through variation.
The intelligent observations which have allowed
us to study the variability of those beings which
we thought were stable — the art with which
science has been able to modify them, to fix and
mould them at will — have driven certain ardent
spirits to see, in the evolution of the universe,
only a vast series of changes. This hypothesis
is the fundamental idea of the evolutionist doc
trine. Its grandeur and its novelty sufficiently
explain why minds should be enticed by it ; and
how cultivated young people (for every Messiah
has his prophets and his disciples) speak of evolu
tion as of a Messiah which transforms Nature.
Now let us see both sides. Our age, dazzled
by the light of science, detests and is afraid of
the unseen. When we speak to it of the un
seen, it turns away, as though, close at hand
but in an impenetrable region, there arose a
terrible reality of which it is afraid. But in the
evolutionist doctrine the unseen is no more; it

52 BELIEF IN THE
has suppressed what is transcendent at its origin,
in the midst, and at the end of things. Space is
void and mute ; the personal and living God has
given place to an unconscious, blind, and fatal
force, which neither speaks nor hears.
Yet more : a great number of souls at the
present day have taken a dislike to God. God
has been so disfigured, even sometimes by those
who serve Him, and so belittled ! He has been
turned into a God so insufficient — reduced to
proportions so miserably human, so unworthy of
the infinite — that many men, scandalised and
revolted, have turned against Him and learnt to
hate Him.
" Speak not of God ! " they say. " Leave me
alone. Your God is an evil being, permitting
all human tragedies. He is an inexorable being,
who torments us, who takes away our sons and
our daughters, and shows us no goal but the
grave. He has created an universe where the
great and primary law is the struggle for
existence — where every man devours his fellows,
where the weak strive against the strong, and
where, naturally, the weak are victims of the
strong. If that be your God, I prefer that there
should be none, and think it an honour to be an
Atheist ! "
That is what you will find in your books of
philosophy ; that is what is sung to you by the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 53
poets in their verses, full of blasphemy against
that God by whom our reason is revolted, our
goodness insulted, and our justice mocked.
Well, then, the evolutionist doctrine delivers
us from such a God. It says : " Young man, the
true heaven is within you, in the ideal of which
you dream. Woman, whose heart cannot bear
the idea of a God of tragedy, take comfort.
Heaven is empty ; there is, throughout space,
one only conscious being — Man ! He is the only,
the true God, but a God who is in course of
making himself; he grows greater and greater,
as the conscience of humanity develops. When
the work shall be complete, and the intellect
entire, God will be made, and then the human
being will be the master of a material universe :
he will dictate his commands, to be always obeyed,
and will be the God of the future ! "
It is by such dreams, such ambitious follies,
that vainglorious man allows himself to be se
duced by the deceitful mirage of the evolution
ist doctrine. He forgets that, were he master
of Nature, this God would still have to be mas
ter of himself — of the evil forces and the cor
roding passions which sway him, and for which
the most advanced science has not yet found
either a curb or a remedy,
This, then, is my conclusion. There have been
many denials, in the course of centuries, of the

54 BELIEF IN THE
Divinity of Jesus Christ, the last of which is the
Atheistic denial of our time. What has become
of them? The Jewish denial has been over
whelmed and beaten back by the great assertion
|land adoration of the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
The Gnostic denial in its original form
has vanished, with all the subtleties of that
East which, until the Western Japhet wakens
it, is only a dead and desolate land. The
Mussulman denial is still alive ; and yet it has
retired from the European world into those
countries which Christian civilisation has not yet
possessed, but which it will conquer in the Name
of Jesus Christ the Son of God. The struggle is
at hand. The Socinian denial is lost in the
endless variations of Protestant doctrines ; the
Deistic denial is old and worn out. All those
who denied have disappeared, one after the other,
engulfed in that unhonoured grave wherein are
buried together all those who deny Jesus Christ.
As for those who deny to-day, let me tell them
that they will follow those who have preceded
them ; the way is open. I will venture to
prophesy that as they are inspired by the same
spirit, so will they follow the same path. It is
the fatal accomplishment of the words spoken to
Julian according to a tradition which expresses
an eternal truth : " What doest thou, 0 Gali
lean ? " — "I prepare thy bier."

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 55
This denial will join the others. All that
is human passes away; and I am glad to insist
to-day that in order to attack Jesus Christ you
must attack the eternal reason of man. When
a doctrine is reduced to this, that it must destroy
reason in order to attack the Divinity of Him
before whom we kneel, it has pronounced its own
condemnation. Reason is not destructible ; it is eternal, like
the essence of all things. Nothing destroys it,
nothing of it is lost. Deniers may have an
ephemeral fashion. We place our trust in Christ.
He has made an eternal, indissoluble alliance with
great human nature which He has espoused,
in the strong scriptural phrase.
We thank thee, 0 Master, for having espoused
eternal reason, against which nothing can pre
vail. We thank Thee that Thou hast become the
inseparable ally of Man ; men may betray Thee,
but Man remains faithful to Thee. Strong in
Thy strength, we will overcome those who, in
order to deny Thee, are obliged to renounce all
that is grandest, holiest and best in humanity ;
that which is grandest is immutable reason ;
that which is holiest is self-sacrificing virtue ;
that which is best is the indwelling God, the
God in whom reason and conscience find their
permanent sanction and their eternal justifica
tion.

56 BELIEF IN THE

III
THE WORTH OF THE DENIAL OF THE
DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST IN OUR
DAY.
The belief in the Divinity of Jesus Christ is not
only an interior fact having its reality in the
conscience of believers and finding its public
expression in the Catholic Church, it is at once
a fact and a dogma : a fact entrusted to authentic
books and bound in the chain of historical events
of which it forms the principal link; a dogma
which is the synthesis and the foundation of
the whole Creed of the Church.
The result of this is that those who deny the
Divinity of Jesus Christ, faithful to their doctrine
which a priori suppresses God everywhere, have
proceeded logically to the suppression of this
Divinity in the authentic documents wherein
it is recorded, in the facts of history of which it
occupies the centre, and lastly, in the dogmas of
which it is the synthesis and the foundation.
This vast work of destruction has been, never-

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 57
theless, resolutely undertaken by our adversaries,
who have brought to bear upon it considerable
talent and learning, the art of expression, and of
such thought as influences the men of our day —
in a word almost all the gifts which Providence
has given to those whom we call superior men :
force of intellect, stubborn will, and cleverness.
I should add that in this work, wherein the
workmen are counted by thousands, the works
themselves are counted by tens of thousands. At
the first view this is terrible !
The country which has especially distinguished
itself in this work is Germany. There are in
Germany about twenty-three universities, and
among these, perhaps, not three in which the Divi
nity of Jesus Christ is not denied, and consequently
the fundamental dogma of the Gospel attacked.
For more than eighty years a gigantic labour has
been accomplished by professors, writers, scholars
and philologists, whose aim is to eliminate the
Divinity of Jesus Christ from documents, facts,
and dogmas.
I regret to be obliged to recognise that in this
work France is the servant of Germany. To
recognise this will not influence my judgment,
nor the conclusions that I have to draw; but
I always remark with sorrow the inferiority of
my country. Even in this work of the denial
of the Divinity of Jesus Christ we have done

58 BELIEF IN THE
nothing but borrow from Germany, and we are
borrowing still. She extracts the ingot which
we coin.
We must consider what this work is worth.
Now this is the principle on which every such
examination should depend. Every criticism
having for its object the elimination of a docu
ment, the suppression of a fact, the negation of a
dogma gains its power from the method. The
legitimacy of the method guarantees the legiti
macy of the operation; arbitrary or erroneous
methods carry with them the unreality and the
falsity of the result.
What, then, is the worth of the method of
the denial of the Divinity of Jesus Christ?
What is its worth in itself, in its essence, and
next in its applications to dogmas, historical
facts, and documents ?
The answer to these two questions will be the
subject of my lecture. I claim, as you have
always allowed me to claim, your most serious
and most kindly attention.
The method employed by Atheistic denial is
called by a name which has been very much in
fashion during the two last thirds of this century :
that is to say, criticism.
A critic, or he who so represents himself)
has a great reputation in certain circles. To

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 59
say of a man that he has not the critical spirit
is to excommunicate him from the little church
of scientific and literary men. Well and good ;
but we must agree on a definition of criticism.
In its full, noble and absolute sense it is the
exercise of judgment; now, judgment being the
sovereign faculty, it is clear that a man who
is dowered with criticism in a special manner is a
sort of sovereign, while he who is deprived of it
must always remain a subject.
The act of judging consists in trying anything
by its absolute or conventional law.
When we judge, trying any given thing exactly
and impartially by an absolute law, the judgment
is full, absolute, and convincing.
When, on the contrary, it tries anything by
a conventional standard, the judgment has only
the worth of that standard ; it is arbitrary, if
the standard is fantastic and capricious ; it is
erroneous and absurd if the standard is false
and absurd.
You admit that a beautiful face demands a
Grecian nose : whenever you meet with a Kalmuk
nose you say there is no beauty in that face ; that
is to judge by a conventional standard.
Now, the criticism of our day which is concerned
with the Divinity of Jesus Christ cannot be re
ferred to any standard of appreciation, judgment,
or criticism.

60 BELIEF IN THE
For a standard is either absolutely convincing to
all reasonable and intelligent minds, or it is purely
conventional, and therefore disputable, arbitrary or
even erroneous.
The criticism of to-day has no other standard than
the doctrine on which it depends — that is to say,
the system of universal and necessitarian evolution,
without beginning and without object. I remark,
in the first place, that this system is new, and
consequently very liable to fall, for in the domain of
thought, whatever is new is condemned beforehand ;
in the order of truth whatever is new is condemned
— truth was yesterday, it is to-day, it is and does
not become ; it is not the same with whatever is
new in the order of experience. But in the order
of abstract and absolute truth there can be no
discovery. We neither discovered God, nor the
soul, nor the mind ; we can only seek to explain
them. So Christianity, which was at the outset
called a novelty, said : Christ is from all eternity,
He is the principle of things, and He will be the
end of things, He is the Alpha and the Omega ;
and therefore He holds the centre of all things.
But the doctrine of evolution, a thing of yester
day, is only one of the variable forms, one of
the aberrations of individual reason; founded
on facts which are by no means established. I
admit that it is of avail for certain minds which
are led astray, but in itself it is disputable;

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 61
indeed, it relies on axioms which cannot be
sustained by reason.
A doctrine which does not claim universal as
sent cannot be an universal standard. And when it
is said that the doctrine of evolution is taught by
eminent men I answer that matters nothing to
me ; I refuse it in spite of them. I refuse it with
a certain pride, and if you say that I am behind
the age I hardly care to defend myself : for there
can be no advancement or progress except on
condition of respecting the essential laws of the
human mind. Now, the doctrine of evolution,
which has no valid principles, no law, no
finality, denies these essential laws, despising
eternal, impersonal reason — that reason to which I
desire to appeal, the reason of the people ; because
the people lasts for ever, while the middle class
passes away, the aristocracy and royalty pass
away, and systems of philosophy pass away. But
if I have a right to repudiate the evolutionist
doctrine, I have also the right to repudiate that
criticism which rests upon the name of that
doctrine, and to repudiate it in the name of
eternal reason.
You may flatter yourselves that you are a
chosen people, the first thinkers, the first writers
of your time and of your country, skilled in the
art of charming and leading astray an effeminate
populace which follows you obediently, when its

62 BELIEF IN THE
heart begins to wither. You may even invoke to
chant your creed a poetry skilled in the harmony
of words ; you may draw with you cultured youth
as they are called ; but there is a power which
you will not lead — the common-sense of man, the
strong masses which make the people.
When you turn against God the gifts with
which He has endowed you, you will not shake His
reign in humanity ; your partial and ephemeral
triumphs will only serve to set in relief the
victorious infallibility of His word and of the faith
which it has inspired the souls of believers.
We now see generally what criticism is, in the
name of which our faith in Christ's Divinity
is it priori and radically denied. We have now
to enter upon the details. I will be brief and
elementary. I am not delivering a course of lectures at the
Sorbonne for the initiated ; I am teaching eternal
and simple truths which everybody can understand,
because "everybody" constitutes this congrega
tion. Yet I will give you a true idea of the great
work of destruction undertaken by criticism — a
sufficient idea to enable you to understand it. All
who act, all who strive, need to know the adver
sary's tactics. A concealed enemy is difficult to
conquer; brought out into the open he is half
vanquished.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 63
Why were we beaten by Germany ? Because
we did not know her. Why shall we be the
conquerors? Because we do know her. I do
not wish to be a false prophet, but it pleases
me to be a prophet. Pardon me this remembrance
and this momentary digression.
I come to the facts. When criticism wished to
realise its destructive plan, it found itself in the
presence of documents in which the Divinity of
Jesus Christ is clearly affirmed on every page, in
every line, almost in every word.
These documents are the Gospels, the Epistles,
and the Acts of the Apostles. Now in virtue of
its fundamental principle it is obliged to deny and
to suppress this affirmation, which is equivalent to
the suppression of the documents themselves.
This was sometimes undertaken, at least in part,
at the commencement of Christianity. Certain
heretics who were annoyed by a page of St. Luke
unscrupulously tore it out, and so we have the
mutilated Gospel of Marcion.
At the present day nothing more can be sup
pressed. The documents speak for themselves,
they are there, and however much people might
like to practise these mutilations they shrink from
so rough a process. The rock is so deeply rooted
in the bowels of the earth that it bears us all, and
there is no pickaxe which can deal with it, no
explosive capable of disintegrating it. Whether

64 BELIEF IN THE
we like it or not, we must accept these docu
ments, whose historical nature is victorious over
all attacks and recognised by the most exacting.
As these documents cannot be ^suppressed, criti
cism must interpret them, in order to suppress by
that interpretation the Divinity of Jesus Christ
contained in them. It is a laborious work, but
the workmen are so persevering, have so much
ability and suppleness, that, in spite of difficulties,
they have applied themselves to the task with
a courage and skill worthy of a better cause.
Nevertheless, in this work which they conduct
so ably they have encountered a principle and
a law of interpretation which sways all critics.
Now this principle and this law hold them in
check and refute them.
Certainly a book is in appearance nothing but
a few leaves of paper, inert matter, worthless
parchment, some letters written on wood, on bark,
on metal, on stone, more or less well carved, which
would seem to have no force.
This is a mistake. In that book there is the idea,
the thought of a man. When, therefore, a docu
ment has to be interpreted, the critic finds himself
in presence of a primary and inflexible law; in
every interpretation he must give the idea and the
thought of the authors. He must not seek for the
discovery of some sense or other, nor put into the
book the idea which he has in his own head ; his

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 65
genius should identify him with the soul of the
writer. You write a commentary on Tacitus and try to
decipher those concise phrases in which sometimes
the thought can scarcely be contained, so vigorous
is it and so powerful the emotion ; you have not
to put into it the thought of any modern man,
but that of Tacitus himself ; if not, you falsify it
and are a bad interpreter.
Now mark this well. Criticism which rests
on the doctrine of evolution is forced, when in
terpreting those documents, to introduce evo
lutionary and atheistic thought wherever the
Divinity of Jesus Christ is formulated — that is
to say, in every page, in every line, in every
word. If the four Evangelists, if St. Paul, St. Peter,
and St. John, sublimest of all, had been the par
tisans of evolutionary and atheistic doctrines, you
the atheists of to-day would be the born inter
preters of those authors. Therefore I willingly
recognise your competence to translate Lucretius,
the pantheist and naturalist ; but when I see you
interpreting authors in whose conscience faith
in the Divinity of Jesus Christ is as a springing
well penetrating all thoughts, I cannot master
my indignation, and I am tempted to tear from
your profane hands those books which breathe a
Divinity of which you are the living denial.

66 BELIEF IN THE
In order to understand a book we must possess
its spirit. The dilemma is forced upon us : either
you vibrate with the genius of the author and
then you understand him ; or you deny and con
tradict, and then you can only parody, falsify, and
destroy him.
There are two sorts of books : those of which
the authors have ceased to exist, which have fallen
into the general public stock at the mercy of each
comer; and those whose authors survive in a
posterity which guards their works. Now, all
human books without exception enter into the
first category, for I do not know that any profane
author can escape death ; I do not know that any
have left descendants, heirs with a title to their
genius and their thoughts, in order to transmit
them to us. If such an author were living,
the interpreter and the critic, however independ
ent they might declare themselves to be, would
have one rule only to follow — that of consulting
him. But that which has not happened to profane
writers is true of sacred writers, and in particular
of the Gospels, of the Acts of the Apostles, and
of the Epistles of the first disciples of Jesus.
You will notice that all these works, without
exception, were produced by the most living, the
most active, the best chosen members of the
Church ; and, consequently, these books belong to

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 67
the society which has produced them, just as the
fruit belongs to the earth which has borne it.
Now, the Church has not ceased to exist, and
these authors have survived in her. Pope Leo
XIII. is the last link of an uninterrupted chain
bound to the first Pope who was called Peter — a
stone — the foundation-stone of the Church. Those
authors whom a common faith groups around
Peter are continued in the same living organism,
of which they are an integral part, which keeps
their books as its property, as its treasure, and as
the chief jewel in their casket.
These books may not be wrested from the
Church, nor treated simply as the works of Livy,
of Horace, or of Tacitus. In the name of exegesis
and of grammar, which you know better than St.
Paul, for he spoke Greek very badly ; in the name
of history, which you know better than sacred
authors and even better than certain Popes who
had no special mission to study it ; in the
name of grammar and of history, you venture to
take these books and declare that you can give
me the true sense of them. I reject your claim
just as the representative of a family would reject
a gentleman who came to take away the deeds of
his ancestral inheritance and affirmed that he
could interpret his title to nobility. And were
the degenerate son of ancestors whom he has
forgotten obliged to have recourse to some pupil

68 BELIEF IN THE
of the Heralds' College, I should have the right to
say to him : " My friend, he who can no longer
understand his title-deeds has no right to them."
But the Church lives on her books, she places
in them all her doctrine and a large portion of
her treasure: you have not the right to inter
pret them, I do not say against her, but without
her. I will not follow criticism into its detailed
interpretations. I will restrict myself to one
example, the most remarkable and the nearest to
our subject, in order to explain my thought,
I choose the word " Son " of God. Jesus Christ,
says the Gospel in every page, is the Son of God,
and I say to a critic : "Tell me, you who are a
Greek or an Arabic scholar, what that word means."
He will answer me, "The expression has three
senses: a metaphorical sense" — very good! — "a
moral sense " — very good ! — " and an absolute
sense " — quite right ! In what sense am I to un
derstand it in the Gospels ? It is plain that if the
gentleman whom I am questioning is an adept in
the evolutionist doctrine he will answer me: " You
can only understand it in the metaphorical sense ;
that is to say, in a very large sense which at
bottom means nothing."
But, pardon me, the society exists to which
these books belong, and since it lives on these
books, since it has produced them and keeps them,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 69
since without it you would not have them at all,
it seems to me that its opinion ought to have
some importance, indeed that it rules and solves
the question.
I ask of the Church's authority what is the
sense of this word " Son " of God, and the Church
answers me with a voice which has always been
the same for eighteen hundred years : that this
expression has to be taken in its most absolute
sense — in the sense of a natural filiation, in the
sense of a perfect filiation which places the Son
on an equality of wisdom, power, virtue, majesty
and glory with God the Father. That is the
Church's sense.
Now, no interpretation whatever can prevail
against this testimony. In fact, we have to find
what Peter thought when he said : " Thou art the
Son of God," and what Jesus Christ thought when,
addressing Himself to Peter, He said : " I am the
Son of God."
Now the Church gives us the sense of this
word " Son " of God — the sense which she has
always and will always attach to it. The inter
preters may take it or leave it ; they can maintain
their interpretation in the name of their criticism,
but they cannot say that the thought of St. Peter
was their thought ; it is what he transmitted to
his successors, what the Church has guarded
incorruptible through all ages as her unshaken

70 BELIEF IN THE
foundation, the substance of her faith and of her
dogma. If the doctrine of those who deny Jesus Christ
is powerless to alter the documents or to falsify
their true sense, it will not be more successful
when applied to history, whose continuous web
shows the succession of phenomena. We will
examine it at work.
There is that which dominates facts, since facts
are only the elements of history — I mean the
interpretation of facts, which we may call the
philosophy of history.
The historian who respects history, and all de
clare and must declare that they respect it, is
bound to admit the sovereignty of facts, not in
opposition to the sovereignty of right, but in
this sense that fact when once established is neces
sarily accepted.
As to the interpretation of facts, it is subject
to all the variations of human thought.
None of us, however great our genius, can
declare that our sight can pierce to the bottom of
phenomena — a web which constitutes the fairest
representation which the human eye can possibly
contemplate, and which God spreads before Him
self in the splendour of His eternity.
But if the sovereignty of facts exists there are
two conditions under which it bears sway : the first
condition is that a fact should not be contradictorv,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 71
for, if it were, it would no longer be a fact, whatever
a refined philosophy may think, and before this
condition I disdain to pause. The second condition
is that it must be attested by a witness worthy of
credence. Now, when those who deny the Divinity of Jesus
Christ find themselves in presence of the facts
of history related by witnesses, they have not
observed this double law in virtue of which the
human mind has no right to reject a fact when
it is not contradictory, nor to reject evidence
which affirms a fact. For the negative criti
cism of the Divinity of Jesus Christ in presence
of facts which do not square with its pre
conceived system has not only rejected but
suppressed them. Now mark this : this system
does not admit facts outside the laws of nature
and humanity ; it rests on that fundamental but
arbitrary principle that there are only two factors,
man and nature ; it has erased the third — God.
When, therefore, it comes in contact with his
toric facts which do not fall under the laws of
nature and humanity it has suppressed or tried
to diminish them. I will only name, to keep
within my subject, miracles and prophecies. I
have not here to sustain the thesis either of
miracle or prophecy, but I declare that they exist,
and that every time that they have been found
in the way of negative criticism it has spurned
them aside.

72 BELIEF IN THE
But you cannot treat with disdain the flood
of miracles which substantiate the Divinity of
Jesus Christ, nor those striking prophecies which
fell from His holy lips. It cannot be denied that
Jesus Christ broke the stone of His tomb ; it
cannot be denied that Jesus Christ proclaimed
that the Temple should be destroyed and that
stone should not remain upon stone ; it cannot be
denied that He announced that His work would be
known throughout the world ; it cannot be denied
that He foretold the dispersion of that people
which misunderstood, abandoned, betrayed and
condemned Him ; it cannot be denied that He
prophesied His scourging and the insults which
were heaped upon Him, and His death upon the
cross ; it cannot be denied that, steadfast and
calm, though at times troubled, He went to
Calvary and died upon the cross.
Now, historians, when they have approached
that figure, have immediately forgotten Him and
declined to see Him. Yet this great Being,
who has no human name, this Son of Man, knew
that He went to death, and to that very death
which He had predicted.
Neither can it be denied that He touched the
sick and healed them. You interpret this, and
you say it was a magnetic touch. Nothing of
the sort. Magnetic touch does not raise the dead.
I have seen magnetic passes, I know all about

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 73
that. You take advantage of obscurity, you creep
into the cave where darkness allows you to hide ;
but magnetism at last is known. You must find
something else, and we drive you thence, perverse
minds who flee the light.
You say again, nature has unknown laws, by
which miracles may be explained ; we shall study
these laws and learn how miracles are wrought ;
we shall find the master-law of the powers of
nature. No ! you cannot escape the dilemma ; you
must recognise that there is another thing than
nature and determinism, than man and his
liberty, and yon will then declare yourself con
quered; or else you will be obstinate in sup
pressing and falsifying doctrines full of miracles,
prophecies not to be denied by any unprejudiced
straightforward people, and you will be justly
accused of violating history and of mutilating
reality. Then you will say : " You force us to accept what
is absurd." No, because I recognise that reason
has the right to refuse a fact which implies a contra
diction ; but neither the miracles nor the prophecies
of which Christian history is woven, are in the/
category of absurd or contradictory facts ; for if
they escape the laws of humanity and of nature,
they enter into that higher law of God whichj
transcends nature and humanity. Therefore I

74 BELIEF IN THE
appeal to all candid minds, to the young who have
not made an unclean alliance with doctrines as
narrow as the brains that have conceived them, and
I say : " Young people, who thirst for intellectual
liberty, recognise only one master after God —
your reason, freed from all systems, your essential
reason, popular in the full sense of the word,
dowered with principles of causality and finality ;
and with those irresistible principles triumph over
pantheism, atheism, criticism. You are stronger
than the doctrines of a day. He who has on his side
eternal reason soars above his time, above mislead
ing prejudices and those false theories which may
turn from the right path men less sincere, less
impatient of all servitude and of all bounds."
Since the facts of which I speak belong to the
past, they can only be know by the intermediary
of witnesses who attest them. These witnesses
are men like to us, who are sometimes of great,
sometimes of little value ; for us who believe they
are of great value.
Now, what should be the attitude of a free and
independent man before the witnesses of history ?
and first, what is the attitude of the criticism of our
day ? We must tear off its mask and see what is
covered by its involved and euphemistic phrases.
"Your witnesses," says criticism, "are simple
people — they knew nothing and consequently are

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 75
not worth hearing. Peter, Paul, the Magdalen,
were fanatics, Jews in whom the narrowest
prejudices were engrained. The natural was not
then distinguished from the supernatural, nor
were the scientific methods of investigation
known. An academic body capable of judging
learnedly about everything had not then been
formed. We must see if those great personages
had recognised scientifically the healings of the
sick, the resurrections, the prophecies. We might
then have believed them." But — but — I will
translate your thought — why should we always
live in this sort of masked hypocrisy? You
mean this : " These witnesses are mere fools ! We
do not believe in fools."
Well, I for my part do not agree with those
who despise man. I respect man : Peter, Paul,
the Magdalen, all those who knew Jesus. I
venerate them, I accept their testimony, I think
tJuit_j£_ojighji_to_be received, Tecau se it comes
from souls who were detached from^self^sincere
souls who *nld whfl,trthey had seen, heroic souls who
gave their life to maintain the truth I do not call
the one — I borrow the phrases from contemporary
criticism — an hysterical enthusiast, and the others
fanatics. I see in Magdalen the great penitent —
we in this church are under her patronage ; and
I salute in the Apostles the conquerors of the
pagan world. They are worthy of the respect due

76 BELIEF IN THE
to all who have boldly borne witness to their
faith in spite of difficulties ; they are worthy not
only to be respected as conquerors, but to be
heard as those who are full of the spirit of
devotion and sacrifice, the Spirit of God.
And now if criticism please to attack and treat
our witnesses with contempt, I despise it in turn
and, disdaining its attack, increase my respect a
hundredfold. The facts which maintain our belief in the
Divinity of Jesus Christ have been declared
divinely — that is to say, by the very Word of God
— in sentences which constitute our dogmas. The
fundamental article on which all the others rest is
this : " Jesus Christ is, in the unity of a divine
person, the Son of God and the Son of Man ; the
Son of God equal to His- Father, and the Son
of Man equal to us, sin only excepted." All
Christianity rests upon this dogma, and its sacred
books are only its development.
Criticism has evidently sought to deprive this
dogma of all divine character, since its main
purpose is to suppress God everywhere. Just
as, in obedience to its atheistic spirit, it has
attempted to erase the divine from the docu
ments, and to mutilate the facts of history, so
has it wished to suppress dogmas. To attain
this end it has thought fit to present them as

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 77
simple statements having no divine reality and of
purely human creation.
Now, see the irony of things ! Half a century
ago, Rationalism explained triumphantly how
dogma had come to an end ; and at the present
day contemporary criticism claims to teach us
how dogmas are formed.
It will be said, no doubt : " Dogmas must be
formed in order that they may end."
Let us understand each other. Dogmas are
not formed like philosophical or scientific theories ;
dogmas are the Word of God, received by the
faith of man. In truth, they are developed
slowly, in contact with the error which denies
them ; but they are one in their essence with
the revealed Word which formed them once for
all. Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Man : we
cannot get away from these two terms ; all
additional statements are only explanations.
Peter had already spoken the word which con
tained, as the acorn contains the oak, the whole
Christology, as the new language calls it. When
God casts such a proposition into the human
mind it grows like a grain which produces a
hundredfold, and just as the field of wheat is
contained in the grain of corn, all dogmas are
enclosed in this primary word.
Yet, let us examine the method of criticism in

78 BELIEF IN THE
accounting for the formation of the dogma con
cerning the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
It began by erecting into a principle this fact :
when a man exercises a profound influence over
his fellows by his intellect, by his virtues, or by
his deeds, by his power and by the terror with
which he can inspire them, or by the enthusiasm
which he excites, humanity— at least those who
have known and loved him — feels the need of
glorifying him.
We can recognise a true element in this
principle, for error is never without a certain
portion of truth.
In fact, when those whom we love pass away or
are at a distance their moral beauty grows fairer
in our eyes. We all have loved and lost those
dear to us ; we have all felt after their death that
they live again, idealised in our memoiy, their
brow crowned with an aureole of beauty. This
sentiment does not lead us into error : rather it
raises and corrects our judgment. Nearness
prevents our seeing clearly ; details obscure our
sight, and the whole escapes us. At a distance
you will perceive the true type in its harmonious
beauty as though carved in Parian marble. It is
the consolation and the privilege of death to
embellish those whom we have lost, placing them
in that mysterious distance where there falls on
their idealised brow a ray of eternal light.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 79
But the tendency to idealise those we have
loved when they have vanished, does not go
as far as formal idolatry or absolute deification.
Now, it is this tendency, exaggerated to an
extreme degree, that criticism must invoke to
explain the origin of the dogma of the Divinity
of Jesus Christ, and to take away from it,
together with its divine character, all objective
value. These are their affirmations in plain terms :
Jesus Christ was a man like ourselves. His
high moral worth inspired those who knew Him
with so great a love, so vivid an enthusiasm, so
ardent a worship, that during three centuries
His fond disciples set themselves to glorify Him
incessantly, till they made Him into God.
This Nazarene, a rebel against His country's I
laws, was regarded by His followers as a
martyr. When once a martyr, He soon became
the Messiah promised to the Jews ; and, yearn
ing to exalt Him, they applied to Him all//
that the ancient books contained in regard to!
the national Messiah. Then admiration, growing/ \
warmer in spite of time, saw in Him the Saviour]
of Humanity ; endowed Him with sanctity, with1
every virtue and every aureole; and, finally,'
crowned His brow with the glory of God, gave ,
Him divinity (not the divinity of the Gnostics, i
which was a half-divinity, and still allowed

80 BELIEF IN THE
an inequality between Himself and God), but
total and complete divinity ; that is to say,
boundless wisdom and love, almighty power
and unfading beauty. The insatiable faith of
His disciples gave to Him the fullness of the
Godhead. It made Him equal to the Father,
equal to Him whom the Jews considered as
the terrible God, Jehovah ; it recognised in Him
the power to absolve from all sin ; it saluted
in Him the creative Word of the world, the
supreme Judge of every creature, the Alpha and
Omega. Dogma thus worked itself out for three
centuries ; enthusiasm grew not cold, the worship
working towards Godhead was always active for
Jesus Christ. Such, in a word, is the evolutionist
doctrine according to criticism of the dogma of
the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
But it is strange there is no other example of
a like fact. Sakia-Mouni was not made a
divinity; he simply became Buddha. Mahomet
was not made a divinity; he remained a simple
prophet. Moses the Jew was not made a
divinity ; there was even a fear that he should be
too highly exalted by his people, and his tomb
was concealed.
Yet these were powerful beings. Buddha
has drawn millions of men after him ; he has
created new races, peoples, and civilisations.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 81
Mahomet brought under discipline an untamed
race, gave it a religion and a law, and inspired
it with a fanaticism unexhausted after twelve
centuries. Moses created a strange and in
destructible people. I do not speak of modern
great men, for criticism takes care to tell us, with
a wise precaution, that those times are past, and
men can no longer make their gods. Pagans
created them by thousands, when they deified
their emperors ; but the art was exhausted in
Jesus Christ.
But I would ask you to remark that there
is nothing in common between the Pagan
apotheosis and deification, properly so-called.
The first placed the emperors in the home of the
gods, while the other has identified Jesus Christ
with God Himself. And I have the right to ask
the cause of this difference ? How comes it that,
in regard to those great men, humanity went no
further than apotheosis; and why, in regard to
Jesus Christ, it passed all bounds, and did not
stop at absolute deification ? What was there in
this unique Being so strange that His disciples
elevated Him to a height which no man has
attained, and with a persistence so great that the
ages have not wearied mankind in its ardour to
glorify Him ? Those who are here — the great
majority at least — adore Him still; and those
who have ceased to adore Him are none the
F

82 BELIEF IN THE
better for it, nor more intellectual. They believe
themselves more free, but have no more virtue.
Unbelieving legislators who court popular favour
serve their country no better, are no more eager,
having rejected Jesus Christ, to fling themselves
into the strife for the triumph of good !
I am astonished when I see those who reject
Jesus Christ stanch the wounds of the suffering,
when they ought rather to stanch their own
wounds. I have an instinctive distrust of those
who, having known Christ — the ideal of those who
suffer, either in the heart or in the body — destroy
in those poor creatures the faith in Jesus Christ,
and feign to doubt the love of the faithful
who have maintained the worship of what is
holy. Yet more. The adoration of the faithful for
Jesus Christ as God was not progressive ; from
the very first hour His disciples saluted in Him,
Christ, the Son of the living God. The Epistles
of St. Paul, written a few years after the death
of the Master, prove the matter to the full, even
were there no other documents. The idea of a
progressive deification is a pure romance, created
by the needs of criticism.
If I admit for an instant that we have made
Jesus Christ divine, and that this proposition,
God made Himself Man, may be reversed and
replaced by this, Out of Jesus Christ men have

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 83
made a God, this is the result : Humanity in
the most advanced state of civilisation, our own
(we may say it without injustice to our ancestors,
and without offence to truth), is nothing but a
vast idolatry and an immense servitude, which
every religious and free conscience is bound to
resist. Christianity, which shattered paganism,
has only replaced the ancient idolatry and the
ancient slavery by another idolatry and another
slavery. The women who sacrifice themselves in
their heroism, are not the less idolaters, even
when they have broken their chains to become
the victorious legions of charity. When priests,
led on by impetuous zeal, carry the Name of
Him whom they call their God beyond our fron
tiers, even to the Black Continent, unlimited
fields opening before them, idolatry leads them
there. In short, if we are worth anything —
which cannot be doubted — if charity is a power
in our world, if justice is a passion, if all great
virtues have ennobled humanity, it is thanks to
the reign of idolatry and slavery !
Such consequences are the test of doctrines and
enable us to refute them. I feel in the depth of
my soul a burning anger, and I revolt against
those doctrines which in order to attack God are
obliged to bestow upon humanity, upon their
time, upon all that is most honourable, most holy,
and most beautiful, in humanity and in their

84 BELIEF IN THE
age, the name of idolatry, the worst of names,
the basest of all, because it expresses the most
culpable of errors and the most shameful of
slaveries. In conclusion, the evolutionist doctrine desired
to suppress God, and in order to this suppression
availed itself of the methods of criticism ; but
criticism, on the contrary, has succeeded in ruining
the evolutionist doctrine. Whether it be judged in
itself or in its application to documents, to the
facts of history and the Creed of the Church, this
doctrine cannot be sustained; it must be repu
diated by sound and free reason.
I know, moreover, that it is a weapon which
begins to grow old-fashioned. Thanks be to God,
I see the youth of our time arising, I hear the
beating of their hearts, I recognise the conviction
of their spirit; they are leaving you to rally to
our side. The armour of criticism will soon be
ancient armour to put in museums, whither we
go to see how our ancestors fought. To-day we
need other swords, other shields, other tactics.
Young men, shake yourselves free; set free
your thought. You hunger and thirst for liberty.
Now, reason is free when it has repudiated pan
theism, atheism and criticism; it is free, when
it keeps its vigorous principles, to accept what is
good and reject what is evil.
Take in your hands the sword of charity. Those

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 85
who attack us are bold, scandalously bold when we
consider their position. If it so happen that an
honourable mind, given to wisdom and to charity,
would place these at the service of its convictions
and of its beliefs, they try to terrify him. In your
turn, young men, sow the seed of terror in this
worn-out world, because it knows only one thing
— boldness in error ; and because it has unlearnt
the sublime and holy boldness of those who bear
as symbol a crucifix in their hand. We will bring
back to Jesus the crowds who die because they
have Him not, and the desperate men who without
Him seek vainly for the last word of life because
they have lost the sense of eternity.

86 BELIEF IN THE

IV
THE CHIEF REASON FOR THE BELIEF IN
THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST
After having proved the vitality of belief in the
Divinity of Jesus Christ, we turned our attention
to the adversaries of this belief, asking them why
they deny it. They answer : " We deny the
Divinity of Jesus Christ because we deny God."
The reason is a radical one. But an objection at
once presents itself ; if to deny were sufficient to
destroy, a simple argument would overthrow the
world. Those idealists who say, " The world does
not exist," would at once with an argument —
subtle indeed, but an argument all the same —
have suppressed the world. Yet the world still
rolls through all its shining spheres despite of the
idealists. So, in spite of the denial of the Divinity
of Jesus Christ, his Divinity remains.
We then said to those who deny that the
Divinity of Jesus Christ is attested by public
documents : What have you to say to the
documents ? They answer : We interpret

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 87
them according to the rules of our exegesis so as
to suppress the divinity which they contain. But
it still remains in the facts of the history ? Oh,
we must pass the facts of history through the
sieve of criticism, and criticism eliminates all
those facts said to be divine.
But the dogmas which are the Creed of the
great Catholic Church ? These, say they, are the
creation of human thought, and if the creation
of human thought had any objective reality we
should be under the full dominion of what is
fantastic and absurd.
Such are, in sum, the answers of those who in
our day suppress the Divinity of Jesus Christ. We
have answered them in our turn : " The Atheism
on which you base your contention is a doctrine
which cannot bear the light of reason ; your
interpretation of the documents contradicts the
fundamental law of interpretation ; your historical
criticism is in formal opposition to the law of
evidence ; your explanation of the genesis of
Catholic dogmas, founded on a false psychology,
only succeeds in making humanity incorrigibly
idolatrous, whereof Jesus Christ would be the
supreme idol."
After having studied the doctrine of those
who deny, it is right that we should examine the
faith of believers.
You believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ ! I

88 BELIEF IN THE
believe it too, with every fibre of my being — my
whole life is staked on it. That proves nothing. I
am but an atom ; but the Catholic Church believes
in it, and the Church is a third of the human
race. Now, we ask if there is any foundation for
our belief ? We ask the faithful, we ask women
why they believe, why they kiss the feet of Christ
whom they call their God ? I ask priests who hear
me why they ascend the altar steps to offer a
sacrifice, of which Jesus Christ is Himself the
priceless Victim and eternal High Priest, for the
priest is only the agent of this supreme Mediator.
I ask the people, who still believe — peasants,
workmen, children — why they say : " I believe
in Jesus Christ, the only Son of God ? " There
are among believers some who do not know why
they believe; and those who can say : "I believe
for such and such a reason."
Do not disdain the first — as for me, I respect
them as we respect children ; for those simple
people — women without culture; illiterate work
men, even though in these days they can read ;
men of science, who are skilled in the secrets of
nature, yet accept the mysteries of God with the
faith of a day-labourer ; nuns who, though they
live by the life of Christ, would perhaps find
difficulty in defining their faith in Him — all those
unconscious believers would answer : " I know
not why I believe, any more than I know why or

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 89
how I breathe ; but what I see and feel is that if
there be in me any spark of good, any devotion,
and any virtue, if I can resist my passions and
master self, if I have any resignation in sorrow and
any firm hope, I owe these things to the faith in
Jesus Christ."
This simple answer of the ignorant is far-reaching;
it is sufficient to confound the pride of unbelief. A
doctrine, indeed, is not proved only by the rational
basis on which we see that it rests, but it has an
equally secure justification in the sublime results
to which it leads and the virtues which it begets.
However, leaving out of question those believers
who cannot give a reason for their faith, I will
examine sincerely and loyally those who are under
the power of a deliberate belief. I will address
myself to the Church, great mistress of doctrine.
The Church has her reason for believing, and
I will ask her the motives for her unfailing
faith in the Divinity of Jesus Christ.
The arguments and motives for belief are so
numerous that to develop them at length would
need not one but twenty lectures, not one but
three or four volumes. These motives, as a whole,
can be brought under three categories.
We may appeal to all the ages which preceded
Jesus Christ and see them run their course ; above
all, among the people chosen of God to prophesy
and prepare for the Messiah ; and this is the

90 BELIEF IN THE
argument: "The Messiah announced from the
beginning implied divinity; the Prophets called
Him ' God with Man — Emmanuel.' Jesus Christ
was Messiah ; He was God."
We may look at the times which have been
since Jesus Christ, which the Catholic Church fills
with the power of her declaration, with the splen
dour of her doctrine and her virtues, with the splen
dour of her deeds, and we may say : " The Church
founded by Jesus Christ is a work which man
could not originate or even maintain. The divin
ity of the work reveals the divinity of the work
man ; therefore He who was her founder was God."
And lastly, we may place ourselves at the centre
of the history of Jesus Christ and say: "Jesus
Christ declared Himself the Son of God, equal to
the Father; therefore He was the Son of God,
equal to the Father, and God as the Father." I
pass over the first and second arguments, so as to
rest only on the third, for it resumes, dominates,
and confirms the others.
The motive for belief founded on the testimony
of Jesus Christ raises two questions : " Did Jesus,
the man whom history knows under that name,
really declare Himself the Son of God, equal to
His Father ? and, if so, what is the evidential
value of Him who uttered those words, the most
extraordinary and momentous that human lips
have ever pronounced ? "

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 91
I will to-day only examine the former question,
and establish the fact, absolutely incontrovertible
from the historical point of view, that Jesus
Christ declared Himself God. The fact has been
denied; I affirm it. The fact has been disputed
in the name of historical exegesis, in the name of
this or that scientific criticism ; I maintain it in
the name of criticism, in the name of history, in
the name of science.
And if I can get this conviction, which is the
very soul of all my preaching, into your minds,
I shall have gained a great victory. May the
Spirit of Jesus Christ be with me and sustain me
in this conflict, wherein the faith of His Divinity is
at stake.
It is certainly true that Jesus of Nazareth, the
carpenter, for that was His calling, did not leave
the little town of Nazareth till He was twenty-
nine or thirty years of age ; He did not reveal
himself until then, after a life of obscurity like
our own. It is certainly true that this man, son
of Joseph and of Mary, as He was called, whose
fellow-countrymen and fellow-citizens pointed out
His brothers and sisters, called Himself the Son of
God, the only Son of the Father. It is quite
certain that He proclaimed His equality with the
Father ?
Apart from this testimony I do not think that
we can give the Divinity of Jesus Christ an

92 BELIEF IN THE
indestructible basis. But if this testimony be
established, I do not believe, as we shall see in a
future lecture, that sound, impartial, independent
reason — man's reason, not the reason of to-day
or of yesterday, but of all time — can reject it.
Reason must either rebel or submit, and you will
therefore judge, when we examine the sum of our
faith, how important it is to establish, in a positive,
certain, invariable, unchanging manner, that Jesus
Christ the Man, Jesus Christ the Son of Man, as
He described Himself, did truly, without any
possible ambiguity, according to history, declare
Himself the Son of God.
In former times this declaration was readily
ascertained ; on opening the Gospels, to which
was consigned the history of Jesus Christ, gather
ing together certain precise texts, sufficient to
enlighten any unprejudiced mind, it was clear
that both in His own circle, before learned men
and before popular opinion, Jesus Christ openly
and solemnly declared Himself the Son of
God. In our days an urgent need has arisen for sur
rounding this declaration with firmer guarantees,
so as to raise it above all attack.
We all know the Gospel, there is not a believer
here who cannot give a superficial proof of the
assertion that Jesus Christ declared Himself the
Son of God. The scene on the road to Cassarea-

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 93
Philippi is easily brought to mind, so as to see
the spot, the country-side, where Jesus Christ
went His way ; not, indeed, discouraged, but
saddened by the faithlessness of that Galilean
population who understood nothing of His
spiritual Messiahship, and who would not
listen to Him because they cared only for party
politics. We see in spirit the spot where Jesus
turned to His disciples and said : " Whom do
men say that I am ? " " Some John the Baptist,
and other some Elias, and others Jeremias, or
one of the prophets : " for at that time it was
believed that the spirit of the prophets revived
after their death. And then Jesus said to Peter
and to all His disciples : " Whom do you say
that I am ? " and St. Peter, the spokesman of the
little flock, answered : " Thou art Christ, the Son
of the living God."
Evidently when he spoke thus Peter only gave
words to the teaching which he had received from
Jesus Himself ; the result of the constant action
of Jesus on His disciples persuaded them that He
was so.
Criticism says that Peter, in professing that
Jesus Christ was the Son of God, simply wished
to declare that Jesus Christ was a man like any
other, though somewhat superior. But there
is one difficulty in this interpretation, which is
that Jesus Christ said to Peter in solemn tone :

94 BELIEF IN THE
" Blessed art thou, Peter, for having thus spoken.
It is not flesh and blood" — that it is say, none
of those aspirations which spring from the flesh
and blood of poor humanity — "it is not flesh
and blood which have revealed to thee who I
am, but my Father who is in heaven" ; and he
added : " Therefore I will make of thee a founda
tion, on which I will build my Church, a rock
against which the powers of hell shall not
prevail." No fair criticism can interpret the words of
Peter otherwise than the Church has done, other
wise than as a recognition of the divine Sonship
of Jesus Christ. Peter speaks, but Jesus Christ
approves and confirms his words in a manner so
extraordinary, so overpowering, that it is not
possible to give to his expression any other than
the grand and solemn sense which the Church has
always recognised.
We may also quote texts which prove that
Jesus Christ declared Himself the Son of God,
but we meet at every turn a criticism which says :
"Those words, 'Son of God,' must be under
stood either in the metaphorical or natural sense."
No doubt they must. "Now, we cannot under
stand them as you do." But, I say, the Gospels
are there and they teach us so. " The Gospels !
They were written at a later date."
These objections cannot move me, and I do not

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 95
multiply them, for the simple reason given in my
preceding lecture, that when we have to determine
the true sense of a book — not such a book as you
can get in the next street, at the fashionable shop
or library — when you have to give the sense of a
book which belongs to some one, which is the
property of an author or the patrimony of a
Church, you must examine this some one, this
author, this Church. Protestants may think me
severe, but I maintain that the Gospel belongs to
the Church alone, in whose womb it was con
ceived at the breath of the Spirit which lives
in her.
Such a book cannot be given over to the
interpretation of the first comer ; and if you ask
me whether Jesus Christ really declared Himself
the Son of God, I find in the books of the New
Testament those texts wherein this declaration
is contained, and I assert that the sole authentic
sense of those texts is given us by the Church,
which never ceases to proclaim it in the face of
the world.
This Church is here, and we are its members.
Not all, perhaps, who listen to me belong to her
organisation or her life, but the great majority
belong to her : the priests who hear me are her
representatives, and they are in touch with the
Body spread over the whole world, and with all
its members who cover the earth.

96 BELIEF IN THE
This Church ceases not to say to you that
Jesus Christ by His very word has affirmed His
divine Sonship. She says it with an energy which
has never failed, and, whether you wish it or not,
you cannot disregard the constant declarations,
which, beginning in the first century, have con
tinued down to our day.
And that this is for a reason no one can
gainsay, on which no other doctrine can depend,
neither Buddhism, nor Mohammedanism, nor
criticism, nor modern revolutionaries who seem
to have a doctrine of revolution, nor modern
revolutions. The reason is this : When Jesus Christ ap
peared He founded His Church ; that is to say,
He gave His mandate to chosen men that they
should repeat His word to all the ages, adapting
it to all the ages. For eighteen hundred years
the mandate of Jesus Christ has been carried
out, starting from St. Peter, through all the
Popes down to Leo XIII. What the Popes say is
precisely that which Jesus Christ Himself said;
consequently, when they declare that Jesus Christ
is the Son of God, they repeat the word which
Peter was the first to receive from the mouth
of Jesus, a word inexpressibly venerable and
holy. This has gone on without interruption; if
there has been an interruption, let historical and

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 97
exegetic criticism tell me in what century and in
what country ; and until it has done this I hold the
declaration as authentic and continuous, and I
maintain that the clearest light for the interpre
tation of the Gospel is the Church.
This attestation is perpetuated from age to
age, down to our own days, and I declare it here
in this very Church of the Madeleine. I am not
declaring my individual thought : if I wished to
express my individual thought I should do so
elsewhere and not in this church. I come here
to translate the thought of the Church, who has
given me commission to do so. It is impossible
for any one to maintain that the Church has lied
at any given time, that she has betrayed the
word of Jesus Christ which fell from His lips and
has been transmitted from Pope to Pope, from
priest to priest, from doctor, to doctor, until this
blessed age of the nineteenth century, in which we
hear the same great voice of the Church attest
ing the Divinity of her Founder — the Church
always in action and always triumphant, because
she has faith in this Divinity.
( But I would give to the affirmation of Jesus
Christ in regard to His own Divinity a force and a
solidity which you would certainly wish to find
in the fundamental truth which supports your
faith. In the light of history I would show you
that the declaration of His Divinity is not an

98 BELIEF IN THE
isolated phrase, nor even a solemn word spoken
before the tribunal about to condemn Him to
death, nor indeed a phrase which can be taken
out of a life or a history without diminishing,
mutilating, or falsifying the history or the life. |
Take the Life of any great man — for example,
the Life of Socrates — and you will find certain
words which you can abstract from it, however
sublime they may be, without detriment to the
Life of Socrates, or of any other great man. But
what is special and unique, and to this I call your
attention, is that if you cut away the declaration
of Jesus Christ affirming His own Divinity, you
falsify and ruin the history of Jesus Christ.
This declaration is part of the very body of His
history, is so identified with it, so essential, that
the disappearance or the alteration of the one
implies and carries with it the alteration and the
disappearance of the other.
Whoever has studied the life of Jesus Christ,
from whatever point of view he may have looked
at it, must recognise that Jesus Christ willed
to accomplish a work peculiar to Himself and
planned by Him, that He founded and realised
it in spite of a thousand obstacles, and in spite
of all the forces allied against Him. To this
work, as the documents unanimously demonstrate,
Jesus Christ gave a name which in His thought
distinguished it from every human work, a name

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 99
simple and profound, full of mystery and yet
clear, the name of the Kingdom of God. The
Kingdom of God expresses the whole work of
Jesus Christ, and you will perhaps allow my faith
to tell you how you should understand this
Kingdom. It is not possible to explain it badly
when one has lived a while with the Gospel which
contains its sublime and incomparable revelation.
The Kingdom of God is the supreme degree
of the universal evolution of things. Those who
take pleasure in great thoughts may well enter
into this kind of speculation.
In the present day we only see reality under
the form of a collection of kingdoms — that is
the scientific word — the kingdom of matter, the
kingdom of life, the kingdom of animalism, the
kingdom of humanity ; and there atheistic science
stops. Jesus completes this majestic pyramid,
raising it to the infinite. At the hour when the
kingdom of humanity strove with the Empire of
Rome, and in which human civilisation, having
produced marvellous fruits, seemed worn out and
.tending to its decline, under the weight of its
corruption, Jesus Christ said : " The kingdom of
heaven is at hand."
I seem to hear you object, that in your own
strength you have outrun old civilisations '; but that
is a mistake, and we, sons of the Crucified, who
have founded Christian civilisation, deny that the

ioo BELIEF IN THE
kingdom of humanity as it now exists is natural
progress, the necessary evolution of the anthropoid
ape which you make the starting-point of modern
humanity. No, we are not so simple as that. You
are impregnated with the Spirit of Jesus Christ ; it
goes to your heart, and of that muscle He has the
key ; he holds your brain and has marked his name
in its convolutions. You only exist by Christ ;
you may revolt against Him, but you cannot get
away from Him. We call Him to your minds
incessantly. Now, here is the thought which dominates the
whole work of Jesus Christ. Follow it, and you
will see that, far from narrowing the horizon,
faith extends it without measure.
Life works in and above matter. Now, life is
nothing else than the participation in matter of a
superior force, which I call vital force because we
must give a name to it; and this participation
constitutes a new kingdom, superior to that of
brute and inorganic matter. And the kingdom
of animal life is itself only the entrance into the
kingdom of life of a superior force which we call.
sensation, and which is characterised by the
passions and the faculty of recognising the in
dividual. This new kingdom embraces the whole
brute creation, and in regard to man I will give
you a definition of the human kingdom which
you will willingly accept, unbelievers though you

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 101
be. The human kingdom is only the entrance of
thought into animal life, of universal good and
liberty into the will.
Man is indeed an animal, but an animal
emerging from animalism in order to rule and
conquer it. He does not entirely submit to the
law of the brutes, he passes beyond their bounds ;
and in passing beyond it he forms his own life,
which is characterised by the perception of what
is true, by the love of what is good and beautiful,
and by the free mastery of his own actions.
Now, the subjection to animalism is not the
same in all human beings. Thus I was reading
recently in a scientific review an article on
female criminals. The author, a learned Italian,
maintains that there is much less crime in women
than in men, and he gives this fundamental reason
for his declaration : " Woman is less animal than
man," and he declared that he was satisfied. For
the honour of my sex I declare that I was not
satisfied. Such, then, is the human kingdom, and it is not
final, for Jesus Christ came upon this earth to
constitute a new kingdom, which He called the
Kingdom of God. Now, just as life is nothing
but the introduction of vital force into matter,
just as the kingdom of animal life is the entrance
of animal force into living beings, just as the
kingdom of humanity is only the entrance of

102 BELIEF IN THE
thought and liberty into the animal, so the king
dom of God is the introduction of the life of God
and the Infinite into thinking and free humanity.
This reign, which completes the universal evolution
of things, is the work of Jesus Christ.
But since this participation in the life of God can
be only realised by him who has God within him,
and God as a good peculiar to himself, it results
that this astonishing being, the greatest on earth,
the most incomparable of all men — for no one
except He ever had an idea of this superhuman
work — Jesus Christ coming to found the kingdom
of God in humanity must have had God in Him.
Therefore He solemnly declared Himself to be the
Son of God, equal to the Father, in full possession
of the Spirit which He was to communicate to
the faithful. Whence it follows that to set aside
the declaration of Jesus Christ that He is the Son
of God destroys at one blow his work and his
history. Jesus Christ was not only the founder of the
divine work which I have just sketched, but also
the moral lawgiver of humanity, promulgating
His supreme and final law to those intelligent
and free beings who would enter into his king
dom. One of my great intellectual and religious
satisfactions is that I see in the modern world,
which often noisily boasts its incredulity, the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 103
multitude drawn into the great furrow traced by
Jesus Christ. Most historians, and notably those
who call themselves critical, treat with unpardon
able and even shocking lightness this essential
function of the Messiah. They rest on and are
pleased with the Sermon on the Mount. When
they have spoken of the birds poised in the air
while Jesus was speaking, when they have showed
us that verdant and flowery plain of Galilee
whereon He cast forth His word, when they have
emphasised the admirable poetry in which the
Master wrapped up His divine precepts, they
declare themselves satisfied. But they hardly
mark the superiority of Jesus to all other law
givers ; yet it only needs to examine the documents
to convince ourselves that, if others spoke as wise
men, Jesus alone spoke as God.
Some critics have even dared to deny the whole
originality of the Gospel scheme of morals, and
have set themselves to establish, against all evi
dence, that the grand Christian precepts are only
a new edition of Jewish and Pagan wisdom.
But there is plainly nothing falser than this.
First, an essential difference distinguishes the law
of Christ from all others. In fact, it cannot be
denied that it is the rigorous expression of abso
lute perfection, so that Jesus was able to say of
it: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my
words shall not pass away."

104 BELIEF IN THE
Now, see what other lawgivers have done.
Moses, an inspired lawgiver, tolerated divorce. We
know what were the ethics of Mahomet, conceding
much to human weakness ; it certainly cannot be
denied that such concessions were clever, for he
was only a man, and hence he could not impose on
men absolute perfection ; he contented himself
with putting evil under law and restraint. Since
he was powerless to subdue the beast in human
nature, he tried to muzzle it ; hence among other
grave lapses in the Koran is the tolerance for
polygamy, which the Christian conscience has
always repudiated and stigmatised as shameful.
Jesus Christ was perfectly wise. He gave an
absolute law without any diminution. He pre
scribed strict monogamy : one man, one woman.
While He said to his disciples : " Love your
enemies," Mahomet said: "Death to the un
believer." Mahomet, perhaps, thought himself
very clever. Jesus Christ was not clever, He was
absolute truth.
"But," you will say, "He is not obeyed." He
is obeyed by his true disciples, and this because
He has given not only precepts but power and
spirit — the power of the Spirit of God — and He
could not have given it if He had it not in
Him. While Moses has engraved the law on stone,
Jesus Christ has engraved his law on the con-

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 105
science ; to write in such a book one must be more
than man. That alone is a new proof that the
affirmation of His Divinity is a necessary condition
for understanding Jesus Christ, even as a law
giver. But He went further, and the deeper we pene
trate into this inherent function of His life we
recognise that He transcends all other human
beings and remains inexplicable without His
Divinity. All the laws of the Gospel are summed
up in this one word : We must believe absolutely
in Jesus Christ. He has demanded nothing other
than this from His disciples, from the people to
whom He preached the Gospel as to all those to
whom in all time He has transmitted his Law.
To believe in Jesus as in God is the principle
of all the laws of the Gospel and the great precept
of Jesus.
"You believe in God," said the Master, "believe
also in Me." It cannot be contested that the
whole effort of His mission was to obtain faith in
Him, unreserved faith. All His action was sub
ordinate to this primary virtue, which He demanded
imperiously from all those who came to Him and
sought to follow Him.
Now, I address myself to that elementary con
science which exists in all of us, and I say that no
man can demand absolute faith from another man.
I may believe in my friend or in my father, but I

106 BELIEF IN THE
do not believe in them with an absolute faith ; I
believe in them only with a relative faith, a human
faith. To believe in any one with absolute faith
is to give ourself over into his hands, is to have no
thought of our own, only the thought of him in
whom we believe ; to have no longer any will of our
own, but to give ourself up to him without reserve.
If faith is complete, the abdication of will is also
complete. If love is complete, we belong no more
to ourselves ; self is annihilated.
This is surprising to you! So it is to me.
You are offended at it ! So am I. What ! give
oneself fully, unreservedly into the hands of
Christ !
I know our age and the passions which carry it
away ; individuality is the last principle which we
consent to sacrifice ; we desire to be ourselves, and,
jealous of our rights, we will not belong to any one.
Love which speaks so glibly of absolute, unlimited
confidence is deceived. No one ever renounces
himself ; he remains himself.
And in fact there is but one Being to whom we
can make this complete sacrifice, there is only
one Being who can demand it of us — God, because
He is absolute truth, absolute power, absolute
perfection. Thus, when a free being, feeling that he has
only a relative truth, a weak will, a limited activity,
finds himself in presence of Him who demands a

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 107
total abdication of intellect before His word, of
will before His moral law, of activity before His
example, there are only two attitudes which can
be taken : that of revolt or that of prostration ;
that of revolt against Him who demands this
total abdication, and, if it be a man, he is right ;
or to prostrate himself because it is God who
demands it of him — God, that is to say, absolute
truth and perfection ; and this abdication be
comes, then, the first and holiest of duties.
Now, that is just what Jesus Christ has de
manded; and in acting thus towards man He
has represented Himself to man as God. 0
Master ! I bear witness to Thee before this congre
gation, witness from the very depths of my being,
and I say : on the day when I saw that Thou didst
demand the abdication of my thought before
Thine, the abdication of my will before Thy law,
the abdication of my activity before Thine example
and Thy power, I made myself as nothing before
Thee, remembering the words of Thy disciple :
"I live, not now I : but Christ liveth in me."
In such a sacrifice there need be no regret.
Those who renounce their own life find infinite,
eternal life. I do not say that they realise it
at once, but they find it in the hopes that swell
the breast of believers and breathe into their heart
those energies which none can know except they
descend on him from above.

108 BELIEF IN THE
And I have only one wish to formulate, and
that is, that all of you may hear the voice of
Christ, and, recognising his Divinity, will not
hesitate to become His disciples. Those who have
given up all to Him have received a hundredfold,
even in this world, in truth and peace ; but those
who know Him not are lost in a region of sadness
and death, from which no human power can free
them. Answer, then, to the appeal of God to humanity,
and may He make you new men this very day.
The affirmation of Jesus Christ, by which He
declared His Divinity, is so identified and incor
porated with His life that the life cannot be
explained without it.
J You are not ignorant of the Gospel history,
and must needs recognise its dramatic character.
I call every life a drama which in its evolution
meets with terrible difficulties, which is oppressed
by grave sorrows, whose end is a blood-stained
tragedy. The life of Jesus Christ is, therefore,
the most heroic drama, when we understand the
psychological depths of the human being under
whom the Divinity was concealed. It unfolded
itself with headlong haste. After thirty years of
a most tranquil existence, Jesus Christ revealed
Himself, to enter on His public life, and in less
than three years the drama came to an end — in
a sudden, heroic, and terrible manner. Jesus

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 109
Christ evoked the most violent national and
religious hatred, more violent than any other
public man ever excited.
If we look at what passes in our present world
when political passions are stirred and angry, we
say, " Political passion is a frightful thing." But
it is extremely superficial ; I do not believe in
political passion : strange as my words may seem,
I do not believe in it, nor do the actors believe in
it. It is more often a comedy than a tragedy.
That which touches not the conscience is naught.
Political hatred may produce a certain superficial
agitation, and those who are not accustomed to it
may call it tempestuous; but those who know
what human nature really is are not troubled,
and let the storm go by. But religious hatred
is terrible. It is the only one which comes
from the depths of the soul and goes to its
depths. Now, Jesus Christ was above all others
persecuted by the hate of hates — religious hate ;
and, in order to account for that drama in which
his life ended, we must seek the cause of this
hatred, the motive wherefore He was so violently
rejected by the people to whom He addressed
Himself. If you read the history of Jesus Christ accord
ing to unbelieving criticism, you will see in it
that He desired to found a new religion. That
is a mistake; He never spoke of such a thing.

no BELIEF IN THE
The truth is, that Jesus Christ deeply wounded
the self-love of His countrymen ; unmasking the
hypocrisy of the Pharisees and doctors of the
aw, who violated its essential commands. In
oly anger, He armed Himself with the scourge
to smite and confound them when He saw them
make the house of his Father a den of thieves.
Thus He raised against Himself all the interests
land passions which could so easily cover them
selves with a mask of religious hypocrisy.
But if you penetrate the depths of Jesus
hrist's life-drama, you will be convinced that
his hatred was provoked against Him because
. le affirmed, with a truth always increasing and
1,1 ways more overwhelming, that He was the Son
of God, equal to His Father.
, You will, perhaps, ask why such a declaration
'shocked, revolted, offended the Jews ? It was
that their principal dogma — the dogma of the
unity of God — was for them, and especially at
that time, the object of a superstitious venera
tion. Their monotheism went so far as to deny
the divine Trinity, although many transparent
allusions were made to it by their prophets.
We can with difficulty form an idea of the
intolerance and fanaticism of those people in
relation to Jehovah — the only God, the Rock,
the Foundation, as they called Him. Therefore
the fury of the Scribes, the doctors, and the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST in
people reached a sort of paroxysm when they
heard Jesus proclaim His Messiahship and His
divine Sonship, declaring that He had received
all from God His Father, and that He was equal
to Him.
Such a doctrine exasperated the Jews. They
could not contain their indignation against Him
who appeared to them the greatest of blas
phemers ; they took up stones to stone Jesus
Christ. How great an example is He for all those who,
bringing truth before the world, have suffered for
her sake ! How often, in studying the life of the
Master, I have fallen on my knees at the sight of
the indomitable courage with which He went to
His death ! Certainly, He knew well that in giving
Himself out as the Messiah, Son of God, equal
to the Father, He would excite the fury of
religious authority in the people among whom
He declared his doctrine. He knew well that
the Jews, the doctors, the learned, the Pharisees,
would be offended, and give vent to all their
rage ; that the High Priest would condemn Him
as a blasphemer, and send Him to death. He
knew this, and He went directly and boldly to
Calvary. Religious hatred, excited to paroxysm,
did not shrink from judicial murder to punish
Him who made Himself equal to God.
Such is the true reason for which Jesus was

112 BELIEF IN THE
condemned to death ; this must be declared openly
in the face of those who deny the Divinity of
Jesus Christ. /As they are obliged by this denial
to mutilate His teaching, they must misrepresent
the truth of the drama which terminated His
great life. But the testimony is indestructible and
invincible. Not only did Jesus declare Himself
in formal terms the Son of the living God, but
He also with prophetic solemnity declared Himself
to possess the inexpressible attributes of God.
"Hereafter," He said to the High Priest "you
shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand
of the power of God, and coming in the clouds
of heaven."
No criticism can ever prevail against the
evidence, the solemnity and boldness of such
declarations. It cannot deny them without giving
the lie to history ; and if it accept, it cannot
understand them. They have indeed no meaning
except for those believers who recognise in Jesus
Christ not merely a man, but the only Son of
GodAHim who was at the beginning of things
and will appear at the end of the world and of all
things to set them in order and to judge.
Let not the unbelievers smile. I know you
well, as I know myself ; for we all of us have in
us a leaven of incredulity. You ask, What is the
end of all things and when will it come ? You
who think that you have probed everything, do

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST H3
not look so far and therefore refuse to understand
it. The end of all things has not need of your
understanding, it will manifest itself to you with
the rapidity of lightning. Our sun will expire as
other suns have expired. There will come a
moment when all will end for us, the moment
when the Master of heaven and earth, the Judge
of all men, Jesus of Nazareth, will appear in His
glory and His triumph. May you be able to
stand before Him !
0 Christ ! Who hast declared Thyself so plainly
to be the Son of God ; Thou Who hast entered so
far into this humanity which Thou bearest by the
virtue of Thy word, be Thou with us ! I know
that men disfigure Thee, but the records which
set forth thine image, the Church which guards
Thy worship, the believers who bear Thee living
within them, have the power of maintaining Thee
in the midst of this world, carried away by all
terrors, fooled by all kinds of aberrations, which
knows not where it is going. But Thou knowest
whither we go. Thanks be to Thee, our life is filled
with divine hopes ; we would live by Thee — that is
to say, by God Himself, having done good after
Thine example, having loved Thee, having adored
Thee in Thy wisdom, Thy goodness, Thy power
and Thy Divinity.

il4 BELIEF IN THE

THE WORTH OF THE TESTIMONY OF
JESUS AFFIRMING HIS DIVINITY
We have established it as an historical, undeniable,
indestructible fact that Jesus declared His Divinity
or His divine Sonship in an absolute equality with
His Father, as He expressed Himself. We have
shown that this declaration was not a simple-
phrase isolated from His teaching or from His
life, but that it made part of the body of His
work and teaching, and that it was the centre of
the whole drama of His heroic and divine ex
istence. We must, as I have already promised, examine
this declaration and criticise it rationally.
I trust that no believers here will be surprised at
the word rational criticism applied to the sayings
of Jesus. Faith is not a blind and impassive
action of reason ; every thinking man has a full
right to examine the motives for belief before he
believes, and he ought only to bend the knee
when he recognises the wisdom of these motives.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 115
Thus, when Jesus publicly declared His Divinity,
do not suppose that humanity crouches like an
obedient slave : humanity has in itself men who
reason, men who think, who know, and those men
have examined and criticised the testimony of
Jesus. This examination and this criticism are
constantly renewed ; we will put them into
practice to-day, and we will ask in our turn what
is the evidential value of the declaration of Jesus
which declares His Divinity and His divine Son-
ship. Jesus is a witness. He speaks and declares
that He is the Son of God, equal to the Father.
What is the worth of this declaration before free,
enlightened, and impartial reason ? If it has any
worth, reason must recognise it ; if it has not, the
duty of reason is to repudiate it.
You will notice that the unheard-of and
prodigious saying by which Jesus declared His
Divinity has commanded the attention of humanity
and of human conscience in spite of all sorts of
objections. In spite of the religious reason of
the Jews; in spite of the cultivated reason
of the Pagans, many of whom still exist ; in
spite of the subtle and shifting reason of those
who are called heretics and are unable to accept
frankly the yoke of faith, in spite of all this, in
spite of the hostility of some and the indifference
of others, it has impressed the conscience of

116 BELIEF IN THE
humanity. This is a surprising fact when we
think of the many sublime words which have
fallen from the lips of human genius, and left no
trace or have remained as the possession of only a
few, while those of Jesus have triumphed over
human pride and implanted themselves like a
barb in the quick of human conscience.
I who speak to you have received this barb
deep in my heart; I am here among you to
interpret this saying, to defend it in the midst of
a world that disdains it, not only by the lips of
the common people but by the lips of the masters
of public opinion. After half a century of life,
and not having been by any means brought up in
the midst of the desert or in the sheepfold, but at
the feet of the doctors of our time, I am here to
speak to you of the declaration of Jesus and to
prove that it has its value.
It is strange and surprising, even to me, how,
after eighteen hundred years it has lost nothing
of its persuasive force. It is true that on
reflection it is nearer to us than it seems at first.
In fact if we consider what separates us from that
moment in which Jesus on the road to Cassarea,
and before the Jewish authorities, declared his
divine Sonship, and announced his return in the
clouds to judge the living and the dead, we find
we are separated from that time by two hundred
and sixty three Popes succeeding each other

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 117
uninterruptedly in the government of the Church,
with an average reign of seven to eight years —
that is to say, twenty generations. Now two men
to each generation for nineteen hundred years
is about forty men only.
In truth we can almost say that we touch
and hear Jesus Christ. Forty men are not
enough to stifle the powerful voice which has
cried aloud this truth, more powerful still, and of
which it has been the mission of the Popes
to repeat again and again the immortal echo. I
repeat this assertion once more, for it has entered
into the very depths of my conscience, and I
justify it before you after having in the first
place established its rigorous authenticity.
The critical examination of testimony raises two
questions : the first relative to the tenor of the testi
mony, the other relative to the worth of the witness.
If we establish the tenor of the testimony from
the point of view of reason and if, from the
same point of view, we establish the evidential
value of Him who affirms, the duty of every im
partial spirit, freed from prejudice, is to receive
the testimony and bow to the authority of
the witness. I hope that I may show you- that
the affirmatiou by which Jesus declared His
Divinity is of reasonable worth, and that He is
a witness whose authority bears sway over con
sciences.

118 BELIEF IN THE
I The tenor of a testimony must precede all exa
mination, for that which a witness says to us may
be absurd, contradictory, and inconceivable, and
then we have a right to set it on one side by
opposing to it the previous question. When,
therefore, Jesus declared His divine Sonship, we
ask what was, and what is now, the tenor of such
a declaration. Evidently when we go to the root of such a
saying we find there the essential idea of the
union of the divine with the human nature in
one and the same person which is divine — I need
not examine this point — that is to say, Jesus.
Therefore the declaration of Jesus implies the
union of the divine and human natures in His
person ; two natures in one person is the tenor of
the message.
You must not confound, and you must not seek to
get to the bottom of that which has no bottom and
which surpasses all your comprehension, because,
whenever man touches the divine, he comes upon a
being who is above his grasp and comprehension ;
he can recognise the reality and see it superficially,
but he cannot penetrate its depth. In hearing the
declaration of Jesus in the sense which it implies, we
must be content to examine whether it presents to
human reason anything contradictory or absurd. |
I know that there are atheistic doctrines which
declare without discussion : " From the moment

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 119
you speak of God as a personal being we cannot
listen to you, for there is no God." Pardon me,
atheistic doctrines are not human reason : they are
individual reason narrowed by a system which
is not only doubtful but false, which reason
shatters when it gives free play to its essential
qualities. And when I speak of examining the
declaration of Christ, it is certainly not that I
may bring it before the tribunal of restricted and
systematised reason, but of essential, eternal,
popular reason.
( The union of the human and divine natures
need not imply anything contradictory or absurd.
If there were, as certain heretics have asserted,
any confusion of nature, we should have a right to
revolt against it, but there is no confusion here ;
we speak only of a union without confusion, with
out mixture — an union of two natures in one Person
who is at the same time God and Man. I/It is
in this quality that Jesus is adored by Christians.
Now, not only is there nothing in this contra
dictory and absurd; but if, going further, we
consider the nature of man, the nature of God,
and the general laws of the universe in which
such union is brought about, we shall see an
admirable convenience and harmony between the
declarations of Jesus and our reason.
I look first at man, investigate his nature and
inquire into his aspirations. I ask what is the

120 BELIEF IN THE
desire of man. Man in the depths of his nature
is irresistibly moving towards the Infinite, as I
have already said in this pulpit. Man never
stops; the truth he contemplates is limited,
the love which enkindles him is limited, the
perfection he attains is limited. But he ever
seeks for more perfection, more love, and more
truth. Man is ever pressing against the limits
which confine him. This is his character and
his privilege. He is constantly going forward,
insatiable, panting and athirst. This is his glory,
and by this he is the ever-growing king of
creation. As he is ever going forward his goal must
be the Infinite. This aspiration dominates and
contains all others, it is concealed in them ;
nothing created can satisfy the desires of man,
while all that brings God near to our nature
moves its depths, and raises it above itself.
Nor should we be astonished that the declara
tion of Jesus, revealing in His person the highest
union of the divine and human natures, finds an
echo in man's conscience. On that day man felt
that he could see, hear, and attain to God, and
that his deepest aspiration was satisfied.
The union of the human and divine natures is
no less deeply in harmony with God than with man.
For so far as we know God, and in truth we know
Him very little, we know of His inner life only

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 121
what He is pleased to tell us. Now He is called
by a name which reveals His nature better than
all the systems of philosophy, whereof the bright
ness pales in contrast with that glory which has
its source in His very name. Pagans called God
the Best, the Perfect, Optimus ; Christians, better
taught by Jesus, gave Him the name which has
more life in it, a name more sublime and deeper,
but which has the same sense. They called Him
the Father — Pater. I do not know that there are
any two other names given to God which are
worth the trouble of recalling : and when we seek
the idea which is hidden under these two ex
pressions we find that of goodness.
There is, indeed, no higher name than that of
Father. Some who hear me may say Mother;
but the mother is a part of the father, and in order
that the mother may be perfect she must make
herself one with the father, who, unless he render
himself unworthy, remams the supreme lord of the
household. The father, then, the ultimate source
of being, is goodness. Now all that is good seeks
to communicate itself.
Whence it follows that the supreme law of God,
if indeed we can speak of law in relation to
Him, is a law of outpouring, of communication.
Whence it follows again that every idea which
implies the communication of God with His
creature is conformed to the nature of God

122 BELIEF IN THE
Himself, the best of beings, the father above
all. Now the Divinity of Jesus Christ supposes the
most perfect gift of God to the human being, and
by Him to all humanity. It is not strange, then,
that such a revelation finds immediate access to
the human conscience, which is always stirred by
goodness. For we see that the universe which science
studies, investigates and seeks to rule, the uni
verse in which is brought about the union of
the human and divine natures, unfolds itself,
according to an admirable plan, in the unity of a
growing, powerful, and irresistible synthesis.
Now, if we examine with the eye of science the
law which rules these vast evolutions, we shall
admit that the great phenomena produced within
this immense reality into which we are cast as
imperceptible atoms is always and everywhere an
increasing union. All inferior forces tend to rise
towards the superior force and unite themselves
to them, obeying a mysterious and irresistible
attraction. If we look at matter, it always strives
to increase ; but in order that it should increase,
it must unite itself to another power having
dominion over it, which is called life. When
beings are living, then, in order that they may
gain greater fullness of life they must unite them
selves to a superior principle transcending matter,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 123
which is called animal sensation, and which by
means of instinct constitutes the animal kingdom.
That the animal kingdom should increase in its
own life it must unite itself to a superior principle
not in itself, which is called intellect and liberty.
It, then, becomes man who unites thus in himself,
in the unity of his personality, many kinds of
nature : matter first, of which he is formed ; life,
because he has all that characterises the vegetable
kingdom ; next, sensation, as having all the powers
of an animal. But this animalism and sensation,
this life and matter, are governed by a superior
principle which is called intellect and liberty, and
by this man becomes the synthesis of things, the
king of the universe and of the creation, and of
which he contains all the elements in sum.
And there the unbeliever and the atheist stop ;
man is for them the final word of the cosmos ; I
will go further, and man will go further. I
will follow him, I declare that I will be with him,
so as not to betray that nature whose aspirations
will never stop here below, which, incessantly pro
jected outside itself, seems drawn to a transcen
dent, intangible reality; that is to say, towards
the Infinite, towards God. Only — and here I find
myself in agreement with them — man may go on
for ever without attaining an end, because man is
finite. But if so, it is strange that the finite does
not satisfy him ; the finite after a time leaves him

124 BELIEF IN THE
tired and out of heart. When man has resolved
one problem, he wishes to solve another ; he seeks
a new solution, deeper and greater. When he has
found one force, he is not satisfied, and does not
rest content with it; he wishes for another force;
he starts again, he goes forward from victory to
victory. We look at the children of science who fear to
stand still, and find them a superb army. We see
them in their laboratories, ever restless, wishing
to master new forces. The children of light may
seek these unknown powers, may tend towards the
infinite which they will never attain; across all
reality the world will extend around them, and
they will never exhaust it. They will see star
after star, nebula? after nebulas, and when they
can handle explosive forces like harmless sand
they will only know the first word of all these
forces, because other forces more irrepressible are
yet to be discovered, not in order to terrorise us,
but to overthrow the obstacles which matter op
poses to our triumphant march.
Men will seek and find the secrets of disease,
discover microbes and know that these will give
birth to others ; they will open the doors of the
world of the infinitely little, which will astonish
them by its smallness and defy them by its
power. Men will study all systems, and when they
have found means of harmonising them, humanity

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 125
will take new and unforeseen departures ; the
unexpected will upset all social science like a
flash of lightning.
The search will continue ; we shall seek to place
our fingers on the living point, the central point,
the only point which is the key of all.
Yet this point will remain beyond the grasp of
the scientific man and the philosopher. It is like
that number which is the key to the power of
things ; we cannot attain it, we shall never attain
it, unless it reveal itself to us. It is the only
solution of the human problem.
Man, such as we know and see him, insatiable
in intellect, activity and will, is very terrible in
his power ; we fear him and despair of him. St.
Paul has said with energetic eloquence: "If in
this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all
men most miserable ! "
There is nothing more awful than a traveller
on his route who never comes to the end of it ;
nothing more lamentable than breathless activity
in search of an ever-receding goal ; nothing more
horrible than the fate of a man who, hungry and
thirsty, desires to moisten his lips at a living
fountain, and always finds himself confronted by
a new disillusion.
Thus I understand those who are in despair
and revolt, those who faint by the way, those who
blaspheme, having no revelation of God; I pity

126 BELIEF IN THE
them and would fain raise them and stanch
their wounds. I know that man must despair
who can find no solace for his heart and no
cheer for his thoughts. I pity him with all the
depths of my soul. I have a horror of those who
are satisfied and full ; those who are satisfied
are false gods. They have made idols of their
wretched selves and lack nothing ; they have the
vanities, the goods, the joys of this world; they
have feasting, pleasure, luxury, and power; they
possess all and grow fat. They are the fortunate,
and are insolent in their good fortune.
Christ, in his gentle and divine language, said :
" Blessed are the poor, blessed are they that
hunger and thirst after justice, blessed are they
that weep, because they have not what they
would in this world." 0 God, I say the same
as Thou, now that Thou hast transformed my
human wrath into Thy infinite gentleness.
Blessed are they because God has done what man
could not do : the Incarnation is the coming of
God among men — that is to say, the union of the
divine and the human natures.
That is the solution of the problem; hence
forward man need run no more without hope of
gaining his end. He need no longer hope without
satisfaction for his hope, he need no longer be
restless and panting, for what he would he has :
God is with him and in him, He is amongst us,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 127
and being amongst us He but completes the
great movement of the universe into which we
are flung. Man has already united all the
elements in the unity of his person and of his
nature ; he wanted one thing alone to complete
the drama of the universe, he wanted God. It
was necessary that all created forces should be
joined to Him and that a divine Person should
unite in an indivisible, indestructible unity all
that exists — matter, soul and spirit.
So the flesh is exalted ; the mere animalism of
brutes with its gross instincts is raised to the
order of divine things. And poor liberty,
tottering reason, the frail power of a day, are
raised to the will, the wisdom, and the power of
the Infinite. Philosophers who seek the universal
synthesis can find none greater, nor an ideal
more beautiful and more adorable. The young
who dream noble dreams can imagine none equal
to that which is contained in the declaration
of God made man. 0 Son of Heaven and
Earth, all that thou hast willed in thy boldest
and fullest aspirations thou now holdest in the
faith and the infinity of thy hope.
After having examined the tenor of the declara
tion by which Jesus attests His Divinity, we have
to examine the evidential worth of Jesus Himself.
When we have to appreciate any witness — above

128 BELIEF IN THE
all, one whose deposition has reference to points
of sovereign importance, we have first to examine
his honesty, then his worth or intellectual com
petence, and lastly, to examine his life, to know
whether the actions of this witness correspond to
his words.
No one can complain of these demands, which
are only just. The witness finds himself in one
of the highest situations which man can fill, he
demands one of the most difficult things to obtain :
by the simple fact that he makes a statement, he
asks our faith, and we have the right to demand
that he be worthy of it. Man is distrustful, and
he has reason to be so, for he cannot blind himself
to the perversity and falsehood common among
men. This being so, as soon as a witness presents
himself we have a right to ask him who he is and
examine his moral honesty, as the first guarantee
of the truth of his testimony.
Popular good sense — always very keen, and for
which I have more consideration than I have for
certain philosophers — popular good sense is never
deceived. It has inspired human justice to
demand an oath from the witness. Naturally,
Atheism hates an oath, and I will track Atheism
into this last refuge.
Popular feeling demands an oath, for the simple
reason that an oath declares the presence of the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 129
God invoked. A man who takes an oath raises
himself to a great moral height, unless he
is perjured. He steeps himself in, identifies
himself with, that God whom he invokes ; and
as God is the chief good, as God is the eye that
surveys all things, as God is the Judge from
whom there is no appeal, as God is the perfect
Being, the man who takes an oath partakes, by
that very fact, in the nature of Him who is good,
who is perfect, Him who knows all and sees
all; and he is at that moment sacred, even
though in his ordinary life he were the lowest of
men. The atheist will tell me that my God is but an
idol ; that his own conscience is enough for him.
His conscience ! I am glad to hear it. But
what is conscience to a man who believes in
nothing? The atheist will say it is the voice
which tells him to do good. But who is
the judge ? Who, in the last appeal, will
pronounce that you have done well ? And if
conscience tells you that you may kill, that you
may burn — for there are consciences which say
so — then you will say : "In the name of my
conscience I have killed and I have burned,
because I ought to do so."
That, you will answer, is an aberration, a
madness, which the social order rejects, But
there is no social order except the eternal
i

130 BELIEF IN THE
justice of God, unless it be the reign of the
strongest. The weakest must yield to force ; the
strongest will always be right.
Thus, either conscience is reduced to itself, as
atheism will have it, in which case it falls as
a baseless edifice, and may justify crime; or
conscience is the reflection of absolute, eternal,
immutable justice, which punishes and rewards,
in which case it is the force which sustains
all things, and we may venerate, protect, and
develop it.
Oh, Mother ! shelter the conscience of thy
children, nourish them with the milk of justice
as with thine own ! Oh, Master ! when children
are placed in thy hands, take care that con
science enters into the very depths of their
being ! Oh, Priest ! make conscience penetrate
yet deeper — even to those depths which Christ
has touched ! Oh, Legislators ! remember con
science! when you declare a law, you say that
you maintain social order; but know that
conscience alone maintains law, and that God
alone maintains conscience. Think of the gene
rations to come who, perhaps, will be victims of
that blind atheism of which self-interest is the
sole and worthless guide.
Thus every witness must have the honesty of
conscience as guarantee of his word. It is
necessary and right that he take an oath,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 131
to invoke the eternal justice which is above him.
Thenceforward we have faith in him, be
cause being near to God he has a hold on
eternal morality, eternal justice, and eternal per
fection. Again we ask, what is the worth of Jesus
from the standpoint of moral sanctity ? Would
that I could repeat to you here, as my sole
demonstration, the history of that life of our
Master — that life of the Man who said He was
the Son of Man while He declared Himself
the Son of God ! No fairer beauty has ever
shone on the surface of the earth — never has a
like dignity, a like sanctity, honoured and dazzled
the human race. I except no name in history :
you may scrutinise all its pages, and will find no
one single example of a man who has attained
such a height as He.
You, who know what man is,- are aware that
the ideal of virtue is always above and beyond
us ; that we shall never attain it : a very little
sincerity reveals to us our failures, our moral
poverty ; no one can say that he is perfect and
without reproach. We may here and there find
people who boast themselves of some virtue or
other ; well-balanced minds, who moderate their
instincts ; generous hearts which are open to
kindness and mercy; pacific natures, who seek
to promote peace and harmony. But there is a

132 BELIEF IN THE
vast difference between these partial virtues and
the entire perfection and saintliness which shines
in Jesus.
Man is drawn in three directions : by his
conscience, his interests, and his instincts. Con
science leads him to goodness and honourable
dealing ; interest attracts him to what is useful ;
instincts stimulate him to pleasure. Now con
science is frail ; it often hesitates in finding its
way, and is powerless always to comprehend
and realise perfect good; the eager pursuit of
interest imprisons us in selfishness ; pleasure
excites our appetites and leads to a thousand
excesses .
In Jesus was nothing of the sort. He escaped
the fatality of corruption, His conscience was the
manifestation of the will of His heavenly Father ;
He always felt this will in Him, He said it and
repeated it. He made this will the law of all
His acts ; His entire life was at the service of the
divine will ; He even said that His meat was to
do the will of His Father in heaven. You will
notice that in the Gospel there is never any
question of the conscience of Jesus, but that He
spoke always of the will of His Father. Now
the will of God being perfection, Jesus, in
following this obediently, realised absolute per
fection in His human existence.
He had but two interests : the business of His

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 133
Father ; when only twelve years old we see in a
remarkable passage of the Gospel that the
business of His Father was His constant preoccu
pation ; the glory of God, as we should say now.
Secondly, the higher interests of man, the glory
of God, for Jesus, Was in reality that God should
reign ' among men. He desired that instead of
blind instinct, and deceitful ambition, whether
personal, patriotic, or humanitarian, the will
of God should be in them as it was in
Him, thus raising their domestic, patriotic, and
humanitarian interests to the height of the
Infinite. That was the human interest which Jesus
sought. All His life, from the moment that He
entered on the scene to His last hour, was conse
crated to the triumph of His Father and to the
good of man.
The course of His daily life was admirable. If
you will study the course of your own, you will
see how sordid it is, but study the daily life
of Jesus during the two years and a few months
comprised in His public career ; it was entirely
divided between the good of His Father and the
good of man.
He rose early, before the sun, and began the
day by prayer ; He went apart from human habita
tion into the solitary fields ; for prayer is difficult
in the tumult of human affairs. Then, when He

134 BELIEF IN THE
had prayed, His disciples who sought Him came
to Him. He said then : " Let us go and preach to
the multitudes and take to them the word of life."
He often said to His apostles, " Children, let us go
and preach."
Having entered into the villages they came to
Him, they brought Him by hundreds, multitudes
of sick, lame, blind, paralysed, those struck
by fever or epilepsy, and madmen. The crowd
was so great that He had not time to eat, and it
was difficult for Him to make His way among
them. Men came to be healed and He healed
them, there was a chorus of blessings from all
those who regained their health. His life was
one stream of good actions; He pardoned those
who demanded a higher life, and even argued in
order to get His doctrine into rebellious intellects,
seeking only the good and the glory of His
Father. There is no mention of pleasure in the life
of Jesus. His only joy consisted in doing good.
When He had been able to heal, to bring back
men to faith and to transform their natures, He
felt an unspeakable joy through His whole being.
One fact has always struck me in His life ; in
the midst of the fatigues of His apostleship, He
forgot to eat. " Eat, Master, eat ! " His disciples
said to Him ; and Jesus answered them " My
meat is to do the will of Him that sent me."

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 135
Such is a rapid sketch of the moral integrity
of Jesus, I would say of His heroic sanctity ; for
if you measure the sanctity of a man by the
perfection of the rule he obeys, no sanctity can
be comparable to that of Jesus who had no other
will than that of God, whose life never dero
gated from that sublime law ; of Jesus, who knew
only the eternal interests of man which are identi
cal with the glory of his Father ; who, moreover,
tasted no joys but the immaterial joys of the
spirit. There is, for us, no proof of our own upright
ness apart from the solemn fact of a true oath.
There is no certain, evident, and infallible sign
to enable us to recognise the righteous man.
The righteous man is he who strikes his breast
and is humble of heart, the penitent sinner
who mourns and weeps. When you see a man
who has no repentance, only two hypotheses
are possible : either God has raised him and
assumed him into His divine perfection, or he is
not sincere.
Jesus never repented. When He died upon
the cross, He asked pardon for His executioners ;
history does not record one single word dealing
with the confession of His own moral sorrows, for
He knew none.
The witnesses who narrated His life as it
unfolded itself before their eyes have given testi-

136 BELIEF IN THE
mony to a sanctity which has ho equal in the
world and is unstained by any weakness.
Those who have not sinned may stand erect",
but those who have sinned must bow before
Him who was always the well-beloved Son of
the Father, before Him in whom His enemies
themselves could never discover in the name
of justice the smallest blot, the' smallest imper
fection. He is there in the rays of His glory, in His
charity and sanctity ; and, whatever was the abuse
which assailed Him, no word has ever "tarnished
the moral beauty of His life. He never knew
human frailty.
He remains alone upright in the midst of pros
trate and repentant beings, as the ideal of justice,
of moral beauty, and consequently of sincerity.
When He speaks, to declare a fact or a truth,
however transcendent the fact, however myste
rious the truth, He must be heard ; He is the
first of witnesses, the' witness above all others,
the witness to whom faith cannot be refused.
A witness, moreover, must be competent in the
matter about which he testifies. Now is Jesus a
competent witness to His own divinity? I am
not speaking, for it is useless, of His intellectual
worth in the precise sense of the word ; nor will
I speak of the sublimity of His reason and of His
mind, in regard to those eternal truths which He

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 137
enounced and the absolutely lofty morality which
He promulgated, or of the doctrinal teaching
which fell from his' divine lips.
I will rather confine myself to making you
understand his competence, as a witness to his
divinity. You will notice that the divinity of Jesus
declared by Him, is a fact of consciousness, an
inner fact, a fact of which He had not' only the
feeling, but the vision ; a fact which we can no
more grasp than we can grasp, for ' example, the
respect or the affection of whose existence you
assure me.
You say to me : "I esteem you." I do not see
it, but your conduct demonstrates it to me, and I
believe this interior and invisible fact.
Jesus said : "I am the Sbn of God." To
the High Priest who asked Him solemnly, He
answered : " Thou hast said it, and hereafter thou
shalt see the Son of Man coming in the Clouds
and sitting at the right hand of the Father."
Note this well ; here is no theory. Jesus never
made a theory or a system like human moralists
or philosophers. It is a fact, a divine and trans
cendent fact, which we cannot grasp, but to which
He bears' witness. His word is an attestation for
which He demands faith. Now when we have
the attestation of a fact of consciousness, there are .
only two hypotheses : either the witness is mis-

138 BELIEF IN THE
taken about himself and about the fact of
consciousness which he attests, or he does not
deceive himself. If he deceives himself, he is
under an hallucination ; if he does not deceive
himself, he is a wise man.
The dilemma is absolute. Jesus declared that
He was the Son of God. In saying this, was He
wise or was He under an hallucination ? To put
the question is to solve it. Those who know the
life of Jesus will never admit the hypothesis
of hallucination ; and I would say to those who
have not read his life : When a man under an
hallucination speaks, he can but disturb for a brief
moment the little world in which he lives. Those
under an hallucination can sometimes make
people talk about them in a town, it may be a
Greek town in which men love what is new, and
there are Greek towns in all centuries ; they may
at most bring upon them, together with the
attention of the light and frivolous populace, the
attention of a few men of science ; but the world
passes on, and they are but as a little pebble which
an engine crushes as it goes.
But when the declaration of a man has roused
a whole people, as did the affirmation of Jesus,
excited to revolt the religious authorities, the
Sadducees, all the great families of Israel who
took part in the government of their country;
when it has had the power to revolutionise a

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 139
whole nation ; when it has found the way to
enter into the Roman world, and burst it all in
sunder, like an explosive, yet not to terrify but
to renew this rotten people, those old Romans,
those sceptical philosophers, those proud senators,
those free livers, those gamesters, those epicureans,
that whole multitude crushed under vice, sen
suality and indifference; when this declaration
has entered there, stirring the whole of this cor
rupt humanity ; when not content with exploding
the civilised world, it penetrated also into those
barbarous nations which hurled their forces
against the crumbling walls of Imperial Rome,
and subdued their consciences ; when at this very
day, in this world weary of doctrines and philo
sophy, weary of writers and politics, and seeking
something else to move it; when at this day,
in this world, this declaration succeeds in keeping
everything vibrating with emotion, I call on you
to say these are not words and declarations of a
man under an hallucination.
You see this as well as I do. When such a
word penetrates in this manner everywhere,
making its way through the mind and conscience
of man, overthrowing peoples and civilisations, we
must be sincere and bow before its power, for it is
no longer man, but God who passes by.
The words of Jesus declaring his divinity come

J40 BELIEF IN THE
before us clothed with a character which I must
needs specify, for it adds a supreme guarantee to
their power. See with how divine an art the Son
of God deigned to treat humanity. He would not
utter this word as a philosopher, or as a great
thinker, or as a politician might have done ; He
willed that this word, which suffers no hesitation
nor doubt, should be sealed by his blood and his
death. For it is a fact of history that Jesus suffered
and died for declaring that He was the Son of
God, and in acting thus He has clothed his
declaration with a persuasive power which no
human word can claim.
Indeed, I know only two sorts of words, those
which bring us praise, which lead us to glory and
make us live; or those which compromise us,
raise up public opinion against us, and lead us to
persecution and death.
When I see my contemporaries live by their
words, gain the glory of them, the glory of public
opinion, of their rivals and of their age — if those
words are beautiful I accept them willingly ; but
the triumphant happiness of these men makes
me pause, and if it is a matter of testimony I
hesitate before I believe them. I say to myself :
those men are so fortunate, perhaps it is their
personal interest and not truth which inspires
them.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 141
You cannot but have that thought, and yet to
have it is not to be cynical.
But if, on the contrary, a man utters a word,
formulates a doctrine, which must encounter the
opposition and the hatred of his people, even
threats, persecution and death, we cannot but
esteem that man. To suffer and to die for the
truth, to be treated because of it as a public male
factor, is the noblest fate and the privilege of
prophets. Welcome, then, suffering and death,
let them escort us who bring to humanity the word
and the truth of God.
Accompanied by suffering and seeing death
before us, we pass through men and force an in
different or hostile multitude to bow before us,
when we are no more, and to recognise the truth
to which we have testified.
Jesus was the first to walk in this heroic and
glorious path, misunderstood by his people and
by almost all his contemporaries, Jews, Romans
and Greeks, listened to by only a few ignorant
men. He went to death as a victim who knew
whereto He was destined, saying : "I, when I
am lifted up, will draw all men to me." And,
indeed, He whom the Jews crucified after having
rendered this bloody and final testimony to the
truth which He declared, has drawn men to Him
by a movement which the ages have not retarded.
There is, then, in this world a greatness which

142 BELIEF IN THE
can resist everything, that of a truth-telling
witness. It is by this witness that families live.
It is by a testimony from Him that woman
•believes in the fidelity of her husband, that a
husband believes in the fidelity of his wife. By
this witness justice exists, by this witness that
kingdoms endure, by this witness the Church
lives. By this testimony the divinity of Jesus
Christ is implanted in the human conscience.
And yet, among all these witnesses, He who by
his competence is the most indisputable, He who
can claim by his death the most absolute confi
dence in the divinest word which was ever
registered in the annals of martyrs, is Jesus Him
self. 0, Jesus, Witness, whose humble disciple I am,
Thou truly standest in the divinity of Thy testi
mony. The world may pass away and hurl
reproaches at Thee after the fashion of Thine own
people who did not fear to call Thee " Samaritan,
and possessed of the devil," that terrible word
of insult and of blasphemy. Yes, the world
may pass away, but Thou remainest in the rays
of Thy martyr's glory, in Thy sanctity ; and we
come to kneel before Thee, saying in the words
of the centurion : " Truly, this man is the Son of
God."

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 143

VI
THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE ACT OF
FAITH IN THE DIVINITY OF JESUS
After having established as an historical and
undeniable fact, the declaration by which Jesus
taught, proved, and attested, even unto death, His
divine Sonship; after having examined and re
cognised the unassailable value of His testimony,
we have by that very fact obtained a reasonable
right to believe in the Divinity of Jesus. Note
that phrase : the right to believe. We do not
believe anyhow. In order to believe we must
have the right, and not the duty only. In this
case the right precedes the duty ; no one can
believe unless he has the right to believe ; and
the right is conferred on him by reason.
This may seem a strange saying, but it is
absolutely certain. If not, we must conclude,
to the shame of belief, that faith is arbitrary, and
may be refused at our pleasure, while it becomes
a right and a duty for whomsoever has examined
and accepted the title-deeds offered by faith.

144 BELIEF IN THE
It therefore would seem that all those who
have taken serious account of the belief in the
Divinity of Jesus must accept this fact — this
transcendent truth. Nothing of the kind. For
man has the power of refusing his adhesion
even to things attested by credible witnesses — a
formidable power, which he uses, or rather
abuses. .
At the present day, many who have given
their attention to this important truth, that
Jesus has declared His divine Sonship, who have
recognised, by a sincere and rational examina
tion, that they ought to accept the declaration of
Jesus, yet refuse to acquiesce in this declared
truth, violate a duty, withdrawing from a right
which they will not use, although they are to
blame for not using it.
I often wonder — I say this in all the frank
ness of my faith and all the simplicity of my
nature, in spite of the experience I have gained
of the contradictions and rebellions of the human
conscience — I often wonder that these men are
able to withdraw themselves so easily from faith
in the Divinity of Jesus. And to my astonish
ment is added bitter sadness ; for to the heart of
an upright man nothing can be more grievous
than to see a truth, which is manifest to all eyes,
disdained, misunderstood, and rejected. How
ever, whoso reflects on what the Divinity of

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 145
Jesus implies, and the act of faith which it
demands, and on the very nature of reason, is less
inclined to wonder at the facility with which man
refuses to believe.
There are two sorts of truth : those we can
demonstrate by intrinsic evidence, and those we
can demonstrate extrinsically. The former are
clear; the second remain, in spite of their
manifest credibility, in the shade of mystery.
In the first the evidence is such that the
intellect is vanquished and bound in subjection;
men cannot but accept them.
You show me in science a visible fact — I
accept it without discussion ; or you prove an
assertion by a syllogism which allows me to seize
accurately the conclusions involved in its premisses,
and the syllogism has all the clearness of the
evidence : in these conditions the reason acts
for itself, and acquiesces deliberately, without
resistance. But it is otherwise when a truth wherein the
intrinsic evidence is not given — as, for example,
the Divine Sonship of Jesus. A witness, Jesus
Himself, declares it, confirming it by evident
exterior signs ; but if this witness and these
signs give it credibility they do not prove it.
Now, human intelligence being only convinced
and overcome by evidence, what I am about to
say will explain one of the general causes of the
K

146 BELIEF IN THE
unbelief of many. In such a case the will must
come in, overmaster our minds, and say to the
reason : " Restrain thyself ; here is a witness
who speaks ; He speaks truly ; bow thyself down,
in spite of the mystery which enfolds the reality
whereof He testifies."
In certain cases, then, evidence is supreme, in
others testimony. In this case, the will must
sway the intellect, because the witness is
credible ; but if the will does not bear sway,
faith will not exist. Now the will of a large
number does not command the assent of reason ;
hence unbelief in regard to the Divinity of Jesus ;
and this is an interesting phenomenon which we
must study. If the will remain inert, it must be
paralysed and rendered immovable by some
obstacle. The difficulties which paralyse and
check human will and intellect in regard to
belief depend upon three causes : the intrinsic
cause is the act of faith itself ; the next, which
I will call subjective, depends on the subject, on
his psychological, intellectual, and moral state;
the third, which I will call general and extrinsic,
is the conditions in which the subject lives, and
whose influences press on him on every side.
Persuaded that when these difficulties are
known they are half overcome, I proceed to
examine with you, one after the other, the
obstacles which hinder us from giving our

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 147
adhesion to belief in the Divinity of Jesus, Son of
God and Son of Man.
The first source of the difficulties opposed to
faith is the act of faith itself.
If in believing we had nothing to do but to
formulate with our lips the dogma that Jesus is
the Son of Man and Son of God, the matter
would be very simple. If we had even to
formulate it in our minds it would still be
very simple. But the act of faith goes further ;
it draws with it the whole human being, and
applies it altogether to the truth of which it is
the object.
In fact, since the will commands the intellect
to acquiesce in the fact that the divinity was in
Jesus, will comes into play. And, as will can
only act under the sway of reason, which has
demonstrated the credibility of testimony, the
intellect has also an essential part in the act of
faith. The two great faculties of the human being are
therefore put in movement. Yet more : when the
intellect, moved by the will, accepts this truth
that Jesus is the Son of God, such an adhesion
carries with it grave and important consequences.
In fact, if Jesus is truly the Son of God, and
we recognise Him as such, then by that very fact
we submit entirely to Him. We give ourselves
a Master in the intellectual order, in the order ot

148 BELIEF IN THE
thought, because it is evident that if the Son of
God speak we must listen. We give ourselves a
Master in the order of the will, because if the
Son of God give us precepts we must follow
them. We give ourselves a Master in the order
of the affections, because if the Son of God
be there we must love Him, love Him as He
deserves, with an altogether sovereign love. We
give ourselves a Master in the order of activity,
because if He command our wills, our affections,
and our emotions, nothing more remains. In
tellect, will, affection and emotion comprise the
whole of human activity.
Now, we must understand the meaning of
those words : " to give ourselves a Master." It
is to belong no more to self. Now nothing is
harder and more contrary to a man who under
stands himself, who has his own will and feels
himself the master of his actions, of his thoughts
and of his will ; the master of his emotions, his
activity — in a word, of his whole being.
Therefore, when the will refuses to enforce on the
intellect the act of faith in the Divinity of Jesus
Christ, we may be quite sure that the first cause of
this refusal is the secret and unacknowledged fear
of submitting to a master. Man instinctively de
sires to be his own master. He does not willingly
bow to another sovereign. He declares that thought
is his own, that will is his own, that he can love

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 149
and act as he pleases ; he declines to think, to
will, to love, and to act under the influence and
empire of another. This age, wherein the sense
of individualism is so strong — I might even say so
excessive — is no time to speak of the difficulties
of belief, and yet I cannot ignore them. We
have all felt them : we are all framed of the
same clay, we all breathe the same air, we all
have the same passions and the same inclina
tions; and, since there is at the present day a
fever of independence, none can declare that he
has never felt some access of it. Even among
believers there is none whose belief is reasoned
and convinced, who has not felt that the act of
belief implies a painful renunciation.
You know what ancient slavery was. The soul
of a modern man cannot contain his indignation,
revolt, and anger against the times when slavery
bore so heavily on two- thirds of humanity, with the
approbation even of philosophers, who regarded
it as natural and necessary. Yet in spite of his
chains and in spite of the material servitude
which weighed upon his body, the slave was
able to keep his soul free. While you who
believe in Jesus Christ keep the liberty of
your members, you can go and come where
you please ; but the Divine Master takes
something away from you — He takes away the
autonomy of conscience. Yes, Christian, you

150 BELIEF IN THE
may come and go, you may do externally what
your will and even your caprice dictates, so only
that morality does not hinder you ; but you
cannot think what your intellectual caprice
chooses, nor will what your desire suggests, nor
love in all the independence of a fickle heart ; you
cannot move in the order of activity where interest
comes into play, without Christ rising to confront
you, without the Son of God stating with absolute
sovereignty what you ought to think, what you
ought to love, what you ought to will, what you
ought to do. Unlike the slave of antiquity, your
body is free, your soul is in chains. That is the
act of faith, in its grave austerity, in the grandeur
of its sacrifice.
When the Christian has done this, not with his
mere lips, as those who seem to believe, and in
reality believe no more than heathens ; but with
full consciousness and will, he can repeat the word
of St. Paul : " I live, not now I, but Christ liveth
in me." There is not a true believer who has not
sacrificed himself, who is not a slave of Jesus, the
Son of God ; a sublime slave, no doubt, but still a
slave, and we who carry a free soul before men,
take a pride in this boast of slavery, and feel an
enthusiasm which the most independent freedman,
drunk with liberty, has never known.
It avails me nothing to be my own master if I
am a tyrant to myself. What I ask is to be the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 151
slave of truth and universal good. Oh, Christ,
when Thou didst demand our faith, Thou didst
enter into us with the truth that bears sway over
the mind, and I adore Thee ; with that eternal
good which is the law of the will, and I adore Thee
again ; with love, the eternal love which God
alone knows, and I adore Thee for evermore.
What matters it that I exist no longer ? what
matters it to me that our wretched self should be
immolated ; I glorify that sacrifice where the
individual renounces himself, escapes from his
own limits and his own nothingness, sacrificing
himself to belong thenceforward only to eternal
truth, eternal goodness, and eternal love.
This is the first difficulty in believing. I feel
the difficulty most intimately, and I am full of
compassion for those poor unbelievers who turn
away from the light. I know them well as they
shrink from the sacrificial pyre ; it is but human
to do so. Believers would fain fling themselves
into the holy flames : a beautiful and heroic sacri
fice. In every one who believes in the Son of God
there are the makings of a hero. I do not say in
all believers. Of all religious masters, Jesus is the
only one who has the right to ask for this heroism ;
for, being the Son of God, He is truth and love
and the absolute good. But no human slavery
finds a sanction among believers. There is not a
single chain which will find amongst us even the

152 BELIEF IN THE
smallest hammer to forge it. We leave chains to
slave-dealers. Slave for slave I prefer to those who are slaves
to themselves, or to the crowd of humanity, the
proud and gentle slaves of God.
We see, then, what are the inherent difficulties
in the very act of faith ; I may point out to you
others not less grave and not less dangerous, the
result of our psychological, intellectual, and moral
state. If we consider the present state of men and
of minds, we find them divided into four cate
gories :
The first comprises those who live, or think they
live, by the mind — those who think, or believe that
they think, among whom the brain is preponde
rant ; the second, those in whom the heart bears
sway ; the third, those whom material activity
masters and absorbs; workmen of every degree
and every class, from the civil engineer to the
humble and obscure miner ; and the fourth, those
who are swayed by passion and follow their more
or less unruly instincts. These four categories sum
up the whole mass of humanity.
Now, on whichever I look, I see special and
dangerous difficulties to the act of faith in the
Divinity of Jesus Christ.
Look first at those who think, or believe that
they think. I put on one side all really great

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 153
minds. I will not here quote them or argue with
them : their measure is beyond mine. Since they
tower above the level of ordinary humanity, we
can scarcely, even in these democratic days of
equality, address such majestic beings. I take
the average, that is to say, those who have the
culture of their times, those whose brain attains
to the level of modern civilisation.
Now, these have a great difficulty in the act of
faith, and the secret reason is that they all have,
or think they have, a little rational system, vary
ing with the individual. In some it is a scepticism
more or less transcendent, more or less logical,
analytic and experimental ; in others it is idealism,
in others pantheism, in others positivism, in others
blank materialism, in others — what shall I say ?
Nothing, nothing! As soon as anything is
affirmed, they fly off; they have a horror of
affirmation, they abstain from committing them
selves, and this abstention, systematised, is called
Agnosticism. Now the system in which such minds are
encased is by no means the result of profound
study. They merely seek what suits them, and
take it as they would take a hat at a hatter's.
When you have to do with minds who are so pro
vided with some such a system, it is not possible
to bring them to any active faith.
These theories, in fact, are just the negation of

154 BELIEF IN THE
all faith ; you dash against a wall, or fire against
a cuirass which your bullet cannot penetrate. All
struggle is impossible ; no faith can triumph over
this very general state of mind.
I do not think that I exaggerate in speaking
thus : experience gives me proof that this diseased
state of mind comes on a man before he has
reached his thirtieth year ; it may even arise
about the twentieth, even before; according to
physiology, the sutures are completely closed and
the physical man is complete.
Yet more ; besides those minds which do not
go so far as to provide themselves with a system,
there are those who fall under the yoke of the
intellectual prejudices of their time. The irre
ligious prejudice betrays itself by aphorisms such
as these : Science has demonstrated that miracles
are impossible ; science has shown that we are the
descendants of apes; science proves that all
creation is an irresistible and fatal evolution of
matter. Among political prejudices we hear the
following: The priest is a useless being, he had
better retire to his sacristy that we may see him
no longer ; he should conceal himself behind his
churches and no longer thwart us in the material
order, which it is ours to keep, with which, more
over, he has nothing to do, for his kingdom is not
of this world.
It cannot be denied that such prejudices blind

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 155
and narrow the minds of those who claim to live
by thought, and they raise between themselves
and faith an impenetrable and unbroken wall of
China. And when we have placed before the eyes
of these blind men irresistible testimony, when we
have proved that Jesus attested His divinity, and
that the testimony of Jesus ought to be received,
they remain deaf and blind ; hearing they do not
hear ; seeing they do not see ; they remain fixed
in their prejudices and their theory as if you
talked Chinese to an European.
Believe, however, that in spite of the severity of
my language, I feel as a priest a profound com
miseration for those far from the faith, who suffer
the grievous slavery of their vain systems and their
prejudices. May youth especially learn how to free itself
from them. In the name of liberty which it
worships, of the frankness in which it glories, in
the name of that great, simple Catholic reason
which lights up with all its powerful rays, may it
free itself from all yokes and break them in
pieces ; one only Master is worthy of it, Christ.
May it find at His feet its best inspiration and its
divine Saviour.
Those who live by their hearts are differently
placed, and face to face with other difficulties
which I must now point out.
The heart of man tends to idolise the object of

156 BELIEF IN THE
its affections ; so all who live by the heart, unless
they allow themselves to be governed by a superior
wisdom, are necessarily dragged into an idolatry of
the affections which is one of the great facts of
our human nature. Women who hear me will be
able to testify to the truth of my words.
When a man is carried away by feeling, he is
absorbed in his object, seeing nothing beyond,
beneath,, or above it. It is a sort of enchant
ment which leaves no liberty of thought, of will,
or of act; and those who are thus constrained
and enchanted are true slaves, most unhappy and
most cruelly treated.
If, indeed, the idol which we have made could
give back all that with which we endow it ; but
the idol is of marble or of bronze, it is of iron or
steel ; let it be of gold or of living flesh, if you will,
it is still an idol ; and the idol has always reduced
to servitude, degraded and devoured those who
adore it.
Such in sober sadness is the history of those
who are carried away by love. They are led like
unresisting sheep. It is impossible to escape the
magic wand which leads them, bleeding and en
chained, whither the fancy of the master takes
them. Man is not a volcano that his heart should
break out and carry everything before it. Our
emotions ought to have a natural law as the
instincts of a beast have. Feeling has in it some-

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 157
thing infinite, and when it turns to the creature,
it clothes it with the infinite which is in him, but
not in the creature ; he makes it into a divinity.
Now, every creature which is made into a divinity
is but an idol, and all idols are men- slayers and
slayers of their brethren, as cruel as they are
debauched. A multitude of men are given over,
in different degrees, to the violence of unbridled
human passion. There are two millions of inhabi
tants in Paris, and if you could look into the
consciences you would see how large a flock is
driven by the scourge of frantic love. They are
happy in their unconsciousness of the lash, happy
in the whirlwind which overwhelms them. But
when they come to themselves they shrink in
terror before the reality of facts. The mind
revolts, they do not know where they are going ;
they go forward to the unknown, always attracted
and always deceived, intoxicated and unappeased.
They are mad.
If you try to speak to them of God and of the
Divinity of Jesus, or to bring them back to the
faith, you might as well speak to sleep-walkers
and hypnotised persons.
You can no more influence a world like this
than that of minds blinded with prejudice and
fortified by systems. They are scattered here
and there, but we have all known a few. The
character which always marks them is that of

158 BELIEF IN THE
madness. If you speak to them of God, they
have only one god, that is the loved one ; you
speak to them of conscience, there is only one
conscience for them, the voice which tells them
what they must do for that they love ; and so the
crowd of desperate men is recruited.
Consult your own personal experience. When
they have not been overwhelmed by the fire which
devours them, when they have escaped the burning
furnace into which they have thrown themselves,
when they fluttered out half consumed, their
despair has no words. If God is not there to help
these natures whose last fibres are broken, you
hear the sad echo of those terrible dramas which
make you shudder.
Our modern civilisation, developing to excess
the emotional nature, has also multiplied to excess
the number of these victims, incurable, though the
flame has not yet reduced them to ashes. We are
unable, alas ! to save them, and see them fluttering
and dying ; and this is one of the most terrible
obstacles to the hold of faith in the human soul.
Hearts which are in bondage to the creature,
wrapped up and possessed by the love of the
creature, are closed to God.
Jesus passes them by, afar off ; leaving them
to the despair which ruin has already begun ; leaves
them to their madness, the last crime of prostituted
humanity which will not seek eternal love.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 159
There are also in our present world those whom
we call men of action, great and little alike. Now
men of action are carried away by the torrent of
earthly activity.
You know our modern society, and can realise
all the agitations, preoccupations, and feverish im
patience which it contains. The man of our day
dreams of colossal enterprises, and his dreams
consume him; he thinks of nothing but how to
change the whole surface of our planet, altering
its conditions, bringing about a new order of
things, becoming the master of Nature, taming her
forces, suppressing time and space. And such a
work as this demands workmen. For you cannot
annihilate distance without the combined and
persevering effort of thousands of workmen. And
here is the strange irony of things ! the humblest
are as necessary as the greatest, and those who
themselves are the most stationary — the miners in
their caves — beget the force which gives the
impulse to the colossal machine ; if you eliminate
them, all is stopped.
From the entrails of the earth they extract
the consolidated rays of the sun, just as we
extract the honeycomb from the hive. But the
absorption and exhaustion of their daily task
is terrible. Those whom this form of inces
sant and overwhelming labour consumes can
think of nothing else. Bowed towards the

160 BELIEF IN THE
earth and sunk in its depth, they cannot look up
to God.
At the end of their long and exhausting day,
they hardly can gain any rest in their families,
with their sons and daughters ; they drop with
fatigue in the evening, after an excess of labour.
And we ask what at such a moment is able to
upraise their souls and revive their courage ?
If they look at the fire crackling on the hearth
— if there be a fire ; the fortunate among them
have always a fire, but many have not — it revives
at the moment when it seemed to be going out.
If they lift their eyes above they will see, above
the chimneypiece, above the hearth, another
flame — that which comes from the Crucifix — the
protector of Christian hearths.
But in order to look there, they must have that
traditional faith which is guarded as a sacred
patrimony ; and too frequently they have lost it,
and are incapable of finding it again, so many
are the difficulties and the obstacles around them
which hinder their belief.
Even men of letters rarely attain to this faith ;
and, that being so, how shall those who are
without culture, those whose only enlightenment
is derived from the halfpenny papers, find the
means of belief, and the secret of uplifting their
weary consciences, even more weary than their
exhausted arms ?

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 161
I know the attempts to give them amusement.
But if we have succeeded in withdrawing them
for a moment from the torrent which sweeps
them along, these poor wretches soon fall under
the yoke of their misery and their labour, and
this crushing yoke cannot give them the courage
to be workmen without reproach, wise and
prudent fathers of families, able to increase their
salaries by thrift, in order that at the critical
hour they may heal their children and heal
themselves. Good God ! This is the truth of the social
situation : the workman needs faith, and his
hard life takes from him the possibility of it.
In speaking thus, I am not thinking only of
the proletariat, of the weak brethren, those who
are visibly oppressed by the woes of the body.
I speak also for the great, the intellectual, and
the strong; and they will pardon me if I take
pity on them as I do on the others. Their sorrow
is equally dark, though it be hidden under the
brightness of triumphant activity ; it offers even
less hold to the priest who endeavours to bring
them the word of Christ, apart from which they
seek in vain the God of all power and all hope,
the God of consolation and of peace.
I am sure you agree with me, and, bestowing on
all those absorbed in the active affairs of life a
common compassion, you would wish for the lowest
L

162 BELIEF IN THE
workman or the highest engineer the knowledge
how to live the life of the soul in the midst of the
din of the world, the devouring activity which
draws the soul far from God and condemns it to
death. There is, in our world of to-day, as in all the
states of civilisation which have preceded it, the
category of those who are carried away by their
instincts, who are governed neither by mind nor
by feeling, who are not wrapped up in the hurry
of business, but whom a sort of whirlwind of
passion seizes and leads captive. I speak of the
mere human beast — forgive me such an expression
— a beast which has not raised itself or which has
not been raised to the heights of reason, of will
and of enlightened interest.
In our civilisation this category is especially
developed in great cities. Humanity, like the
sea, has its foam and its wreckage. I may add,
moreover, that those beings who are given over to
brutal instincts, if they be but a little refined,
easily take their place in society, wear a mask
which prevents our recognising them.
Well, this human beast is refractory, is uncon
genial to faith in the divinity of Jesus and to
everything which is noble. " The animal man,"
says St. Paul, " cannot understand the things of
God." Here too lies hid a bottomless misery. Into

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 163
those dark and gaping abysses we must look
when we wish to fathom all that is inferior, gross,
perverse, and violent in poor humanity. Speci
mens are, alas ! so numerous that it is easy to
examine the phenomenon. The faith of Christ
cannot spring up in those souls consumed by the
fire of earth, nor can the light of God shine in
this impenetrable darkness. At the last moment,
it is true, we are occasionally able to save these
beings reduced to the last degree of moral corrup
tion whom infinite mercy wills to recover.
We may say perhaps that we ought to take no
account of these, but the priests of Jesus, who
know the divine value of souls, can never treat the
lowest among them as a negligeable quantity, and
I am not alone in thinking thus ; all those who
possess the heart of an apostle would be glad to
try, even at the peril of their life, to tame these
degraded natures who are all the more wretched
that they often have not the consciousness of their
baseness and their misery.
In any case we have here the sign of the in
herent corruption of humanity. It may be said
that these beings do not belong to humanity, and
that they have not risen out of their mere animal
nature, but I for my part consider that they have
gone back to it.
Now it is just this that we ought to prevent.
The legislator should not ever seek ouly to punish;

164 BELIEF IN THE
he should attempt prevention. He should not be
like those who wake on a sudden at the onset of
danger to aid those who cry : Help ! help !
True soldiers have other tactics. Defence is good,
but to prevent attack is better. In a great country
like ours, this is the urgent duty, and while I utter
no reproach against those who have the honour to
rule it, I permit myself in my independence as a
priest to offer them a word of advice. I would say
to them : Destroy in the germ the human animal
which may be a danger to the society of which you
have the care. It lies with you to prevent cata
strophes. And I would add : Take care of morals — an
old precept which people do not care for now —
old, because eternal.
The chief care of those in power should not be
the vigorous assault on evil, but the development
of those healthy and unseen influences, whereby
the reason which is inherent in civilisation, and the
morality which makes law, penetrate little by
little into the conscience of the lowest and the
soul of the most insignificant.
I dare not say whether our rulers do this or
not, and I leave it to your own reason and your
impartial wisdom to answer.
I cannot leave the subject which I have wished
to treat in your presence without once more calling
your attention to the surroundings in which we all

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 165
live and which oppose great difficulties to faith in
God and belief in the Divinity of Jesus, which two
things are really one and the same.
I shall not be suspected of darkening the picture
of my time ; I am ready to declare that I love it
more than any other century, for the simple reason
that I belong to it, just as a man loves his own
family more than other families because it is his
own; and this reason, which springs from the
heart, is always accepted and suffers no contra
diction. Among all the sorrows of our time, there is
a very characteristic one which I will venture to
call by the name of the atrophy of the religious
sense. Humanity obeys three kinds of influence : the
influence of earth, from which we can never free
ourselves; the human influence of our surround
ings, which we cannot escape ; and, lastly, the
superior and divine influence, which constitutes the
better part of man.
If the feet of man are firmly planted on the
earth ; if his breast dilates as it fills with the air
which surrounds it ; his brain takes in the world,
and he feels by his very attitude that the earth is
not all, that those who surround him are only a
part of what is real, and that the world really has
its centre beyond his vision, higher than earth,
higher than humanity.

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Now that which characterises our age is, on the
one hand, the energetic development of the force
by which we put matter in motion and of the
activity by which we influence society for its own
perfection; and, on the other, the languor and
feebleness of the movement with which we tend
towards God.
I am grieved at this, and others with me. And
yet we may not despair. Man is not a complete
being. Among the children of the Heavenly
Father each one has his own physiognomy ; some
are well born, others less so ; some have physical
strength, others the poetic genius to sing of
Nature ; some have their heads bowed down better
to see their earthly road, others look up and
adore. The centuries succeed each other and differ
each from the other ; we must take them as they
are, without holding a brief for them. I defend
my own only in part ; I recognise the predominant
tendency of those who guide its course ; they are
concerned with the problems of matter or towards
social questions, and I find that this movement
offers a difficulty to the belief in the Divinity of
Jesus Christ.
For this very reason that if we were less
engaged, less busy, we should better feel the
attraction of what is divine ; now this attraction
is revealed in Jesus, and those who do not feel the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 167
thirst for the divine pass by Him, distracted and
indifferent. I would remind you of it. It does appeal to
me, you will say; but I, who am devoured by
this thirst, rush to Him as we run to a fount of
living water. You will recognise that men like
him who speaks to you being in the minority, the
masses turn themselves to social, economic,
colonial, and international questions, to all which
touch human interests. They are engaged in
piercing tunnels, making railways, constructing
such or such works as seem to you very fine ; for
example, the submarine tunnel, or a gigantic bridge
in the open air, between France and England.
But when you say to men who are doing these
things : " Look towards God," they answer you :
"We have neither time nor inclination to do so."
We, however, who, in the midst of this torrent
which carries us all towards matter, have kept the
hunger and thirst for God, we go to God ; and when
the testimonies of God are heard, we bow down
ourselves in an act of faith and say : " 0 Christ, I
adore Thee, since Thou givest me the God whom I
sought." Yet we know that men pass unmoved by the side
of that which is a passion with us, hurrying madly
onward without a suspicion of that living fount
from which we draw courage to undertake and to
endure all.

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Such is our age. Faith does not reign therein
in a full stream as do science and democracy, but
this need not dismay us. Time passes, and there
is room under God's sun for all the acts of the
great drama which is transacted in humanity.
At the present day men are not drawn in the
direction in which we would fain see them go.
We must gather up the greatest number that we
can without anathematising those who withdraw
themselves from us, and we must wait for better
times with the patience of God whom we represent,
and of Jesus who has sent us to bear witness to
Him. Fear nothing, and recognise even in this age in
which we live, under a grey, sometimes a darkened
sky, without sun in the day, without stars in the
night, the power of Him of whom I preach to you.
In this night of the end of the nineteenth
century, against this night of God, against
the murky sky — a sky darkened by the thick
dust raised by human toil — you may see the
great Church of God arise and stand. It is
the column of fire which tells you that light
has not gone out. When men, too much occupied
with earth and with themselves, darken the world,
there always remains to guide them on their road
and to show them the good, the eternal light of
God shining through the darkness of humanity, as
stars shine through the clouds of heaven.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 169

VII
THE SEVEN WORDS OF JESUS ON THE
CROSS
I interrupt to-day the course of my lectures, for
we have come together to-day to celebrate the
anniversary of the death of Jesus Christ.
This death is the most important fact in the
annals of humanity ; that which most deeply stirs
our grief and our emotion, and yet it is the most
consoling and the most powerful. Nothing can be
compared with it.
In fact the death of Jesus Christ and the cross
which was its instrument divided human history
into two parts — the one which preceded, the other
which followed that event — and these two parts
resemble each other in nothing ; they are in
absolute contradiction one with the other, and
it is the cross of Jesus which has produced this
contradiction, an honour to humanity and alto
gether to our advantage.
The death of Jesus, and His passion — pas
sion which cannot be expressed in words, is

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the divine coronation of His life. All that He
taught and manifested to us, all the examples of
virtue which He gave, all the weariness which He
endured, all the treasures of wisdom, love, power,
and goodness which He manifested, are concen
trated in His last hour.
His death was not that of a man, it was that of
a God. Let those who seek to believe contemplate
it ; and, as it drew from the Roman centurion that
immortal cry from an upright conscience : " Indeed
this was the Son of God ! " it will, after all these
centuries, win from all sincere souls the same cry
and the same faith.
I cannot repress the emotion which I feel when
I speak to you as a disciple speaks of his Master.
Eighteen hundred and ninety-four years ago at
this same moment — the sixth hour, as it was called
at that time — on the little bare hill which was
called the place of a skull, Jesus was raised on
the cross. I see the place, I see the ancient ram
parts of Jerusalem as it then was ; I see the angle
formed by the wall which sloped away from a
defensive tower called the Tower of Hippicus, which
went direct to a gate, the Gate Djennat ; I see
another wall starting at a right angle from the gate
and running due north. There, some twenty paces
from the walls — for it was the custom to execute
those comdemned to death at the gates of the town
— there, some twenty paces off, near the road which

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 171
went to Ephraim of Samaria, in the midst of the
olive gardens where the rich Israelites dug their
tombs, in the midst of a crowd, Jesus, accom
panied by two brigands, thieves, or malefactors,
was crucified.
Now there fell from the divine lips of Jesus on
the cross, words which were recorded by those who
heard them ; we are here to meditate upon them,
and I would wish to explain them to you ; poor
explanation, however, beside all the infinite depths
which those words contain.
Oh, my brethren, the dying Jesus left us the
great knowledge of life in those few words which
fell from His lips, and the knowledge of life is the
knowledge of suffering, is the knowledge of woe,
of consolation, affection, and of pardon. It is the
knowledge of perfection — in one word it is the
knowledge of how to die.
There is one word which teaches the rudiments
of this divine knowledge, the most necessary to
man, for we may be ignorant of everything, my
brethren, in this world except one thing, the
knowledge of how to die. Now, the first word
which fell from the lips of Jesus is a word of
pardon : " Father, forgive them, for they know
not what they do," He said as He was raised on
the cross, speaking of His executioners.
We all suffer, more or less, by the deeds of men :
their ill-will and their antipathy, their violence or

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their craft, their secret hostility or their open per
secution. Although born to love each other as
brethren, men tear each other in pieces. The
sorrow caused by unconscious nature, the sorrow
inherent in our fragile constitution, is more easy to
bear ; we resign ourselves to it of necessity, as to
inexorable fate ; but the sorrow which comes from
an intelligent and free cause, from those among
whom we live, our fellow-citizens, our friends and
our relatives, that is the sorrow which is most
excruciating of all, a terrible sorrow, especially
when it follows upon an innocent person who has
the right to say to his enemies : " Why do you
persecute me?" Jesus did not even make this
reproach to His executioners ; He forgave them
fully, simply. Let us say as He did and with
Him : " Father, forgive them, for they know not
what they do ! "
We look for this word from Christ. He had
always taught forgiveness ; He had recommended
it as His new law, and had said to His disciples :
" They will persecute you, but do you bless them ;
they will insult you, do and say what is good;
love your enemies. Pardon without counting, not
seven times, but seventy times seven, that is,
always." And now, Master, here is Thy supreme hour.
What wilt Thou do upon the Cross to which Thou
art nailed by Thine enemies ? Thou wilt forgive.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 173
From the hour of this forgiveness an immense
pity has developed the earth; the victims have
learnt to curse no longer, but to forgive and to
love. Forgiveness ! Not only did Jesus call for
pardon, but He asked it from His Father for His
executioners; and He added, thus giving the
secret of infinite mercy : " Forgive them, for they
know not what they do."
Now notice that when man does evil, it is
always at bottom from ignorance. Man does not
know. No doubt his will has its weaknesses, its
obstinacies, and aberrations ; but an attentive
examination of conscience shows that they pro
ceed, most of them, from ignorance of the mind.
Man's intellect is very short ; he does not see or
understand, and therefore he errs. The execu
tioners who crucified Jesus would certainly not
have crucified Him if they had known what He
was. Their ignorance excuses them and opens a
side door to infinite mercy.
Now see the effect of this divine word.
Humanity, considered in regard to God, is ruled
by two laws — that of Justice, which strikes and
avenges ; that of Mercy, which absolves and
loves. Jesus lived under the law of avenging Justice,
under the law of the terrible Jehovah, which left
no place in human conscience for goodness and
forgiveness. Inflexible humanity seized the

174 BELIEF IN THE
sword, struck and slew, armed with that false
justice which is called lex talionis. It was a
formidable law, which had dominion in the whole
world before Jesus. After Him this law was
changed ; since He pronounced the word of for
giveness a new spirit has taken possession of the
heart of man. We are kind, even to weakness ;
but we need not excuse ourselves too much. We
may be well permitted to imitate our God, and to
have for the bad a cry of pity. In the kingdom
of Jesus there is no more vengeance, no more
reprisals, no more killing, no swords brandished
to intimidate the human beast. We must imitate
Jesus ; and even when the claws of the human
brute pierce our flesh, we must contain our
wrath, open our hearts to pity, and not withdraw
ourselves from this outpouring of the forgiveness
of God.
0 my Lord! blessed art Thou, for Thou hast
changed what was most difficult to change in
man. Thou hast slain the instinct of vengeance,
and brought about the reign of mercy and of
boundless pardon.
If to pronounce the word of forgiveness, even
in favour of the executioner, belongs to the
heroism of man, to create in the heart of hu
manity the divine law of universal mercy belongs
to God alone.
Jesus was crucified between two brigands,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 175
thieves, or murderers. The second word which
fell from His lips was a word of the most touch
ing consolation. One of those crucified with Him
joined with the general crowd, with the passers-
by, the Pharisees, the Jewish authorities, all
vying with each other in insulting the Crucified,
and said: "If thou be Christ, save Thyself and
us." He continued his evil life even in his death ;
but the other, rebuking the companion of his
punishment, said, in all the sincerity of his soul :
" We receive the due reward of our deeds, but
this man hath done no evil." Then looking upon
Jesus he said to him : " Lord, remember me, when
Thou shalt come into Thy kingdom." Jesus
answered him : " This day thou shalt be with Me
in Paradise."
My brethren, I know no word that is better
addressed to the whole of humanity. All we here
are, in our different degrees, sinners. I do not
say that we have been robbers, thieves, assassins,
as any man who is the victim of public wrath, or
as they who, condemned by Pilate, went with
Jesus to His death ; but we have our vices, and
we are sometimes more culpable than those who
are declared malefactors, more criminal than
murderers. Some men kill the body, but others
corrupt the spirit and slay the soul. Of these
two crimes, which is the greatest in the sight of
God ? Intellectual malefactors ! you have perhaps

176 BELIEF IN THE
distilled into a whole generation your evil venom.
Race of vipers ! it is not a single man whom you
have morally slain, but thousands of men ; and as
for the corrupters, the perverse, they have cor
rupted a thousand consciences and sowed shame
and incurable vice in many families. They drape
themselves in their decorous civilisation, and
speak of virtue in order to make us believe in
their own ; and they have the insolence of self-
admiration under their hypocritical mask.
We will have no illusion, no deception, and no
sham. Human conscience faints under the burden
of innumerable crimes open or secret. And,
strange though it be, the most innocent before God
recognise and publish with the highest frankness
and sincerity their sins and woes.
My brethren, you cannot escape death, which
lies in wait for you. I do not say that we have
to be nailed to a cross, but we shall certainly be
nailed to the bed of death and draw our last
breath. And you who listen to me, what need you for
that tragic hour ? What do I need, above all, who
speak to you here ? We need hope ; for that
which takes strongest hold of the human being
when in the hour of death he has a vivid sense of
his own un worthiness, that which tortures him
and often renders his salvation impossible, is the
leaven of despair which rises suddenly in us. And

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 177
at the end of a long life, when in the mournful
gloom of death we examine our actions, we are
inclined to say : " Leave me ; I am too far from
God. Let me die, and make an end of it."
This is the bitter cry of the desperate, and I
would wish that you should have once for all the
remedy against that supreme anguish. Look at
that nameless wretch who died by the side of
Jesus ! He was a criminal like those of to-day,
for times, like evil actions, scarcely change.
Civilisations are modified, but the essence of evil
is always identical and its fruits of death are
always similar.
I would address myself in the name of Jesus, in
the name of the Crucified, the great, the only
Consoler, to all those who are unhappy because
they are sinful — and we are never absolutely
unhappy unless we are sinful — I would address
myself to those who have made pubic failure of
honour, those who have made failure in the secret
of their conscience ; those who have made failure
in their passion, failed in the law, failed in regard
to society, I would say to all these criminals — to
all, you understand, for they are all on the same
road, and breathe the same atmosphere of Satanic
evil : whoever you are, whatever be the number
and the greatness of your crimes, never despair.
Young women who have fallen, do not despair;
faithless wives, do not despair; husbands bowed
M

178 BELIEF IN THE
down under the weight of secret shame, do not
despair; you who are perjured to all oaths, op
pressors of the weak, traitors to justice, enemies
of religion, blasphemers of God, do not despair,
for since Jesus said to him who was crucified with
Him: "To-day thou shalt be with me in Paradise,"
despair is conquered. Paradise is God, Paradise is
truth, Paradise is eternal love ; Paradise is infinite
power, Paradise is perfection; it is the kingdom
of God, it is eternal justice and eternal love.
Such is the dream to which we cling in the
fulness of our higher instincts and of our most
sublime aspirations. Paradise is the hope of the
sinner ; Jesus promises it to him.
Brethren, one thing is to be done to obtain
Paradise, and that depends upon yourselves : to
smite your breasts and return into your own con
sciences, to pronounce that word from the depths
of your heart in the example and with the faith of
the good thief : "I have done ill, and I have
received the punishment which I ought to receive,
but Thou, 0 Jesus, art innocent; remember me,
when Thou comest into Thy kingdom."
And may all you who hear me learn this lesson,
when you feel your sins weigh heavily upon you,
when despair threatens to overwhelm you, look to
the eternal Calvary and say to Him who is dying
there : " When Thou comest into Thy kingdom —
and Thou art there now — remember me ! "

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 179
Oh, my brethren, would that I could wring from
you this cry; that I could bring home to your
troubled consciences — I do not say into your dead
consciences, but, what is worse, your despairing
consciences — the saving word. Yes, you will hear
it with the thief on Calvary, the word of Christ,
the secret of eternal consolation : " This day thou
shalt be with me in Paradise."
At the foot of the Cross a scene took place,
most moving because most human. The soul of
Jesus was therein revealed in its exquisite and
infinite tenderness. Round those who were cruci
fied there was a surging crowd, curious to see them,
full of ill-will and evil dispositions. The greater
number of them were mocking, threatening and
ironical, full of insults and blasphemies against
Jesus. A little apart stood in silent grief the
holy women who had accompanied Jesus in His
mission. One moment the mother of Jesus, her sister-in-
law Mary, the wife of Cleophas, John the well-
beloved disciple, and Mary Magdalene, drawn by
an invincible attraction, came near, in spite of
danger, as though to mingle their anguish with
the anguish of the Crucified. Jesus saw His
mother, He saw the beloved disciple, His eyes rested
on them with unspeakable tenderness ; He forgot
His pain to think only of those whom He loved,
for if there is one trait more remarkable than

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any other in His life, and in particular during
His passion, it was the forgetfulness of His own
grief. From the moment when He left the Prsetorium
and met the women of Jerusalem manifesting by
their wailing, according to Oriental custom, the
immense pity of the people, down to the last hour
wherein he gave His soul into the hands of the
Father, Jesus forgot Himself; so different to the
man who concentrates himself in his own woe, and
in suffering thinks of nothing but his own pain.
Great is the lesson and austere the teaching — no
egotism, especially in suffering ; you should endure
it, forget it and forget yourself, after the example
of Jesus on Calvary, nailed to the Cross, resting
His eyes on the group of those whom He loved
most in the world — His mother, John his friend,
Mary Cleophas the friend of his mother, and Mary
Magdalene, His penitent — His affection poured
itself forth on them for the last time before His
death. He uttered some wonderful words, admirably
human ; He made as it were His testament. You
will understand this, you who have seen any
beloved being die, and treasured up his last
wishes ; He looked at His mother and John, then
He said to His mother : " Woman, behold thy son,"
and to John, " Behold thy mother."
Jesus, seeing death take Him from his mother,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 181
not being able any more to be visibly the Son
of Mary, He gave her His most beloved apostle
John as a son in His place ; John was to watch
over her, and the mother of Jesus was to watch
over the disciple whom He loved. Being no longer
able to lie on the breast of the Master, John would
live at least near her who had been with Him all
His life, from His conception to His death, and in
hearing the beatings of the Mother's heart he
would find in them the echo of all the divine
mysteries which he would translate to the world
in his sublime Gospel ; that Gospel which is an
offence to those whose minds cannot endure to
contemplate the high things of God, and whose
hearts harden themselves before His infinite pity.
Such in its simplicity was the testament of Jesus.
We Christians have always seen in it a profound
and touching symbol. Its tender humanity con
ceals a touching mystery, and, from the beginning,
all those who have been initiated into the doctrine
of Christ have seen there a great creation of the
dying Jesus ; the creation of a spiritual and uni
versal Motherhood of which Mary would be the
organ, and a spiritual sonship embracing all the
disciples of Jesus represented by John.
Women will ponder on this wonderful height to
which it has pleased Jesus to raise them in the
person of her who is at the head of their sex, and,
after Christ, even at the head of humanity. I here

182 BELIEF IN THE
reveal to you a great mystery of Providence, and
however respectful may be my auditors, I feel a
certain scruple — I would not profane holy things
and give the truth of God to be trampled by the
feet of those who disdain it.
Must we then go into the desert to escape the
lightness and the irony of men, and in the desert
call together the initiated to tell them in the tran
quillity of solitude and the respect of their con
science the holy truths of which we are the
depositories ? No, 0 Christ Jesus ! Thou hast
willed, in accepting Thy Cross, to be exposed to
the world, and in Thy divine nakedness to be the
mark for every form of insult, and we must bear
them with Thee. In the spiritual and divine
order as Providence has established it on earth,
we have not only a Redeemer who communicates
to us the spirit and grace of God, we have not
only a Master and a Father, we have a Mother,
and her name is Mary ; and since she has been
raised to this divine position, she certainly must by
the grace of God have merited this holy privilege.
When she conceived Christ, she said in that
prophetic song which at the present day is the
song of all Christianity, as it was yesterday and
will be hereafter : " All women, all generations shall
call me blessed." The humble Virgin, who had
become mother by the Spirit of God, did not guess
that all generations would call her by a still fairer

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 183
name. Women who listen to me know that there
is no name sweeter, deeper, more full of tenderness
than the name of mother. This name was to be
given in the days to come by all the disciples of
Jesus to Mary, Mother of Jesus. She became,
indeed, our Mother on Calvary, in the profound
mystery of the divine love. Resigned to the
inexorable will of God who condemned her Son
to be crucified, she identified herself with His
sufferings, His woes and His death; and her
anguish, heroically endured, has been the con
dition of that maternity perpetuated through all the
ages and which the acclamations of the universal
Church have consecrated for ever.
All good and simple souls, all those in whom
the mind has not stifled the heart, all Christians
who have a lively faith, have felt themselves
adopted from that hour by this Blessed creature
in whose heart God placed the well-spring of pity.
By her those choice graces which God pours upon
humanity through mysterious channels, are given
to us.
I may, perhaps, give offence to those who boast
of their reason and their independence, and who
believe it to be unworthy of a man to bow himself
before that Woman who has been so greatly exalted
by God Himself ; and, if so, let them be offended.
Let those of simple and sober mind, of large
and sincere heart, hear this : one day when they

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can have no more of life, when they feel over
whelming pain which nothing can heal, when,
crushed with the thought of their own wretched
ness, they dare not look towards God nor call to
Him, from the depth of the abysss let them remem
ber that they have a divine Mother, a woman
called the Virgin Mary, consecrated on Calvary to
be their Mother in the divine order, let them invoke
her, and they will be saved.
I know women who, following the spirit of the
Virgin Mother to whom they have consecrated
themselves, invoke her name ; and, breathing it
into the ear of the dying, have gathered up
for God hundreds of hardened and desperate
sinners. Oh, repeat this name again, my sisters. You
are the chosen instruments to accomplish visibly
the invisible task of Mary ; you know how to
staunch and heal, and you know also that best
balm which soothes and calms all wounds, the
balm of affection and kindness. Consequently,
when you can murmur the name of the Mother
of all Christians in the ear which has need to hear
eternal truth, hesitate not to invoke it. You who
struggle in darkness and the anguish of evil,
seeking in vain for light, for strength and for
peace, know that, if you have a Father who watches
over you, and a Mediator who loves you, you have
also His mother — yours — who will listen to you

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 185
always, and hold out her sacred hand to bring you
back to God and to Christ.
The fourth word which Jesus spake on the
Cross is a word of anguish : " My God ! my God !
why hast Thou forsaken me ? "
It is the beginning of a prophetic psalm which
paints in letters of fire the unspeakable woes of
Jesus crucified.
Indeed, brethren, we cannot imagine or conceive
a woe equal to that which overwhelmed the soul
of Jesus during the three hours of His crucifixion.
He was nailed to the Cross about midday, and
He drew His last breath at three o'clock according
to the precise statements of the Evangelists.
But I know that many Christians — I have heard
them many times — say : " Since Jesus was God,
how could He have any sorrow ? God could not
suffer, and He who was the Son of God should not
suffer ; if He suffered, His pain was drowned in
the infinite beatitude of His divinity."
Such a mode of reasoning rests upon the radi
cally false idea that Jesus had humanity only in
appearance, that He was not a man in flesh and
blood, endowed as we are, and more than we are,
with most exquisite sensibility.
Jesus was God indeed, but He was equally man.
The human nature and the divine were united in
Him without confusion, and each of them preserved
their essential properties intact. God has no

186 BELIEF IN THE
passions, but man has passions, and the union of
the divine with the human nature of Jesus not only
did not prevent the sufferings of human nature,
but added to them something of the infinite.
Indeed, a nature has a capacity for suffering all
the more great as its sensibility is keener and
more delicate. Now the union of the divine with
the human nature, far from lessening the sensi
bility, added something of infinity — that is to
say, it thereby became an instrument still more
perfect for comprehension, for love, for will, for
feeling and suffering.
Man cannot be divided : his psychical faculties
are closely combined, the attenuation of one is
sometimes a detriment and sometimes an advan
tage to others; thus, a man who is devoid of
intellect suffers but little, and you must have
remarked the impassibility of certain herculean
natures in whom the muscles are everything. On
the contrary, you may have observed the particular,
refined, and subtle sensibility of intellectual beings;
a mere word can wound them, because, from their
keener intelligence, they understand better and
feel more profoundly. Now Jesus having the
most delicate, the most refined, the most intelli
gent, and the most loving human nature, must,
since His physical nature was admirably adapted
to His human intellect and moral nature, have
endured unutterable agony ; and we may say that

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 187
He climbed to the last step of the degrees of the
ladder of pain.
Let us consider Him only on the Cross. It is
written in the sacred book of His people that He
must be crucified, and He himself announced it ;
He said : " I have to be baptised with the Baptism
of Blood, and how am I straitened until it be
accomplished." He said also : " I am come to
cast fire on the earth, and what will I but that it
be kindled." And this fire consumed Him first
of all.
Crucifixion is the most frightful suffering which
has ever been invented by human cruelty. And
what is wonderful is, that the Jews did not crucify,
and that Jesus who belonged to the Jewish nation
was crucified, and that at the demand of His own
people. The Romans did not crucify their own
citizens, they slew with the sword — a nobler death.
But if the Roman citizens died by the sword, the
inhabitants of conquered provinces were crucified
like slaves, an ignominious death, reserved for the
most despised class of men. The suffering was
atrocious, because the death was slow and left all
his faculties to the sufferer, who witnessed his own
ignominious death, exposed naked before the whole
multitude, the whole nation.
The punishment took place in the light of day,
and whoever passed along the road by the side of
which the cross was raised might see, insult, or

1 88 BELIEF IN THE
pity the victim. And in addition to this frightful
martyrdom was the devouring thirst and the
horrible fever which consumed the crucified.
Jesus knew this pain. He knew another also, the
pain which came from the people who surrounded
Him. At such a moment, amid £he wild crowd
there prevailed a sort of contagion of insult ; each
one tried who could blaspheme the most, they
recalled the words which had been pronounced by
Jesus and made of them a weapon against Him ;
because He had said : " I am able to destroy the
Temple and after three days to rebuild it," it
was urged against Him as a blasphemy worthy of
death. They ironically reproached Him also for
His divine Sonship : " If Thou be the Son of God,
come down from the Cross." It was in the midst
of the agony of His punishment that they addressed
to Him those reproaches. When He said He was
the Son of God, they would not listen to Him,
and His word had no power; now that He was
nailed on the Cross they said : " Answer, and let
God save Thee, if He will, since Thou art the Son
of God."
A cowardly insult !
A clever man once said to me : "If Jesus were
the Son of God, He ought at that moment to have
caused the nails to fall from His cross, and, spring
ing among the crowd, to have cried : Here is the
Son of God ! "

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 189
This is to understand divine things but
little !
It is not by a sudden enlightenment but by the
gentleness of persuasion that God will open hearts
to Him.
Such were the insults and wrongs to which
Jesus had to submit when He uttered that cry of
anguish in a dialect which certain Romans could
not understand : " Eli ! Eli ! " which means, " My
God ! my God ! " Those who did not understand
Him said : " This man calleth Elias ! " and they
joked with that unconscious cruelty which is one
of the worst traits of humanity, and which takes
possession of crowds when they flock in their
curiosity to behold a bloody death.
This pain He knew. All His doctrine, all the
good that He did, all His power is therein. His
Father did not come down to save Him ; the hour
had come in which He gave His Son, a defence
less victim. His friends were there, His mother,
John, the holy women, and all of no avail. His
mother experienced an anguish which pierced her
with seven swords, His friends could do nothing,
and their powerlessness was for them a torture
the more. There were there priests and high
priests and all that was most respectable in the
land, but these insulted Him pitilessly, with the
irony which belongs to superior people.
Yet there was something still more terrible,

190 BELIEF IN THE
more atrociously cruel in the abyss of evils wherein
Jesus was cast by the will of His Father.
Our members may be tortured as were those of
the martyrs given over to the beasts, or to man
more cruel than the beasts ; we may be devoured
by the fever of death, our hearts reduced to a
stone, calcined by the flame of sorrow ; we may
be the mark for every insult, whether on the part
of the careless and brutal populace or of the
educated, more refined in their cruelty; we may
be victims of the vengeance of political power or
of the anathemas of religious power ; we may see
our friends helpless witnesses of our torture, in
creasing our grief a hundredfold by their anguish ;
but in this lamentable state one last refuge is
open to us, against the violence of the hatred of
men : conscience, and in the conscience, God —
God who sees justice and loves it ; God who sees
sacrifice and blesses it, who recognises devotion,
who beholds our anguish and assuages it.
But Jesus, at the hour when He cried : " My
God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"
Jesus who had divinity in Himself, in His intel
lect, in His will, Jesus at one moment repulsed by
His Father who treated Him as the victim laden
with all the sins of the world, had not any longer
this consoling sense of the divinity living in Him ;
he lost it — and it is frightful to say so, though no
heresy — it is frightful, I say, but it is the truth:

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 191
hence that terrible cry so full of agony which
came from His heart and fell from the Cross as
the last word of human suffering: "My God, my
God ! why hast Thou forsaken me ? "
We have a foretaste of this bitter suffering
when at certain hours our spirit troubles our will,
we feel God no longer in the deep of our conscience.
We have a foretaste of that terrible moment
which Jesus knew and which can only be com
pared to the damnation of souls for ever plunged
in that darkness wherein the will of God does not
shine, and frozen in that icy cold where divine
love penetrates no longer. Not that His human
and His divine natures were disunited, they were
inseparable, but the humanity of Jesus no longer
felt, as we can feel, that God was in Him.
And now, in face of the Crucified, I have the
right to say : You who weep, complain no more ;
be angry no more ; you who are dying, look at
Him and send towards God the same cry which
He uttered ; see if there be a sorrow like unto His
sorrow ! What we can see of God is a ray ; what
we can feel of God is a drop of ambrosia, while
that which Jesus looked upon was the sun, and
what He felt was an immense flood encompassing
heaven and earth. Conceive, then, what He ex
perienced when the flood, like an intercepted
source, no longer intoxicated Him with its infinite
sweetness.

I92 BELIEF IN THE
I have said that one of the great agonies of the
crucified was the agony of thirst, and this Jesus
endured. A moment after He felt His dereliction
by God His Father, He cried : " I thirst."
One of the Evangelists who witnessed this
scene tells us it and interprets the word of Jesus.
In order to emphasise the fact that the events in
the life and the death of the Saviour had been
foretold by prophecy he makes this comment :
" Jesus having accomplished all things, that the
Scripture might be fulfilled, said : I thirst."
This prophetic word of Scripture was that Jesus
on His cross should be given vinegar to drink.
The Romans prepared two sorts of beverage for
those condemned to be crucified. The first was a
mixture of incense, myrrh and wine, a stupefying
liquor which, lulling the senses of the patient,
calmed the last hours of agony.
When you read the account of the Passion, I
beg you to remark that this beverage was pre
sented to Jesus at the moment of His elevation
on the Cross; but He refused it, choosing to
endure His suffering in the full clearness of His
human spirit, and to taste the chalice of His
sorrows to the dregs without diminution of its
bitterness. The second beverage, destined for the soldiers
and for the condemned when they were about to
die, and with which they were wont to moisten

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 193
their dry and burning lips, was vinegar or a sort
of sour wine. When Jesus said : " I thirst," they
presented to His lips a wet sponge ; and then the
last word which the Scripture had said about Him,
that vinegar should be presented to Him, was
accomplished. This thirst of Jesus has a deeper sense. When
He uttered the cry: "Sitio!" He not only expressed
the horrible sufferings of the Crucified but He
expressed also the inner thirst of His soul, His
burning desires, His ardent love, and this thirst
was more vehement and more devouring still than
the other.
Jesus then wished and His love thirsted with so
much ardour on the Cross for you, my brethren,
for us, for all humanity ; He desired to communi
cate to you, to us, to all, the divine life which He
had in its fulness.
Have you an idea of the devouring thirst and
ardour of desire which takes hold of the soul in
which faith is living as a burning fire? It is
difficult to understand it in this languid age in
which it seems the height of wisdom to extin
guish all desire — in this time wherein scepticism
has weakened so many minds, and the vehemence
of earthly appetites has extinguished higher aspir
ations, in which we must seek in vain for those
noble and undaunted natures to whom nothing is
impossible. The thirst of good, honest, and
N

194 BELIEF IN THE
virtuous hearts inflamed with the desire to extend
their wisdom and to bring in the reign of justice
and of truth, consumes no longer our worn-out
natures. We may well speak of being worn out
before Him who came to give us the intensity of
the divine life, and if we are men who do not
understand the holy foolishness of truth, the holy
eagerness for justice and progress ; if we call our
selves conservatives — as if the word to conserve was
one of the Gospel and not rather a negation of the
Gospel — if we call ourselves conservatives instead
of progressives, insatiable of life, it is because, in
truth, faith consumes us no longer.
Leave conservatism to God, because He is the
infinite, but we whose truth is relative, whose
justice is limited, we who always are in movement,
ought always to advance.
You will say that we have a revelation. But
revelation is ever growing, in its effects, in its
applications, in that species of fever which it
communicates to humanity. Of what then will
you be "conservative" — of your imperfections, your
limits, your wretchedness ? That is to betray God
who created you to advance for ever, and, if you
withdraw yourselves from His divine impulse, God
will raise up the thirsty and unsatisfied to per
petuate in humanity that which ought to grow
and will grow, that thirst which the Crucified
experienced in His passion and of which He

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 195
uttered a cry piercing and immortal in the face of
heaven and earth.
In this, as in all things, He is our model;
though we overthrow the framework in which you
have established your tranquil and selfish life,
though we inspire you with the conviction that
that which is to-day will not be to-morrow, that
your tent is pitched but for a while, that you must
strike it to bear it elsewhere ; yet as disciples of
Him who was athirst for all good, for all justice
and all perfection, we would utter with Him
and after Him that piercing and terrible cry :
"Sitio!" That which sprang from the lips of the
Crucified is never silent ; the cry uttered on
Calvary has entered into the very heart of
humanity, so as to move, and, if need be, to melt,
it, for it is an irresistible force, a devouring
flame. Blessed be Thou, 0 Jesus, Thy words do their
work in spite of all, for they are spirit and life,
and nothing can repress spirit and life.
At the hour when Jesus pronounced this word
nothing that He desired existed, and all that
existed was against Him; the multitude angry
and disappointed, His disciples terrified and
scattered; the Jewish authorities triumphant,
convinced that they had made an end of this
dangerous man, a disturber, a seducer, a bias-

196 BELIEF IN THE
phemer and revolutionary ; they were happy and
satisfied, persuaded that the drama of Calvary
would have no morrow, and that He who hung
there thirsting in His agony would die of His
thirst. Far from dying, He has conquered, and we
live by His thirst, for it has excited in us the holy
fever of progress, the irresistible effect of Him
who, dying upon His Cross, has given us the power
to dream, to desire, and to be ambitious of all.
0 Christ ! Thou wert athirst at that hour !
since then it is we who quench Thy thirst.
Every time that a soul comes to Thee it is like
the cup of fresh water given by the Samaritan to
the tired traveller. For the Crucified whose
tongue clave to the roof of His mouth, every man
who is converted, every people and nation con
verted, are as streams of living water.
Ah, if in this city there were to be a universal
rallying to the Crucified, and if from the crowd
there came out this great cry : " Sitio ! " would you
be disquieted and affrighted ? There is but one
thing which affrights, and that is man when he is
far from God ; but if he be in revolt against God, I
know well that you are right to be afraid, because
he is of all beings the most terrible. Do you
desire never to fear any more the tumultuous
movement of human society? Come near the
Crucified and quench His thirst in giving yourself
to Him. Calvary has never been a cause of fear

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 197
for any soul, for any people. It has always been
a place of reconciliation ; for the Cross is the Tree
of Peace, under the shadow of which all men must
find themselves sooner or later if they would meet
each other as brethen.
The sixth word of Jesus is this : " Consummatum
est : it is finished ! "
This word should be the law of life. When a
life is finished we should be able to say, not in a
vain and formal sense, but in all the fulness of the
meaning : It is finished.
Now, my brethen. for what was it that Jesus
came into this world? He often told us that
it was to accomplish the work which His
heavenly Father had given Him to do — the work
of salvation indicated by His name of Saviour ;
He came to teach truth to men, to give them an
example of virtue, to communicate to them eternal
life and the Spirit of God.
Now to accomplish that work He needed to
bear witness to the truth, to present the model of
an absolutely holy life, and to enter by the means
at the disposal of God alone into the conscience
of men, to inoculate them with the Spirit of
God. In this manner, Jesus was truly the Saviour of
humanity. For that which kills humanity is the
ignorance of truth; it is vice and all the evils
which it engenders ; it is the privation of the

198 BELIEF IN THE
divine Spirit, or the power by the aid of which we
can strive against the evils and the vices which
devour us, and against the darkness which over
whelms our spirit.
Therefore Jesus was — He often said so — the
witness to truth, the example given to all those
who would follow the good. Therefore He called
Himself the living fountain which slakes thirst,
the source of the spirit which overflows the world
and brings to it eternal life.
Therefore, when on the Cross Jesus said this
great word : " It is finished ! " this was to say : I
have borne witness to the truth, I have shown you
the way, I have opened to you the source of the
Spirit of God which I have in fulness.
And He did this by sorrow.
Sorrow is a great teacher ; we can do nothing,
even Jesus Christ Himself could do nothing, with
out sorrow. Without it a work alway wants the
final seal. The poet who has never suffered can
never draw from his lyre the most moving and
sublime sounds ; the scientific man who has never
suffered in order to conquer Nature and force the
gates behind which her mysteries are hidden, will
find Nature rebellious and her gates sealed. The
philosopher who has not suffered, who has but
constructed a system from his poor ideas, who
talks of pessimism after having lived a joyous
and tranquil life — of idealism after having lived,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 199
like other men, in the brutal realities of sense,
who talks of positivism after having gaily
suppressed all higher forces, whose mysterious
action uplifts all men of action — conquerors, rulers
of the people, founders of races and of religions —
such beings, whoever they are, if sorrow has not
touched them, remain ineffectual ; they want the
power of persuasion and ascendency, they lack
dignity and majesty.
Whoever would bear witness to truth must
suffer, and, if need be, die for truth. Whoever
would give an example must give it in trial and
even unto death ; whoever aspires to open a new
path unto men, must be ready to place not his
statue but his dead body at the entrance of the
path to which he leads them.
Statues are rife in decaying civilisations; but
they often need to be taken away, for they
encumber the road, and in their place a man must
leave his tomb, more eloquent than a vain effigy.
I admire the wisdom of the Orientals. At
Constantinople you may see the mausoleums
of the great Caliphs at the cross-roads. These
funereal and magnificent monuments declare to
the people that the dead man who is laid under
the marble, granite or porphyry, has not left
his people, but still serves unseen the cause for
which he laid down his life.
I know not if the custom is contrary to the

200 BELIEF IN THE
principles of hygiene, but I know well that it
has a great moral effect.
A man of our day is only truly worthy of
honour on condition that he bears on his brow the
glory of suffering and martyrdom. Sorrow and
blood consecrate everything.
From this point of view no one ever reached
the level of Jesus who died on the Cross, for
He alone can say: It is finished, because He
sanctioned by His death — and by the most
terrible death — the testimony which He rendered
to truth and the examples which He gave to- men
by a life of incomparable sanctity.
He has done more and better ; He consecrated
by His death the full right of humanity to enter
into the Spirit of God.
The Spirit of God — I hold to that word of the
Gospel — is closed to us if Jesus has not opened
its source.
I spoke just now of the body which I like
to see on the roads to mark to us the higher
point to which we must go. The Cross of Jesus
planted on the road of humanity is the living
source from which we must draw, if we would
have the life which never dies. And we are now
free to enter on this bloody road.
You will ask why the way was previously
closed, and I answer because the inexorable justice
of God placed a barrier before us.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 201
Earth and human reason are not everything.
Above the forces of earth and of reason you must
not forget the divine force. You cannot explain
why, before Jesus, humanity crouched under
an iron sky. All the gods which humanity made
to itself wielded the thunderbolt, and all societies
which modelled themselves on the image of those
gods were societies wherein violence and slavery
bore sway. Because they knew not those divine
forces which are ours, and they were crushed
beneath the heavy weight of human justice.
And after Jesus came the complete change
created by His sacrifice and His cross. There
appeared in heaven a divine phenomenon, the
reconciliation and the re-establishment of eternal
order and eternal justice. Therefore when Jesus
said : " Consummatum est," it is as though He had
said: The reign of human slavery, the reign of
a terrible God and of His overpowering and in
flexible justice which spared nothing, all that par
took of the nature of the world given up to evil
and the wrath of God, is finished. I bring it to
an end.
He brought it to an end, in fact, by His sorrow
and His sacrifice.
Man has only one means of conquering evil
and conciliating justice, and that is to accept
everything as the necessary chastisement and
expiation of moral evil. Jesus accepted infinite

202 BELIEF IN THE
suffering ; He is the Lamb of God that takes away
the sins of the world. Thanks to Him, Heaven
and man have been reconciled — the face of God, to
speak in human language, is softened and smiling ;
the angry master has become the heavenly Father.
The Father indeed rules the modern world, and
therefore in the Victim of Calvary I worship the
Creator of the great human brotherhood, for
the human brotherhood is only the social con
sequence of the divine brotherhood. You who
speak of human fatherhood and who deny your
Father in heaven, are confuted by the most
terrible facts, and you see your brethren strive
the one against the other in oppression and in
blood, with implacable fury.
But when you would cause to reign upon earth
that holy brotherhood which goes so far as to
surrender in charity all its own rights for those
who have nothing, the holy brotherhood which
staunches the wounds of poor wretches dying on
all sides of us ; which draws near without fear to
men whose mouth is full of blasphemy and whose
hands are blackened by work; the holy brotherhood
which forgets itself to enclose in a warm and
universal embrace all the members of the human
family, you must remember that that brotherhood
can only come through the heavenly Father, the
God of the Gospel.
Your science, your philosophy, your social and

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 203
political economy will never succeed in bringing it
about. Whenever you forget the great Crucified
Saviour you will fall back under the yoke of the
laws of the old humanity before its redemption.
Your lips will call men brethren, but in reality you
will find before you enemies alone; the enemy
will be he who has less than you, who does not
think with you, who will take your place ; while
the friend, the true brother, is he who follows the
example of Jesus in saying : " Love your enemies."
The friend is he who lives in dependence on the
heavenly Father and who says to you : Since we
call God our Father, we are sprung from Him
and return to Him, why then should we dispute
about this atom of earth which we shall leave to
morrow? It is not worth the trouble of strife
and contentions, it ought only to be for us a
point in which we meet, a point of ephemeral
union which we must quit to gain a higher and
a better one in the eternal country whose supreme
law is the union of all in infinite truth, good, and
love. The last word of Jesus : " Father, into Thy hands
I commend my spirit," is the formula of death.
After having spoken it, He uttered a great cry and
bowed His head and died.
There are three ways of living, and so there are
three ways of dying. Some live in animalism,
some in humanity, others in God. Those who live

204 BELIEF IN THE
in animalism, borrow more or less from the instincts
which constitute and characterise it, and they will
end as animals ; those who live in a human
fashion, in a more or less elevated manner at the
pleasure of their capricious reason, of their selfish
and fickle will, and of their small ambitions, will
also end, in a manner more or less distinguished,
in humanity. Lastly, there are those who, masters
of their instincts and of themselves, live in God
and they will end in God.
Jesus lived entirely in God, His Father; that
which was material in Him and belonged to the
life of instinct was absolutely subordinate to
human reason and will, as His human reason and
will were absolutely subordinate to the wisdom
and the will of His Father.
You therefore see the sublime and divine sense
of that word which ended the mortal life of Jesus :
" Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit ! "
In thus giving His soul into His Father's hands,
He gave Him everything. You will remark that
Jesus ended as a free man, He was not conquered
by death, though He allowed death to finish its
work in Him.
According to the story of the Evangelists,
Jesus on the Cross held up His head ; He spake
the words which I have made my poor comments
upon with His eyes fixed on heaven, and after
having pronounced the last He gave a great cry,

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 205
then bowed His head and rendered up His spirit.
That was the end.
But what is important for us to see here is that
we are • destined to inevitable, fatal, necessary
death ; and in virtue of the very laws of our con
stitution, we have to choose between three kinds
of death.
Alas ! it is the fate of a great number of men
to die in an animal fashion. Hardly freed from
instinct they obey the law of instinct up to the
last hour, they give to the earth that which belongs
to it, or rather, earth takes them again ; sprung
from the dust, they move for a moment above the
dust to which they return as the animals return,
without consciousness.
To die as a man is to bring to death some
intellect, some will, some conscience ; the majority
allow themselves to be surprised by the end which
comes upon them unexpectedly, because they turn
their eyes from it. And to see men so careless
might make us believe that not to think of death
was to avoid it. Pagans were braver, they looked
at it as it came. Want of energy, enervation of
will, attachment to present life, the unbelief of
civilisation, has increased among us the terror of
death. Therefore the final word of tenderness in
our homes is to veil the imminence of death and
the approach of the terrible abyss from the eyes
of those we love.

206 BELIEF IN THE
Some, however, have a consciousness of their
end, but most of them die without repentance,
leaving regretfully a life whose mysterious morrow
fills them with terror.
Unbelievers hope to leave behind them certain
works by which they will survive in humanity.
Round the coffin which contains their remains,
their friends will come to hold converse with them ;
they declare that they know, and they teach, that
there is nothing left of them, and that they talk
not only to a dead man, but to one who has
no existence, yet they will talk to him all the
same and call upon him : " Thy memory will
endure in humanity which thou hast served : thou
wilt be an example for all those who survive thee ;
thy son, thy wife, thy friends will follow thy pre
cepts, &c. &c."
Such is the rite of human funerals. I am will
ing to admit that certain traces remain in human
ity to witness to the passage of those who have
lived in it. No doubt, a man of science, a writer,
a poet, a politician, a conqueror, do not entirely
die out of that humanity which they have taught,
enchanted, attracted, and perhaps terrified.
But humanity does not contain the life of the
soul, and the earth does not contain the life of
eternity. I do not know what certain people
think of it, that is their affair, but they cannot deny
that there are among men many natures greedy of

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 207
eternity, who are straitened in this vast earth, in
this vast universe, as much as in the ditch into
which their dead body is thrown ; and how will
they end, what will they do with their soul in the
face of death ? To whom will they commend their
spirits ?
Jesus has taught us the true way to die;
death, which will come for those whom we love
and for ourselves, truly the death which we must
look in the face, the death which is the con
dition of our entrance into the world towards
which we tend, that death, I hope, for you,
will be such as Jesus has taught.
When you come to that hour — I speak not only
to the dying, but also to those who stand about
the dying, I say to all, help them to die as Jesus
died. Try to awaken in the conscience of him who
is about to go the idea of the heavenly Father,
who has given us a task to fulfil here below, and
who will judge us.
The awakening conscience will understand in
the clearness of death, what good it has done and
what evil ; it will render thanks to God and ask
pardon of Him, and these two acts sum up the
whole ; the life which they end is pure, and
the death which they prepare is worthy of God.
And then you may sleep in peace. What good
you have done will remain, for good is like God,
imperishable, eternal. Your domestic virtues will

208 BELIEF IN THE
be the flame of the hearth which is desolated by
death, and this contagious flame will light up
others — you will haVe sons and daughters who will
perpetuate your virtues. The good which you
have done may perhaps be ignored by men, but
that matters nothing ; you may look to heaven, for
the sake of which you have sought for truth, for
perfection, and for the source of all things, and you
may say to your heavenly Father : " Into Thy
hands I commend my life, my soul, my very being,
0 Thou whom Christ has taught me to love ! "
That is the true way to die.
Jesus has thus left us all knowledge and all
examples ; the knowledge of life and the power of
living, the knowledge of death and the power of
dying in God.
Men scorn the knowledge of how to die. We,
however, esteem it, for I declare that those alone
know how to die well who have been the boldest
in life. Those who have had in life the boldness
of spirit and the help of that Father whose sons
they know themselves to be, go to their death as
Jesus went.
We know not how we shall die ; perhaps from
a bullet which seeks us out in defending our
country, perhaps at the bedside of another, carried
off by contagion. We know not whether we
shall die in want, abandoned by all our friends
and overwhelmed with insult, as was Jesus.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 209
The greatest sometimes end thus, and we must
look for all possibilities. Who can tell whether
we shall die at the hand of a murderer or in some
explosion ?
We live on an earth where everything may
assail us. We should be ready to render up our
soul after we have lived valiantly. Suppose you
have but a second to look death in the face ; then
remember the Calvary of the dying Jesus, and
have but one word with which to quit this world ;
but let it spring from the depths of your con
science : " Father, into Thy hands I commend my
spirit ! "
And so ending, you will leave to those who
stand around the joy of children who go towards
their father, those who go to God.
Those who go to God are a great means of
union. You will leave behind you a track of
light and a track of virtues ; you will have the
glory of dying as Jesus died, not, indeed, in
saving the world — that only belongs to God — but
in saving some of those beings who are dear to
you in the world; and that is the highest glory
of the children of God.

BELIEF IN THE

VIII
THE PRACTICAL MEANS FOR BELIEVING
IN THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST
In placing before you the difficulties of the belief
in the divinity of Jesus Christ — difficulties in
herent partly in the very act of faith, partly in
our own nature, partly in the circumstances of
our lives — I fear that I may have kept you in
suspense and perhaps discouraged you.
To see obstacles before us always slackens our
impulse and paralyses action, except in those
valiant and strongly tempered natures whom diffi
culty stimulates and peril emboldens.
But in speaking to you as I have done I had an
after-thought of pity. I said to myself, we must
feel for those who do not believe ; and to show
that they are worthy of our pity, we must admit
what is, in fact, the reality — that there are diffi
culties in believing. Then, counting also on the
generous substratum of human nature, I thought
those who know where the difficulty lies in
believing will know best how to conquer it.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 211
And now a practical question arises which has,
no doubt, occurred to you. Do the means of
believing exist ? If so, what are they ? Does it
depend upon our own will and our own energy ?
I cannot terminate this series of lectures on the
faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ without
showing you that there do exist means for be
lieving in this divinity — practical means, which
are in your own hands, and which it only depends
upon you to employ.
As science and philosophy, morals and educa
tion, art and politics have their proper methods
and processes, so faith has its own. I will go
farther, and say that the processes of science and
philosophy, morals and education, the methods of
art and politics are not within the power of
everybody. Not everybody can aspire to be a
man of science, a philosopher, a moralist, a
teacher, an artist of renown, or a leader of
nations ; while the processes and means of belief
belong to all, for all the world can and ought to
aspire to belief.
Between the Gospel and human things there is
always this difference — to the honour of the
Gospel — that human things are the affair of a
chosen few — and I say this of even universal
suffrage, however universal it be — while the
things of the Gospel belong to all. I will show
you, in fact, that it is in the power of all to

212 BELIEF IN THE
believe in the divinity of Jesus if only they have a
sincere mind and an upright will.
When I speak of the means of believing in the
divinity of Jesus, notice that I do not exclude
that divine, invisible, sacred influence which sur
rounds man and all creatures, and which, when
this action is a divine and supernatural succour of
humanity, we call, in theological language, Grace.
This divine action is everywhere, but it is espe
cially there, and it makes its power felt even
unconsciously to those who experience it.
Notice, moreover, that I am not now addressing
myself to those tranquil believers whom I have
already compared to infants asleep on the bosom
of their mother, to those believers for whom faith
is a pious heritage, who having been born on their
knees before Jesus Christ, Son of God, live on
their knees before Him, the Lord whom they have
always worshipped, and who die embracing the
Cross which has saved them.
Therefore I except all children, many women,
many Christians, and I consider only those natures
who find themselves to-day more or less troubled
in their faith — the hesitating, the indifferent, those
who claim the right to reflect, to argue, those who
wish to be a law unto themselves, disposing of
their own powers and of their life as a master
disposes of his property.
I speak to you, then, for I know you well;

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 213
because it is not possible to have lived more than
half a century and have found oneself face to face
in the great struggle of life with difficulties which
beat against the fortress of the faith in all intelli
gent and free consciences ; it is not possible, I
say, to have lived thus without taking account of
how terrible it is to maintain a position unvan-
quished wherein all would be overthrown and
ruined if it did not rest upon foundations which
man cannot destroy.
And again I exclude not only children and
those who have the simple faith of the labourer,
I exclude men of corrupt will, those who have
chosen their place ; I exclude stupid incredulity,
self-satisfied unbelief, the proud and vain spirit
which measures and weighs us, finds us wanting,
and scorns us from above.
I must exclude him, if he will have it so ; but
if he will remain and listen, I will yet accept him
in the profound respect which I always have, even
for those who attack, I do not say the priest but
his faith.
Well, the field once marked out, the question
which I have laid down returns : Are there means
of belief, what is their nature, are they in our
power ?
The means of belief exist, since it is a duty to
believe. We cannot admit for a moment that we
are bound by an obligation which it is impossible

214 BELIEF IN THE
to fulfil ; whoever aspires to belief in Jesus Christ
with a faith which rests on reason and on motives
such as minds demand when culture has ripened
them for independence and liberty, must in the
first place put himself in personal relations with
Jesus Christ as a real and historic personage.
Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, declared and
taught His divine Sonship. I ask you who wish
to believe, who feel the need of it, and who often
say : I would and I cannot ; I ask you to put
yourselves in a personal and direct relation with
Him who has affirmed, taught, and proclaimed
these prodigious and unheard-of things.
We are, you say, in relation with Him; but
that is an illusion. You are not yet there — you
do not know Jesus — I do not say the Jesus of
dogma, the Jesus of the creed, whose sublime
formula is, for the faithful, merely a summary of
all that He is in reality — you do not know the
Jesus of history, living, acting, preaching, teach
ing, suffering, persecuted, founding His work and
doctrine on His death and sacrifice. You do not
know the Jesus of the Gospels as His disciples
picture Him in the sincerity of their soul and the
fidelity of their recollection, so that the ages might
always guard His ineffaceable and incorruptible
image. In saying this I do not wish to reproach men of
letters too vehemently, although I certainly have

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 215
the right to do so, for many times in my life as a
priest I have met cultivated men steeped in the
literature of their time, knowing all the religious
and irreligious books which have recently appeared
in France, Germany or elsewhere, able to sum
them up and to analyse them, but ignorant of the
Gospel. They had never read it through as a
whole, they have heard it read in some degree in
their childhood, perhaps in later life a few frag
ments when they have been in the holidays to the
little church of their village, and that is all !
Now, how can you be in direct and personal
relations with a man, a man who belongs to
history, if you do not know his life ? Nor can you
know the life of Jesus if you do not seek its
elements in the Gospel.
I have heard many men say : I read the Gospel,
but I do not understand it. Difficulties arise on
each page, and I cannot get on with my reading.
Allow me to answer to this objection, that there
are three ways of reading a book : with the
critical spirit, with imagination more or less
dreamy and sentimental, and with the conscience.
When one reads with the spirit of criticism, it
is to judge ; with imagination it is as a dis
traction ; with conscience it is to become better.
Read the Gospel, not with your critical spirit,
nor with your poet's imagination, but with your
conscience; later, you who reason may pass to

216 BELIEF IN THE
criticism ; and you poets, to imagination and to
all that you can conceive of what is beautiful.
But in the name of that Book which has no
equal, in the name of the divine nobleness and
wisdom which breathes in each of its words, I ask
you to read it in the first place with your simple
reason and with your conscience. Read in this
spirit it will make your conscience thrill at every
page before the good, the true and the beautiful
which transfigure them, and you will often close
the book, moved and delighted, to say with
Rousseau : "If the life and death of Socrates are
those of a wise man, the life and death of Jesus
were those of a God."
You will notice that in asking you to read the
Gospels with your conscience I have no other end
than to bring about by that reading your placing
your conscience in relation with the hero of that
book, Jesus Christ.
I do not like to bring myself forward, it is
always a delicate thing, but I do it now for your
instruction. The study of history and constant
reading of the Gospel have allowed me to bring
myself in contact with Christ ; I have called upon
Him as one can call upon one who has long since
passed away from earth, but who yet remains en
graved ineffaceably on the pages where every
candid mind can find Him, and I bear you witness
that I saw arise before me a human being whom

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 217
none can resist ; He has inspired me with
absolute confidence ; a confidence which will lead
me, following Him, through fire and water ; His
moral beauty is dazzling, and His whole teaching
instinct with the highest truth. His holiest
shines forth in the least of His actions, a virtue
goes out from Him, He exercises a magic from
which no sincere and simple heart can escape.
Whatever be the result of this reading, I ask
you to read. I do not bring forward proofs,
I would give you the blessing of faith by healing
you of the evil of incredulity. It is my duty and
my right. You ask me how you shall believe, I
point out the means as I know them, simply and
as experience has taught me to know them.
Before all things take the eternal Gospel as a
book for your bedside and as your travelling
book. When you are tired of the business of the
day, or the fatigues of life, read and re-read it,
not as a poet, not as a critical scholar, nor as a
learned professor, not as an interpreter or a
historian : read it as a man. There is something
grander than imagination, than science, than mind
or genius — were it the mind of the whole world
and the greatest genius — there is something
which I put above all ; and you will agree with
me ; this something, with which you must read the
Gospel, is conscience.
Genius can only attain to phenomena and their

218 BELIEF IN THE
causes. Conscience penetrates to the good, and
good is the last word of the supreme cause, of God
and Jesus Christ.
When you have read and re-read the Gospel
under these conditions, you will be in relation with
Jesus ; you will observe that I do not know what
will happen afterwards, but you will be in relation
with the human being whom I have indicated
to you as declaring in a solemn manner His own
divinity. Does He deserve belief or not ? That
is the sovereign question, and it can only be solved
by those who have placed themselves in close and
lasting union with Christ.
The intimate commerce of the conscience with
the person of Jesus by constant and attentive
reading of the Gospel is the first step of him who
is seeking faith ; but it is not sufficient.
Many, indeed, among the contemporaries of
Jesus found themselves in contact with Him,
heard Him preach, saw Him cure the sick, and
yet, what a difference ! Some believed in Him
and became His disciples. Others remained
indifferent, withdrew themselves from Him, and
even became his adversaries.
Whence, then, comes this variety of attitude ?
Why are some enlightened and others blinded ?
What passes in the secret recesses of the soul at the
moment when Christ is evoked either by the reading
of the Gospel or by the living word of the apostle ?

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 219
We cannot tell. When the light remains sterile
and is not changed into faith and virtue, it is not
that light is wanting to man, but that man
betrays light.
Jesus will teach us why and wherefore, and
will deliver to us the true secret of belief.
" If any man will come after me," He often said
to His disciples and to the crowd, " let him deny
himself, take up his cross and follow me."
To come after Jesus is to believe, to come after
Him is to enter into the faith of His divinity.
There can be no doubt on this point. The
disciple of Jesus, the man who would follow Him,
must believe what his Master declares of Himself,
and, consequently, His divine Sonship. But in
order to arrive at this faith, Jesus teaches as a
necessary condition the renouncement of our own
personality, the sacrifice symbolised in carrying the
Cross. The way is strait. If you believe that it is
easy to be a Christian, disabuse yourself of the
notion. Certainly the gate which leads to the
Kingdom is strait, and we are thankful for it.
Jesus will not have in His following the common
herd — the selfish, the satisfied, those who are
incapable of devotion, of forgetfulness of self and
of sacrifice ; He rejects them, and He teaches in
unmistakable terms : " If a man will come after me,
let him deny himself."

220 BELIEF IN THE
We have to find what personal abnegation and
sacrifice of self and one's own individuality are.
Human personality may find fault with itself in
spirit, reason, will, ambitions, interests and pri
vate affections : but above private reason and minds
narrowed by systems there is that reason to which
I continually appeal, impersonal, eternal reason ;
above the will governed by our own private
interests and aspirations there is the universal
will of God and of good ; above light, selfish and
passing affections there is disinterested and eternal
love which never passes away.
When Jesus demands the sacrifice and renun
ciation of self, He does not demand the sacrifice
of eternal reason or universal will, of good and all
the higher interests of humanity and of God. He
demands the sacrifice of our own ideas, our mean
ambitions, our selfish interests, all that constitutes
in the human sense of the word our personality ;
but it must be added that to this personality man
clings more than anything else.
He disdains universal, incorruptible reason. He
does not even think of universal and general good ;
interest, unless it touches him directly, that of his
country, and still more, that of humanity in
regard to which disclaimers make such a noise —
these interests hold but little place in his individual
life. A complex and greedy selfishness fills the heart

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 221
and tyrannises over the mind of man ; selfishness
of the mind, in our petty systems ; selfishness of
love in our little affections ; selfishness of personal
interests, for which all dispute, and which are not
worth the struggle.
Now, if you would follow Jesus, all this must be
sacrificed. He has declared it : sacrifice is the door
by which we come to Him :
"If any one will come after me, let him renounce
himself." It is a hard thing to ask. The more self in the
human sense is considerable in our little world, the
more are we set upon our own philosophy and
systematic science, puffed up with power, dominat
ing other men by mental influence, authority or
money ; the more we are engaged in multiple and
ardent affections, the less we are ready to believe.
I can give you an historical proof of this. The
Gospel which I have invited you to study,
the Gospel which contains the living, wonderful,
irresistible Jesus, tells how He appeared before His
nation. There were men in power — there always are ;
bread may be wanting, but power, religious and
national power, are never wanting.
There were men of science, doctors of the law,
who knew that law down to the last iota, and who
boasted of it as their supreme title of glory.
There were — there always are — the rich, even

222 BELIEF IN THE
when others are dying of hunger. They maltreated
their servants and sent them out in ambush to rob
families who were their enemies or to seize the
property of the poor. Happy in their lives — they
are always so — having all on their side, they grew
fat like the Epicureans, having no remorse because
they did not believe in the supreme Judge, exhaust
ing all that life can give, closing their hearts to all
pity. And then there were poor people, without
knowledge, without riches, without power,
I have forgotten one category ; that of the
" holy people," who said : We are perfect ; we
observe the law, we wash our hands before and
after meals ; we carry large phylacteries according
to tradition ; we fast rigorously twice in the
week ; we cover our heads with ashes ; those were
the good, the eternal Pharisees.
Well, Jesus came. Power rejected Him, the
rich families disdained Him, the learned men and
doctors of the law repulsed Him as a blasphemer
of the law; the " holy people" were the most in
exorable towards Him, the Pharisees pursued
Him with their hate as an impious person.
But the poor Galileans — the most despised in
all Jerusalem, the people who did not much keep
the law, who recognised that they were even
a little unfaithful to it; who did not pretend
to know the teaching of the sacred Books —

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 223
those Galileans, unlettered men, without power,
without fortune, without legal sanctity ; those
Galileans, Peter, Paul, John, James, Bartholomew,
Matthew, a publican — all belonged to that little
circle which recognised Jesus. Just because they
had practised the abnegation of self, they felt that
their individuality was so poor that they could
without difficulty put it on one side.
You will see, the obstacle is always the same.
We, who transmit to the world in the sincerity of
our faith the words of Jesus, have assuredly no
other pretension than to be an echo of the eternal
Word which moved and enlightened the earth.
Yet we speak to an organised world, to men who
have power and talent — and talent is the great
power of our day — or who have fortune and the
influence which riches give. We speak even to
" holy people," and where does the Word of Jesus
find an echo?
Power is often suspicious of it; men who
govern opinion by science and by philosophy, of
which they seem to have the monopoly, disdain it
as a worn-out word ; they would willingly reject it
as rubbish abandoned to the scavenger.
Nor can men who are satisfied in their wealth
hear the echo of eternity. They are not interested
in it, they care only for the stir and whirl of
affairs. When you see these things reproduced in their

224 BELIEF IN THE
living reality, always in virtue of an unerring law,
remember this : that if you would believe in Jesus
you must renounce the self which is the obstacle ;
without which you will remain in yourself, never
attaining to Him who calls you and who has laid
down as a condition of the power to reach Him,
abnegation of self and of the complex selfishness
which is its essence.
I hear you say : The door is too strait, and the
road too steep.
I admit it, and to attain to Jesus strenuous
men are wanted; as He said, the kingdom of
heaven is not a kingdom of the weak, it is a
kingdom of the strong. The violent take it by
force. If man were limited to his own energies and
given over to his own aspirations, he would never
arrive at faith ; in order to believe, a divine force,
a secret, irresistible and gentle action of the
Spirit is needed ; aided by grace, man can rise
above himself, and, above all, can place himself in
contact with the transcending reality of God.
There is in the Gospel a profound saying on
this subject, which has often arrested me, and in
the mystery of which I have often loved to lose
my thoughts. Jesus says : " No man can come to
me unless my Father draw him."
I have asked myself how God draws us. I
have interrogated my conscience, the foundation

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 225
of our being which men cannot change, nor human
surroundings alter — for there, thanks be to God,
we have to do with eternity only. I look at this
principle which aspires to unlimited truth, to
untrammelled good, to absolute beauty, to ideal
perfection, and I have felt this and I have said to
myself : It is the movement of the Father who
draws to Him every intelligent creature, and, by
that very fact, to Jesus, the realisation under a
human form of the ideal of God.
Philosophers, with your vain systems, poli
ticians, with your ephemeral legislations, men of
letters, with your fantasies, you cannot sound this
secret and unfathomable gulf — you cannot in
fluence these movements of the infinite and the
eternal. In spite of all the influences which can alter
him superficially, man is drawn by the Father.
And I say : If the Father draws us towards the
beautiful, the good, total perfection, and the cloud
less absolute, then He will lead us to Jesus, Son
of God.
For Jesus, Son of God, is the effusion of the
Father, truth expressed and manifested infinitely
the shining beauty and the splendour of God
veiled under the humble flesh of the Son of Man,
behind which the Son of God conceals His
glory. But there still remains the sacrifice of the
r

226 BELIEF IN THE
trammels and tyranny of self, and who shall give
us the power to make this sacrifice ?
Here we must reckon with the eternal power
which controls individuals, families, lands, coun
tries, civilisations.
The Father does not manifest Himself in the
conscience alone, but in all the events great and
small of our existence and of our world.
The little events are those which affect the little
world in which we live, the great are those which
trouble a whole country or civilisation. There
reign and flourish those great laws of which the
secret is in God ; there is also revealed to the
observant spectator the work of the Father,
making easier for us the sacrifice of ourselves, the
abnegation of our individuality, without which
there is no faith in Jesus or in His divinity.
There comes a time — I speak of those who live
by the mind — when, whether we will it or not,
reason is disabused and ceases to believe in its
own system.
Perhaps a master has acquired renown by
teaching pessimism. When that man has passed
his fortieth or fiftieth year, his pessimism becomes
a worn-out garment which he cannot even sell.
He will not perhaps avow it, but criticism dis
covers it and cries it out on the house-tops.
When the materialist has arrived at his last
hour, you think that, after having wearied those

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 227
around him by exalting the virtues of matter and
its intelligent energies, he still regards matter
as the last word which can be spoken. But he
dares no longer affirm this; he is disabused. If
he is not disabused I am sorry for him, for no one
knows what matter is.
You see that our minds are not good for much.
The greatest minds, when they arrive at their full
development, cease to believe in themselves. And
when they are tired, if there were not a disciple
to put new life into the theory and stimulate the
master, how rapidly would the worm-eaten system
from which this master had gained so much
glory crumble away ! But the disciple is there.
Help us, he says, one word, master, one page,
prophesy !
Alas ! the words are empty, the page is cold,
and the oracles no longer find faith or echo.
And if illusion is obstinate in the conscience of
the man who lives for intellect, he has only to look
to see that mankind is forsaking him. Then an
immense sadness takes hold of him. For what
are glory and the opinion of man ? He disdains
them at last as another vanity which passes
away. Those who live by their hearts are easier to dis
abuse, because the heart is more easy to touch
than the intellect. The heart is guarded by a few
ribs, and between these ribs there is only a muscle,

228 BELIEF IN THE
which is easy to pierce; while the hide-bound
mind is, like its organ, the brain, enveloped in its
hard and bony case. It is enclosed in its system
as in a granite fortress, which God alone can
take. The heart is accessible, especially when it has
loved. Ardent youth is there to open it ; the
illusions of affection at that hour of life move in
rays of light, and envelope the soul with an
enchantment from which few escape. But when
this intoxication passes, experience quickly shows
us the vanity of its phantoms, the frailty of those
human affections which can only be eternal on
condition that God be in them. We soon meet
with deceptions which assail the heart like an
open fortress, and then we feel beforehand how
great is the weakness of humanity, and, whether
we will or not — it is the advantage of having
made a few steps in life — we measure the vanity
and the nothingness of all that is earthly. The
stars which seemed to be our guides on the way
have set, and we find ourselves in the night,
knowing our road no longer; and we ask our
selves what was that light of our life which
has disappeared as all things disappear here
below. When we see how little is the value in life
of all that is earthly in affection, we do not cling
to it with the same ardour, and thenceforward the

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 229
personality which is affected by human love
shrinks and becomes poor ; it becomes accustomed
to the sacrifice of those vain things which encum
ber and puff it up.
And the proud, inflated by the vanity of power
and riches, how are they broken when a popular
movement sweeps away thrones and governments !
It is well for them if they can find a garden in
which to plant their cabbages in peace.
Those who had the appearance of wealth and
opulence, when the whirlwind of affairs throws
them all at once under the car which crushes them,
are no longer inflated by their millions.
Providence passes by, and sows on the wind
like empty dust the fortune in which they
took a pride. We may see it laying low
political ambition, which is often the most un
wholesome of all the ambitions which spring up
in the heart of a man, for it is made of pride
and servility.
They seem to be of another race, and will not
bow the head, but Providence scatters all. Thus
all your systems have grown old, whether scepti
cal, pantheist, idealist, critical of every kind ; you
see to what you are reduced, and how poor a thing
was that which took you captive. The teaching of
Providence has come to make your sacrifice easy,
and free you from your nothingness.
If so, what will you do ? Two ways are open

230 BELIEF IN THE
to you. The way of those who are despairing
and soured, those who shut themselves up in self,
and whom even God cannot subdue, and the way
of those who look up and call upon the Saviour.
On which path will you enter? I will try to
show you how you may enter on that which leads
to salvation.
Jesus spoke the word which contains the
secret of belief : " Repent and believe the Gospel."
He addressed Himself to conscience, because the
conscience plays the preponderant and necessary
part in the act of faith.
Conscience is concerned with the whole man,
since it rules and directs all our actions and
all our faculties ; while the mind constructs its
systems and the heart is concerned with affection,
while ambitious activity is intoxicated with power
and fortune extends its empire, conscience remains
a hidden and deep region wherein is transacted
the great battle between ourselves and God ;
so conscience in the final analysis gives or refuses
faith. And the word of Jesus is eternally true :
" Repent and believe the Gospel." Every rebel
lious conscience which does not enter into the
way of repentance, wherein a man recognises
that he is a sinner and beats his breast, will
never arrive at belief. The most invincible
difficulty which we encounter in our priesthood

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 231
is not the intellect, though perhaps you think
so, not absorbing and tyrannical passion, not
fortune or power — no, the terrible difficulty is
in the conscience which is closed to repentance.
The man who says : "I am an honourable man,
I have nothing to reproach myself with," terrifies
me ; for who can say with truth : I have nothing
to reproach myself with. When you hear that,
priest, pass on your way, discussion is useless — •
there is no place for God in these self-satisfied
men. On the contrary, when you hear a man, what
ever he may be, no matter of what age, tempera
ment, culture, human situation — any man, in
fact, who is touched by the ' hand of God and
by the warning which you make to him as a
priest — when you hear him say : "I don't make
myself out better than I am ; I am, like many
others, a miserable sinner, but I repent ; " that
man, I declare to you, is at the gate of the
kingdom of God; to-morrow he will be on his
knees before the Crucified.
All repentant consciences are open to God,
who takes possession of them by faith, as all
self-satisfied consciences are irremediably closed
to Him. Jesus has explained the reason when
He said : " Blessed are the poor in spirit, for
theirs is the kingdom of God."
Nor does "poor in spirit" mean "fools";

232 BELIEF IN THE
the disciples of Jesus often professed humility
and gentleness, but never folly.
The poor in spirit are those who consider
themselves as poor, stripped of all intellectual,
moral, or material riches. To these humble men
is reserved the kingdom. Now there are several
sorts of riches — common riches, money, worldly
wealth. It is easy to hold this as nothing and
declare that it is nothing. Mere vile dust !
The riches of power which exalt us above others
by giving us authority over them; the riches
of the mind, more solid than fortune and authority,
for it is not like these a good that is borrowed,
external to us, but it constitutes our very being ;
and, finally, the treasure of our affection, more
precious than all worldly goods, than all the
glory of power and the dazzling gifts of the
mind. Add to these goods the supreme good, virtue,
and you have the schedule of the whole wealth
of man.
Now, a man poor in spirit as Jesus understood
him and sought him as a disciple worthy to enter
into His kingdom, is the man who in spirit dis
dains riches under all these forms, who in his
mind has measured the vanity of fortune and of
power, who in his mind has known the frailty of
those systems, who in his mind has penetrated
the nothingness of his love.

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 233
But even when you are capable of that you
are not yet a moral hero. To be poor in spirit
as Jesus willed it, man must have measured
before all things the vanity and the nothingness
of his own virtue.
When you have realised in yourselves this
admirable and heroic poverty — and I beg you
to remark all that is grand in this moral doctrine
of Jesus and of the Gospel — when you have
realised this last poverty and dare not lift your
eyes to salvation, you have already stricken your
breast, saying: "Lord, have mercy upon me,
I am but a publican ! " when you have done
that, at the first appeal, you will believe in Jesus,
Son of God.
Well, I look round me for such souls. I
am a priest — that is, one who seeks for souls.
I find many poor, not in spirit, but in fact ; some
are in despair that they have no fortune ; others,
fallen from power, are in despair to have been
cast down yesterday and hope to rise again to
morrow. I find those in despair because of their
affections; they tell me their sorrows and show
me their wounds still bleeding and not healed
over ; they are unable to console themselves for
being betrayed and abandoned. I find minds
disabused of their vain wisdom, but who are
overwhelmed with sorrow, and do not look towards
the eternal light. Q

234 BELIEF IN THE
There are few whose wakened consciences say: " I
confess I have no virtue, no excellence, no sanctity ;
I am but a wretch at bottom." They are rare as a
precious pearl, they are the predestined, the only
ones worthy to enter by faith into the kingdom of
God. The Gospel opens up an excellent road for you
to follow. I have revealed it to you in the light
of doctrine, of Him whose disciple I am. I have
shown you how to become a believer, and I assure
you that if you will take that road, faith is at the
end of it.
I love to invoke the name of that lost woman,
Mary Magdalen, in this place, in this church
which is called by her name ; she has given us by
her example a confirmation of the great manner
of believing.
0 Mary Magdalen, may thy name penetrate into
the heart of women and the conscience of men
who listen to me ; thou wert, in the life of the
Master, a consoling and sublime example; thou
didst prove that the woman who is lost — that is
to say, whose heart is overwhelmed by passion,
which sometimes dishonours and always makes
the soul little and narrow — may be born again by
faith and trust into the life of God. 0 Mary
Magdalen, make all understand that the way of
faith, for those led astray by their mind as well as
by their wandering hearts, comes finally to this :

DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 235
that we must repent and love, recognise our woes
and our nothingness, the vanity of all things and
of self, to care for nothing but God, who gives
eternal life ; in one word, to renounce ourselves
and sacrifice all, to open our heart and give our
selves to God.
That is the last word of the Gospel, and it must
be the final word also of these conversations which
God has permitted us to hold together.

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