ce of
the universal intelligence. To believe in one's reason, is to believe in
God, in this sense: the fact of the confidence which we place in our own
faculty of thought, supposes a concealed faith in eternal truth. This is
the analysis of which I was speaking. It is a circle if you please, but
it is a circle of light, outside of which there is, as we shall see by
and by, nothing but darkness and hard contradictions.

You deny the existence of God. On what ground do you rest this denial?
On the ground of your reason. You believe then that your reason is good,
you believe it very good, since you do not hesitate to trust it, while
you undertake to prove false the fundamental instincts of human nature.
But you would not venture to say that this reason which you believe in
with a faith so firm is your own separate reason merely, your personal
and exclusive property. You believe in the universal reason; you believe
in God, considered at least as the source of the understanding. The man
therefore who denies God, affirms Him in a certain sense at the same
time that he denies Him. He denies Him in his words, in the external
form of his thought; he affirms Him in reality, as the Supreme
Intelligence, by the very trust which he places in his own thought. Our
understanding is only the reflected ray of the Divine verity. Therefore
it is that Descartes, as soon as he has laid the first foundations of
his system, interrupts the chain of his reasonings to trace these lines:
"Here I think it highly meet to pause for a while in contemplation of
this all-perfect God, to ponder deliberately his marvellous attributes,
to consider, admire, and adore the incomparable beauty of that immense
light, at least so far as the strength of my mind, which remains in a
manner dazzled by it, shall allow me to do so."[19] Thus it is that
while descending into the depths of the understanding, the philosopher
who is supposed to be absorbed in pure abstractions, discovers all at
once a sublime brightness, and exclaims with the ancient patriarch: "The
LORD is in this place, and I knew it not!"[20] God is everywhere; He is
in the heights of heaven, He is in the depths of thought. Remember
those celebrated words of Lord Chancellor Bacon: "A little knowledge
inclineth the mind to atheism, but a further acquaintance therewith
bringeth it back to religion."

God is not demonstrated, in the ordinary sense which we attach to the
word demonstrate;[21] He is pointe