The Heavenly Father Part 15

.... Pour etre approuves De semblables projets veulent etre acheves.

[167] Ps. cxlviii.

[168]

Le monde entier te glorifie, L'oiseau te chante sur son nid; Et pour une goutte de pluie Des milliers d'etres t'ont beni.

[169] Albert de Haller. _Lettres sur les verites les plus importantes de la revelation_. Lettre 2.

[170] Et toute la _science_ est un hymne a sa gloire.

[171]

Dieu ne mesure pas nos sorts a l'etendue.

La goutte de rosee a l'herbe suspendue Y reflechit un ciel aussi vaste, aussi pur Que l'immense Ocean dans ses plaines d'azur.

LAMARTINE.

LECTURE VII.

_THE FATHER._

(At Geneva, 8th Dec. 1863.--At Lausanne, 1st Feb. 1864.)

GENTLEMEN,

We have proposed for solution the problem which includes all others whatsoever--the problem of the universe. What are the laws which govern the universe? They are those which are the objects of science, taking that word in its largest and most general meaning. What is the cause of the universe? The eternal power of the Infinite Mind. These are the two answers which we have hitherto obtained, but, as we have explained, a study is not complete if it confine itself to these two answers. When we know the law and the cause of an object submitted to our study, we further look for the end designed. This is no freak of our fancy, but the direct result of the const.i.tution of our understanding. The universe is the creation of G.o.d. What is the design of the creation? I answer: the design of the creation is the happiness of spirits. Nature is made for the spiritual beings to which it offers the condition of their life and development; spiritual beings are made for felicity. The moving spring of infinite power is goodness: this is my thesis. If I succeed in establis.h.i.+ng it, it will follow that we shall in imagination see issuing from the supreme unity of the Infinite Being three rays: the power which creates the being of things; the intelligence which orders them; and the love which conducts them to their destination. It will also follow that I shall have justified the t.i.tle under which these Lectures were announced: Power and wisdom are attributes of the Creator; the Father reveals Himself in goodness.

What shall be our method? Can we enter into the counsels of G.o.d? By what means? To place our understanding in the midst of the Divine consciousness, there to behold the spring of the determinations of the Infinite Being, were an attempt so far exceeding our capacity, that it is impossible to point out any means whatever by which it could be made.

This would be to conceive of G.o.d in His eternal essence, independently of His relation to the universe, to nature, and to our reason. I do not say merely that the attempt would be fruitless; I say that we have no means of attempting this metaphysical adventure. But might we not, in looking at the work of G.o.d, discern in it the evidence of its design?

This is a process which we often follow in regard to our fellow-creatures. Do we wish to know the object which a man has in view in his labor? He may himself disclose that object to us directly in words, or we may endeavor to discover it. We watch him at work, and by observing the way in which he proceeds we sometimes come to know what his thoughts are, because we find ourselves in presence of the work of a mind, and we ourselves are mind. Can we in the same way, by looking at the universe, that grand work, succeed in discovering its end?

The way on which we are entering raises two objections, which proceed from the difficulties felt by two cla.s.ses of men of opposite views; and our first business will be to rid ourselves of these preliminary difficulties.

You will never succeed, it has been said to me, in proving the goodness of G.o.d, because evil is in the world. I am not inventing, Gentlemen. A letter containing this challenge has been addressed to me by one of you. It is manifest, since we propose to ourselves to recognize in the work the intention of the Worker, and since our thesis is the goodness of the First Cause of the universe, that evil, in all its forms, sin, pain, imperfection, is the main objection which can be addressed to us.

Evil is real; it is a sad and great reality; I am forward to acknowledge it. Any system which would prove that evil does not exist, or, which comes to the same thing, that evil is necessary, that good and evil in short are of the same nature, is an impossible, I had almost said a culpable, system. The strongest minds have worn themselves out in such attempts with no result whatever. The great Leibnitz attempted an enterprise of this nature. His system consisted in extenuating evil as far as possible, and in p.r.o.nouncing that amount of evil, of which he could not dissemble the existence, to be necessary. He failed. The strong intellectual armor of one of the greatest geniuses the world has ever seen was completely transpierced by the sharp and brilliant shaft of Voltaire.

Sad reckoners of the woes which men endure, Sharpening the pangs ye make pretence to cure, Poor comforters! in your attempts I see Nought but the pride which feigns unreal glee!

O mortals, of such bliss how weak the spell!

Ye cry in doleful accents--"All is well!"-- And all things at the great deceit rebel.

Nay, if your minds to coin the flattery dare, Your hearts as often lay the falsehood bare.

The gloomy truth admits of no disguise-- Evil is on the earth![172]

For once, Gentlemen, we will not contradict our old neighbor of Ferney.

Yes, evil is on the earth; and it const.i.tutes, in the question which we are discussing, the greatest of problems, the most serious of difficulties. Let us listen to a modern poet:

Why then so great, O Sovereign Lord, Came evil from thy forming hand, That Reason, yea, and Virtue stand Aghast before the sight abhorred?

And how can deeds so hideous glare Beneath the beams of holy light, That on the lips of hapless wight Dies at their view the trembling prayer?

Why do the many parts agree So scantly in thy work sublime?

And what is pestilence, or crime, Or death, O righteous G.o.d, to Thee?[173]

We have only to put this poetry into common prose to obtain this argument, namely,--The presence of evil in the world is not compatible with the idea of the goodness of G.o.d. Here is the objection in all its force. And what is the answer? Simply this, that G.o.d did not create evil. It was not He who brought crime into the world. He created liberty, which is a good, and evil is the produce of created liberty in rebellion against the law of its being. I borrow from Jean-Jacques Rousseau the development of this thought. "If man," says he, "is a free agent, then he acts of himself; whatever he does freely enters not into the ordained system of Providence, and cannot be imputed to it. The Creator does not will the evil which man does, in abusing the liberty which He gives him. He has made him free in order that he may do not evil but good by choice. To murmur because G.o.d does not hinder him from doing evil, is to murmur because He made him of an excellent nature, attached to his actions the moral character which enn.o.bles them, and gave him a right to virtue. What! in order to prevent man from being wicked, must he needs be confined to instinct and made a mere brute? No; G.o.d of my soul, never will I reproach Thee with having made it in Thine image, in order that I might be free, good, and happy, like Thyself.

"It is the abuse of our faculties which renders us unhappy and wicked.

Our vexations and our cares come to us from ourselves."

Such is Rousseau's answer to the objection drawn from the existence of evil. It is a good one. It is so good that it is impossible to find a better. If we are determined not to outrage the human conscience by denying the reality of evil; if G.o.d is the sovereign good, and if there is no other principle of things than He; evil cannot be accounted for otherwise than by the rebellion of the creature. But now, Rousseau's answer, excellent in itself and in the abstract, becomes profoundly inadequate, as the citizen of Geneva goes on to develop his theory. Evil comes from the creature; but each individual is not the exclusive source of the evils which he does and suffers. To attribute to each individual, not only the responsibility of his acts, but the origin of the evil germs which exist in his soul, is the untenable proposition of a desperate individualism. There is evidently among men a common property in evil; Rousseau sees it clearly enough, but he makes vain efforts to find in the organization of society and in the condition of civilization the causes of pain and of sin. When one has come to see clearly that the source of evil is in the creature, the close mutual connection of created wills and their relations with nature present a field for long and difficult study; and Rousseau has no sooner discerned the road to truth than he wanders away into byroads in which the solution of the problem escapes him. This problem, Gentlemen, I have the intention and desire of studying some day, if G.o.d permit, with those of you who may be willing to undertake it with me. We shall then have to deal with an objection, or rather with a difficulty. But this difficulty, which we cannot now dispose of, must not hinder us from stating our thesis. In every well-conducted study, the propositions to be maintained must be laid down and supported before dealing with objections. If it were maintained that evil is the principle of things, it would be necessary first of all to endeavor to establish the thesis, in which the existence of good would be brought forward, and would const.i.tute the objection.

The objection would have to be answered--Why has good appeared in the world? And I would just say in pa.s.sing, that our libraries are full of treatises upon the origin of evil, and I have never met with one upon the origin of good. It appears therefore that reason has always admitted, by a sort of instinct, the ident.i.ty of good, and of the principle of being. Our thesis is that the principle of the universe is good. We are going to try to demonstrate it. Afterwards the difficulty, evil, will present itself, of which it will be necessary to seek the explanation. This will be the natural sequel, and the necessary complement of the course of lectures which we are concluding to-day.

I pa.s.s to another difficulty, another challenge which also has been addressed to me.

Your object, Christians have said to me, is to establish that the principle and ground of all things is goodness. This you will not be able to do without departing from your prescribed plan, and entering upon the domain of Christian faith properly so called. In your examination of the universe will you leave out of view Jesus Christ and His work? Do you not know that it is by means of this work that the idea of the love of G.o.d has been implanted in the world, and that it is thence you have taken it? Do you think to climb to the loftiest heights of thought, and to make the ascent by some other road than over the mountain of Nazareth and the hill of Calvary?

Gentlemen, I declared my whole mind on this subject at first starting.

The complete idea of G.o.d demands, for its maintenance, the grand doctrinal foundations of our faith. Christian in its origin, firm faith in the love of G.o.d the Creator requires for its defence the armor of the Gospel. But before defending this belief, we must first establish it; we must show that it has natural roots in human nature. Christianity purifies and strengthens it, but it does not in an absolute sense create it. The mark of truth is that it does not strike us as something absolutely new, but that it finds an echo in the depths of our soul.

When we meet with it, we seem to re-enter into the possession of our patrimony. The Cross of Jesus Christ is without all contradiction the most transcendent proof of the mercy of the Creator; but the Cross of Jesus Christ rather warrants the Christian in believing in the Divine love than gives him the idea of it. We must distinguish in the Gospel between the universal religion which it has restored, and the act itself of that restoration, which const.i.tutes the Gospel in the special sense of the word. Now what I am here maintaining is the fact of the existence in modern society of the elements of the universal religion. I am far from sharing in the illusions of my fellow-countryman Rousseau, when he affirms that even if he had lived in a desert isle, and had never known a fellow-man, he would nevertheless have been able to write the _Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard_. I know very well that if I were a Brahmin, born at the foot of the Himalayas, or a Chinese mandarin, I should not be able to say all that I am saying respecting the goodness of G.o.d. The light which we have received--I know whence it radiates; but, by the help of that light, I seek its kindred rays everywhere, and everywhere I find them in humanity.

Let us endeavor, then, according to our plan, to recognize in the universe the marks of the Divine goodness. Let us first of all interrogate the human soul, which is certainly one of the essential elements of the world; and let us interrogate it with regard to the great fact of religion.

The universal religion presents to observation two princ.i.p.al forms of mental experience: the sense of the necessity for appeasing the Divine justice, and the sense of the necessity for obtaining the help of G.o.d.

The sense of the necessity for appeasing justice reveals itself in sacrifices. There are sacrifices which are merely offerings of grat.i.tude, and freewill gifts of love. But when you see the blood of animals flowing in the temples, and not seldom human blood gus.h.i.+ng forth upon the altars, you will be unable to escape the conviction that man, in presenting himself before the Deity, feels constrained to appease a justice which threatens him.

The sense of the need of help shows itself in prayer; and this must be the especial object of our study, because it is in the fact of religious invocation that we shall encounter the idea, obscure perhaps, but real, of the goodness of the First Cause of the universe.

Prayer is a fact of the universal religion. Whence is it that we derive a large part of what knowledge we have of the ancient civilizations of India and Egypt? From ruins: and the chief of these ruins are the ruins of temples, that is to say, of houses of prayer. Would we go further back than these monuments of stone? I interrogate those pioneers of science who are searching for the traces of antiquity in old languages,--in the ruins of speech. I inquire, for example, of my learned fellow-countryman, M. Adolphe Pictet: "You who have studied, with patient care, the first origins of our race--what have you discovered in the way of religion?" He replies: "When I have gone as far back as historical speculations can carry us by the aid of language, it appears to me that I no longer see temples built by the hand of man, but, beneath the open vault of heaven, I see our earliest ancestors sending up together the chant of prayer and the flame of sacrifice."[174]

And now, from this remote antiquity, I come down to the paganism, in which modern civilization had its beginning. Tertullian teaches us that the pagans, seeming to forget their idols, and to offer a spontaneous testimony to the truth, were often wont to exclaim--Great G.o.d! Good G.o.d!

What in their mind was the order of these two thoughts, the thought of greatness and that of goodness? The pediment of a temple at Rome bore this famous inscription, _Deo optimo maximo_; and Cicero explains to us that the G.o.d of the Capitol was by the Roman people named "very good" on account of the benefits conferred by him, and "very great" on account of his power.[175] It is the idea of goodness which here appears to be first. But let us go more directly to the root of the question: What do we gather from the universality of prayer? What is it to pray? To pray is to ask. Prayer may be mingled with thanksgivings, and with expressions of adoration, but in itself prayer is a pet.i.tion. This pet.i.tion rises to G.o.d: and when does it so rise? In distress, in anguish. It is misery, weakness, the heart cast down, the failing will, which unite to raise from earth to heaven that long cry which resounds across all the pages of history: Help!--I a.n.a.lyze this fact, and inquire what it means. A request is made, and for what? For strength, for tranquillity, for peace; for happiness under all its forms. And of whom is happiness asked? Of goodness. Justice is appeased, power is dreaded, but it is goodness which is invoked. It is so in human relations. The man who supplicates the fiercest tyrant only does so because he supposes that a fibre of goodness may still vibrate in that savage heart. Take from him that thought; persuade him that the last gleam of pity is extinct in the heart to which he appeals, and you will arrest the prayer on the lips of the suppliant. There will remain for him only the silence of despair, or the heroism of resignation.

To sum up:--Religion is a universal fact. "There is no religion without prayer," said Voltaire, and he never said better. There is no prayer without a confused, perhaps, but real, conviction of the goodness of the First Cause of the universe. If you could stifle in man's heart the feeling that the Principle of things is good, you would silence over the whole globe that voice of prayer which is ever rising to G.o.d. Thus humanity itself testifies to the truth for which I am contending.

Humanity prays; it believes therefore in the goodness of G.o.d. This fact is an argument. The heart of man is organized to believe that G.o.d is good: it is the mark set by the Worker Himself upon His work.

Let us study now another of the elements of the universe. We have heard the answer of man's heart; let us ask for the answer of reason. Has reason nothing to tell us respecting the intentions of the Creator? Let us place it in presence of the idea of G.o.d--of the Infinite Being, and see what it will be able to teach us.

To attain my object, I must explain more particularly than as yet I have done, a word rendered frivolous by the levity of our heart, a word defiled by the disorder of our pa.s.sions, and too often by the unworthiness, and worse, of poets and novelists, but which still, in its virgin purity, is ever protesting against the outrages to which it has been subjected: that word is _love_.

This word has two princ.i.p.al meanings. In the Platonic sense of it, it is the search after what is beautiful, great, n.o.ble, pure,--after what, as being of the very real nature of the soul, attracts, fills, and delights it. But there is another sort of love, which does not pursue greatness and beauty, but which gives itself; a love which seeks the wretched to enrich him, the poor to make him happy, the fallen to raise him up.

These two kinds of love seem to follow different and even contrary laws.