This may be a bold, but it is not an impious supposition. For God,
having made all things for himself alone, must have placed, upon all
that he made, an impress of himself; more or less clear, more or less
luminous, more or less profound, a presentiment or a remembrance of a
Creator. But this faith, when it stops here, is not worthy of the
name. It is a species of _Pantheism_, that is to say, a confused
"visibility," a physical working together into indissoluble union of
something impersonal, something blind, something fatal, and something
divine, which, in the elements composing the universe, we may call
GOD. But this "visibility" can give to man no moral decision,--can
give to God no worship. The Pantheism of which I am accused as a
philosopher and poet, that Pantheism which I have always scorned as a
contradiction and as a blasphemy, resembles entirely the reasoning of
the man who should say, "I see an innumerable multitude of rays,
therefore there is no sun."
III.
Faith, or reasonable and effective belief in God, proceeds, undoubtedly,
from this first instinct; but in proportion as intelligence develops
itself, and human thought expands, it goes from knowledge to knowledge,
from conclusion to conclusion, from light to light, from sentiment to
sentiment, infinitely farther and higher, in the idea of God. It does
not see him with the eyes of the body, because the Infinite is not
visible by a narrow window of flesh, pierced in the frontal bone of an
insect called Man; but it sees Him, with a thousand times more
certainty, by the spirit, that immaterial eye of the soul, which nothing
blinds; and after having seen him with evidence, it reasons upon the
consequences of his existence, upon the divine aims of His creation,
upon the terrestrial as well as eternal destinies of His creatures, upon
the nature of the homage and adoration that God expects, upon his moral
laws, upon the public and private duties which he imposes on his
creatures by their consciences, upon the liberty He leaves them; so that
with the sufferings of conflict He may give to them the merits and the
prize of virtue. Thus in man does the instinct of God become Faith. Thus
man can speak the greatest word that has ever been spoken upon the earth
or in the stars, the word which fills the worlds by itself alone, the
word which commenced with them, and which can only end with them;--
"I believe in God!"
IV.
It is in this sense, my friends, that I say to you, "I believe in
God."
But, once having said this word with the universe of beings and of
worlds, and blessed this invisible God for having rendered himself
visible, sensible, evident, palpable, adorable in the mirror of weak
human intelligence, made gradually more and more pure, I reason with
myself on the best worship to be rendered Him in thought and action.
Let me show how, by this reasoning, I am forcibly drawn to the love of
the People.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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