so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye."

The Savoyard Vicar was consistent with the sublimity of his own
conception. He meditated on the order of the universe with a reverence
too profound to allow him to mingle with his thoughts meaner desires
as to the special relations of that order to himself. "I penetrate all
my faculties," he said, "with the divine essence of the author of the
world; I melt at the thought of his goodness, and bless all his gifts,
but I do not pray to him. What should I ask of him? That for me he
should change the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?
Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his
wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order
troubled for my sake? Nor do I ask of him the power of doing
righteousness; why ask for what he has given me? Has he not bestowed
on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom
to choose it? If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will
it. To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he
seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish
something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343]
We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the
manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong
enough to practise it. But a divinity who has conceded no right of
petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of
more popular creeds.

Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and
complacency. It does not incorporate in the very heart of the
religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first
clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth
miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men. Why is
this? Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a
hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the
most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of
human life. Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary
men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself. Yet it did
not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows
that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of
insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many
cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously
adopted superfluit