o know the creation or the Creator, the world or its eternal Cause. God
it is who must be Himself the satisfaction of that craving of the
conscience which urges us towards holiness. If we had arrived at the
highest degree of virtue, what should we have done? We should have
realized the plan which He has proposed to spiritual creatures in their
freedom, at the same time that He is directing the stars in their
courses by that other word which they accomplish without having heard
it. God is the eternal source of beauty. He it is who has shed grace
upon our valleys, and majesty upon our mountains; and He, again, it is
(I quote St. Augustine) who acts within the souls of artists, those
great artists, who, urged unceasingly towards the regions of the ideal,
feel themselves drawn onwards towards a divine world.

God then above all is He who _is_,--the Absolute, the Infinite, the
Eternal,--in the ever mysterious depths of His own essence. In His
relation to the world, He is the cause; in His relation to the lofty
aspirations of the soul, He is the ideal. He is the ideal, because being
the absolute cause, He is the unique source, at the same time that He is
the object, of our aspirations: He is the absolute cause, because being
He who _is_, in His supreme unity, nothing could have existence except
by the act of His power. We are able already to recognize here, in
passing, the source at which are fed the most serious aberrations of
religious thought. Are truth, holiness, beauty considered separately
from the real and infinite Spirit in which is found their reason for
existing? We see thus appear philosophies noble in their commencement,
but which soon descend a fatal slope. The divine, so-called, is spoken
of still; but the divine is an abstraction, and apart from God has no
real existence. If truth, beauty, holiness are not the attributes of an
eternal mind, but the simple expression of the tendencies of our soul,
man may render at first a sort of worship to these lofty manifestations
of his own nature; but logic, inexorable logic, forces him soon to
dismiss the divine to the region of chimeras. These rays are
extinguished together with their luminous centre; the soul loses the
secret of its destinies, and, in the measureless grief which possesses
it, it proclaims at length that all is vanity. We shall have, in the
sequel, to be witnesses together of this sorrowful spectacle.

Such is the basis of our idea of God: we must now di