creed which is specially adapted for, and has been generally seized by, those with whom the world has gone very well, owing to their own laudable exertion, and who are inclined to believe that the existing ordering of society is fundamentally the best possible. It is the superlative decoration of optimism. The mass of men, those who dwell in dens and whose lives are bitter, have never, in spite even of Rousseau’s teaching, accepted deism. An opportunity for trying the experiment had occurred in the fourth century, and the lesson should not be forgotten. Deism had been the prevailing opinion in religion, but, as the most instructive of all the historians of the dissolution of the Empire observes, it was generally felt that deism did not supply the void occasioned by the absence of the multitude of sympathetic divinities of the pagan system. Its influence was cold and inanimate.[219] The common people are wont to crave a revelation, or else they find atheism a rather better synthesis than any other. They either cling to the miraculously transmitted message with its hopes of recompense, and its daily communication of the divine voice in prayer or sacrament, or else they make a world which moves through space as a black monstrous ship with no steersman. The bare deistic idea, of a being endowed at once with sovereign power and sovereign clemency, with might that cannot be resisted and justice that cannot be impugned, who loves man with infinite tenderness, yet sends him no word of comfort and gives him no way of deliverance, is too hard a thing for those who have to endure the hardships of the brutes, but yet preserve the intelligence of men. Comment concevoir un Dieu, la bonté même, Qui prodigua ses biens à ses enfans qu’il aime, Et qui versa sur eux les maux à pleines mains? Quel œil peut pénétrer dans ses profonds desseins? De l’être tout parfait le mal ne pouvait naître! Il ne vient point d’autrui puisque Dieu seul est maître: Il existe pourtant. O tristes vérités! O melange etonnant de contrariétés! Un Dieu vint consoler notre race affligée; Il visita la terre et ne l’a point changée! Un sophiste arrogant nous dit qu’il ne l’a pu; Il le pouvait, dit l’autre, et ne l’a point voulu; Il le voudra, sans doute; et tandis qu’on raisonne, Des foudres souterraines engloutissent Lisbonne, Et de trente cités dispersent les débris, Des bords sanglans du Tage à la mer de Cadix.[220]