The essence of religion, then, is a belief in the goodness of God. A German critic, Feuerbach, said with great effect, that religion consisted in divinizing human attributes. Thus: God is good, means according to him: goodness is divine. God is just, signifies: justice is divine. The boldness of Christianity, its profound, pathetic beauty, its great moral efficacy lie in the fact that it has divinized our miseries; and that, instead of saying, pain is divine, death is divine, it has said: God has suffered, God has died. In a word, according to the same author, God "is the human heart divinized." Nothing could be more true and beautiful, only in another sense than that in which the author takes it. If God himself was not supreme goodness, the heart of man would then contain something divine, and God would not himself be divine! The heart feels that it exceeds all things, but, in order to believe in itself, it must know itself coming from a higher and purer source than it is itself. "In thinking of such a being (God), man experiences a sentiment which is above all a religious sentiment. Every man, as we come into contact with him, awakens in us a feeling of some kind, according to the qualities we perceive in him, and should not He who possesses all perfections excite in us the strongest of feelings? If we think of the infinite essence of God, if we are thoroughly impressed by his omnipotence, if we remember that the moral law expresses his will, and that he has attached to the fulfillment and violation of this law, rewards and punishments which he distributes with inflexible justice, we must of necessity experience before such greatness emotions of respect and fear. If next we come to consider that this omnipotent being was pleased to create us, we, whom he had no need of, and that in creating us he heaped upon us benefits of all kinds, that he has given us this universe to enjoy its ever renewed beauties, that he has given us society that our life may become enlarged in that of our fellow-beings, that he has given us reason to think, a heart to love, liberty to act, that same respect and fear will receive additional strength from a still gentler sentiment, namely, that of love. Love, when directed toward feeble and circumscribed beings, inspires us with the desire to do them good: but, in itself, love does not especially consider the advantage of the person beloved: we love a thing, good or beautiful, simply because it is good or beautiful, and without thought of benefiting it; or benefiting ourselves. How much more so when this love is turned to God, as a pure homage to his perfections; when it is the natural outpouring of the soul toward a being infinitely adorable.