At the bottom of all this is Börne's very remarkable, implicit faith in God, which is but rarely disturbed by the doubts of his ever active brain. The formula to which he almost always has recourse when he needs comfort is, that he trusts in God. Nicholas advances against the Poles with an overwhelming force; Börne "trusts in God." It is, as a matter of fact, only the Polish nobility who have risen in revolt, but Börne "trusts in the wisdom of God and the stupidity of his so-called representatives." He himself is, he declares, wiser than all the rest in France, as he was wiser than the rest in Germany; why? Because he "believes in God and nature," while the others believe in men and politics. Yet at times his faith wavers. We saw how at first he rejoiced over the cholera, saw the finger of God in it, felt that it would drive even the Germans to revolution. Only two months later (19th January 1831) he describes its actual effect, the manner in which it is paralysing the nations and aiding in the demolition of such liberty as still exists. At first he wrote: "What nothing else has been able to do, the cholera will do;" now it is the exact opposite: "What no Emperor of Russia, no devil could prevent, the cholera prevents." And he who saw in that plague "God's naked hand," now exclaims: "And the priests would have us believe that this is a judgment of God!" Nine months later (25th November) he gets out of the difficulty with a witty, thoughtless joke: "It is not often that God sends a heavenly commission of justice down to earth to investigate into the stewardship of his representatives, and so far, when such a thing has happened, it has not improved matters. The heavenly emissaries are out of their element on earth; they make mistakes, they even allow themselves to be bribed. We saw this lately, in the case of the Asiatic cholera, which punished the oppressed in place of the oppressors. God only helps those who help themselves."[3]