"The day will come when we shall no longer talk about God idly, nay, when we shall talk about him as little as possible. We shall cease to set him forth dogmatically, to dispute about his nature. We shall put compulsion on no one to pray to him, we shall leave the whole business of worship within the sanctuary of each man's conscience. And this will happen when we are really religious."[330] Meanwhile the sense of this spirit or presence which animates us, the sense of the divine, is our stronghold and our consolation. A man may say of it: "It comes not by my desert, but the atom of divine sense given to me nothing can rob me of." _Divine sense_,--the phrase is a vague one; but it stands to Madame Sand for that to which are to be referred "all the best thoughts and the best actions of life, suffering endured, duty achieved, whatever purifies our existence, whatever vivifies our love." Madame Sand is a Frenchwoman, and her religion is therefore, as we might expect, with peculiar fervency social. Always she has before her mind "the natural law which _will have it_ (the italics are her own) that the species _man_ cannot subsist and prosper but by _association_." Whatever else we may be in creation, we are, first and foremost, "at the head of the species which are called by instinct, and led by necessity, to the life of _association_." The word _love_--the great word, as she justly says, of the New Testament--acquires from her social enthusiasm a peculiar significance to her:-- "The word is a great one, because it involves infinite consequences. To love means to help one another, to have joint aspirations, to act in concert, to labor for the same end, to develop to its ideal consummation the fraternal instinct, thanks to which mankind have brought the earth under their dominion. Every time that he has been false to this instinct which is his law of life, his natural destiny, man has seen his temples crumble, his societies dissolve, his intellectual sense go wrong, his moral sense die out. The future is founded on love."[331]