Religious sentiment is composed of two elements: one which may be called _metaphysical_;[140] the other, _moral_. 1. Metaphysically, the love of God is the sentiment of the infinite, the need of attaching ourselves to the absolute, the eternal, the immutable, the true in itself--in one word, to Being. The thinking man, and even the thoughtless man, looking at himself, finds himself small, feeble, miserable. "Oh!" exclaims Bossuet, "how much we are nothing!" "Man becomes vile to himself," says St. Bernard. "Man feels that he is frail, that his life hangs but on a thread, that he is constantly passing away. The goods of the world are perishable. The fashion of this world passeth away. We neither know who we are, whence we come, whither we are going, nor what sustains us during the short period of our lives. We are suspended between heaven and earth: between two infinities; we stand as on quicksands." All these strong expressions of mystics and religious writers admirably express the need we stand in of the absolute, the immutable, the perfect,--a need felt more particularly by devout minds, but which all men, without exception, experience in some degree or other, and which they endeavor to satisfy the best they can. All our efforts to reach the absolute in science, in art, in politics even, are but the forms in which this need of the absolute manifests itself. The insatiable pursuit of the gratification of the passions even is, also, under a vain appearance, the same need. It is this feeling of the eternal and the infinite, which the greatest metaphysicians all regarded as the ultimate foundation of morality. Plato, Plotinus, Malebranche, Spinoza, all enjoin upon us to seek eternal, in preference to perishable, goods. This sentiment, conscious of ever striving after the substance of good and not its shadow, is the profoundest, nearest, and dearest element of religious sentiment.