defended, they sometimes let me into the secret of objections
which might be made to it, and set me to scrutinizing the articles of my
faith;" and she states that "this was the first step toward a skepticism
at which I was destined to arrive after having been successively
Jansenist, Cartesian, Stoic, and Deist." By this skepticism she
doubtless meant merely skepticism as to creeds, for in her memoirs,
written in daily expectation of death, and in most intense
self-communion, she writes upon the great subjects of immortality,
Deity, and providence in language of astonishing eloquence. "Can," she
writes, "can the sublime idea of a Divine Creator, whose providence
watches over the world, the immateriality of the soul and its
immortality, that consolatory hope of persecuted virtue, be nothing more
than amiable and splendid chimeras? But in how much obscurity are these
difficult problems involved? What accumulated objections arise when we
wish to examine them with mathematical rigor? No! it is not given to the
human mind to behold these truths in the full day of perfect evidence;
but why should the man of sensibility repine at not being able to
demonstrate what he feels to be true? In the silence of the closet and
the dryness of discussion, I can agree with the atheist or the
materialist as to the insolubility of certain questions; but in the
contemplation of nature my soul soars aloft to the, vivifying principle
which animates it, to the intellect which pervades it, and to the
goodness which makes it so glorious. Now, when immense walls separate me
from all I love, when all the evils of society have fallen upon us
together, as if to punish us for having desired its greatest blessings,
I see beyond the limits of life the reward of our sacrifices. How, in
what manner, I can not say. I only feel that so it ought to be." She
read incongruously. Condillac, Voltaire, the Lives of the Fathers,
Descartes, Saint Jerome, Don Quixote, Pascal, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui,
and the French dramatists, were read, annotated, and commented on. She
gives an appalling list of obsolete devotional books, which she borrowed
of a pious abbe, and returned with marginal notes which shocked him. She
read the Dictionnaire Philosophique, Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal,
Holbach, and took delight in the Epistles of Saint Paul. She was, while
studying Malebranche and Descartes, so convinced, that she considered
her kitten, when it mewed, merely a piece of mechanis