niverse and ordains all things, and to him we give the
name of God.

"To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I
have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary
consequence flowing from them. But I do not know any the better for
this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from
my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I
confound myself. I have full assurance that he exists, and that he
exists by himself. I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and
all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same
case. I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; I
see him universally around me. But when I fain would seek where he is,
what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled
soul discerns nothing."[339]

"In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite
essence, the less do I conceive it. But it is, and that suffices me.
The less I conceive it, the more I adore. I bow myself down, and say
to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate
ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my
veritable source and fount. The worthiest use of my reason is to make
itself as naught before thee. It is the ravishment of my soul, it is
the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful
majesty of thy greatness."[340]

Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like
fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent
Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the
orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden
refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to
listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a
region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but
from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen
barriers. It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was
the restoration of a divinity. To realise this, one must turn to such
a book as Helvetius's, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner
machinery of the heart. Man was thought of as a singular piece of
mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism,
receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is
placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within. It was this
free and energ