That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the command of God. It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he wrote, "and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The State, in fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty in our allotted station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward. What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his _Letters on a Regicide Peace_ have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.