_Sufro yo a tu costa,
Dios no existiente, pues si tu existieras
existieria yo tambien de veras._[35]

Yes, if God the guarantor of our personal immortality existed, then
should we ourselves really exist. And if He exists not, neither do we
exist.

That terrible secret, that hidden will of God which, translated into the
language of theology, is known as predestination, that idea which
dictated to Luther his _servum arbitrium_, and which gives to Calvinism
its tragic sense, that doubt of our own salvation, is in its essence
nothing but uncertainty, and this uncertainty, allied with despair,
forms the basis of faith. Faith, some say, consists in not thinking
about it, in surrendering ourselves trustingly to the arms of God, the
secrets of whose providence are inscrutable. Yes, but infidelity also
consists in not thinking about it. This absurd faith, this faith that
knows no shadow of uncertainty, this faith of the stupid coalheaver,
joins hands with an absurd incredulity, the incredulity that knows no
shadow of uncertainty, the incredulity of the intellectuals who are
afflicted with affective stupidity in order that they may not think
about it.

And what but uncertainty, doubt, the voice of reason, was that abyss,
that terrible _gouffre_, before which Pascal trembled? And it was that
which led him to pronounce his terrible sentence, _il faut
s'abetir_--need is that we become fools!

All Jansenism, the Catholic adaptation of Calvinism, bears the same
impress. Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbe de
Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Inigo de Loyola and as he who
writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious
despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in
obedience.

Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we
abstain from affirming and denying. Note the greater part of our
atheists and you will see that they are atheists from a kind of rage,
rage at not being able to believe that there is a God. They are the
personal enemies of God. They have invested Nothingness with substance
and personality, and their No-God is an Anti-God.

And concerning that abject and ignoble saying, "If there were not a God
it would be necessary to invent Him," we shall say nothing. It is the
expression of the unclean scepticism of those conservatives who look
upon religion merely as a means of government and whose interest it is
tha