s."[325]

In all this we are passing from the second element in George Sand to the
third,--her aspiration for a social new-birth, a _renaissance sociale_.
It is eminently the ideal of France; it was hers. Her religion connected
itself with this ideal. In the convent where she was brought up, she had
in youth had an awakening of fervent mystical piety in the Catholic
form. That form she could not keep. Popular religion of all kinds, with
its deep internal impossibilities, its "heaven and hell serving to cover
the illogical manifestations of the Divinity's apparent designs
respecting us," its "God made in our image, silly and malicious, vain
and puerile, irritable or tender, after our fashion," lost all sort of
hold upon her:--

"Communion with such a God is impossible to me, I confess it. He is
wiped out from my memory: there is no corner where I can find him any
more. Nor do I find such a God out of doors either; he is not in the
fields and waters, he is not in the starry sky. No, nor yet in the
churches where men bow themselves; it is an extinct message, a dead
letter, a thought that has done its day. Nothing of this belief, nothing
of this God, subsists in me any longer."[326]

She refused to lament over the loss, to esteem it other than a
benefit:--

"It is an addition to our stock of light, this detachment from the
idolatrous conception of religion. It is no loss of the religious sense,
as the persisters in idolatry maintain. It is quite the contrary, it is
a restitution of allegiance to the true Divinity. It is a step made in
the direction of this Divinity, it is an abjuration of the dogmas which
did him dishonor."[327]

She does not attempt to give of this Divinity an account much more
precise than that which we have in Wordsworth,--"_a presence that
disturbs me with the joy of animating thoughts_."[328]

"Everything is divine (she says), even matter; everything is superhuman,
even man. God is everywhere; he is in me in a measure proportioned to
the little that I am. My present life separates me from him just in the
degree determined by the actual state of childhood of our race. Let me
content myself, in all my seeking, to feel after him, and to possess of
him as much as this imperfect soul can take in with the intellectual
sense I have."[329]

And she concludes:--

"The day will come when we shall no longer talk about God idly, nay,
when we shall talk about him as little as possible. We shall cease to