Principle on which true theodicea rests. God the last foundation of moral truth, of the good, and of the moral person.--Liberty of God.--The divine justice and charity.--God the sanction of the moral law. Immortality of the soul; argument from merit and demerit; argument from the simplicity of the soul; argument from final causes.--Religious sentiment.--Adoration.--Worship.--Moral beauty of Christianity. LECTURE XVII.--RESUME OF DOCTRINE 346 Review of the doctrine contained in these lectures, and the three orders of facts on which this doctrine rests, with the relation of each one of them to the modern school that has recognized and developed it, but almost always exaggerated it.--Experience and empiricism.--Reason and idealism.--Sentiment and mysticism.--Theodicea. Defects of different known systems.--The process that conducts to true theodicea, and the character of certainty and reality that this process gives to it. APPENDIX 371 LECTURES ON THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE GOOD. DISCOURSE PRONOUNCED AT THE OPENING OF THE COURSE, DECEMBER 4, 1817. PHILOSOPHY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. Spirit and general principles of the Course.--Object of the Lectures of this year:--application of the principles of which an exposition is given, to the three Problems of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. It seems natural that a century, in its beginning, should borrow its philosophy from the century that preceded it. But, as free and intelligent beings, we are not born merely to continue our predecessors, but to increase their work, and also to do our own. We cannot accept from them an inheritance except under the condition of improving it. Our first duty is, then, to render to ourselves an account of the philosophy of the eighteenth century; to recognize its character and its principles, the problems which it agitated, and the solutions which it gave of them; to discern, in fine, what it transmits to us of the true and the productive, and what it also leaves of the sterile and the false, in order that, with reflective choice, we may embrace the former and reject the latter.[3] Placed at the entrance of the new times, let us know, first of all, with what views we would occupy ourselves. Moreover,--why should I not say it?--after two years of instruction, in which the professor, in some sort, has been investigating himself, one has a right to demand of him what he is; what are his most general principles on all the essential parts of philosophic science; what flag, in fine, in the midst of parties which contend with each other so violently, he proposes for you, young men, who frequent this auditory, and who are called upon to participate in a destiny still so uncertain and so obscure in the nineteenth century, to follow.