to say to us: "Show us God; tell us what form he has; let us see paradise and hell, and we will believe."

We should answer them; "Since you are unable to see anything that does not fall under the senses, choose between the forest and the stable, the necessary abodes of creatures without reason.t"

This is what is called an argument ad canem.

CHAPTER XII.

CONTINUATION.-METAPHYSICAL PROOFS.-PROOFS FROM

FEELING.

If there is not an atom in the material Universe which does not proclaim a creative and regulating power, there is not a fact of the intellectual and moral order which does not present the same truth to the meditative mind.

Such, in fact, were the assertions of the atheists of the Institute to Bernardin de St. Pierre. Let us quote M. Aimé Martin. "At the first words of his solemn declaration of his religious principles, a cry of fury rose from all parts of the hall. Some hissed him, asking where he had seen God, and what figure he had; others were indignant at his credulity; the calmest addressed to him contemptuous words. From sport they proceeded to insults: they insulted his old age, they treated him as a weak and superstitious man, they threatened to drive him from an assembly of which he was unworthy, and their madness was carried so far as to challenge him to fight, that they might prove to him, sword in hand, that there was no God. He endeavored in vain, in the midst of the tumult, to utter a word; they refused to hear him, and the idealist Cabanis, (he is the only one we shall name,) beside himself with anger, cried-'I swear that there is no God! and I beg that his name may never be pronounced in this place."-Essai sur la vie de Bernardin de Saint Pierre.

Reason is really the faculty of seeing what the senses do not see. My dog visits with me the triumphal arch de l'Etoile, the Tuilleries,

But we must not dwell on this subject. The age of progress is too unfriendly to the metaphysical world. As there are no mines of gold, silver, copper, or even coal to be found in it, it is forgotten entirely. Let us address a few words to these solitary travellers who are still winding their way through it, and then resume our humble rout.

I. The finite, the imperfect, exists; how can the infinite, the perfect then, not exist! Could perfection, that is to say being, be a reason for not being!

II. We have the idea of infinite perfection:* it exists then; if it were not, we could have no idea of it.

III. God is possible, by the avowal even of the atheist: then he exists; for the idea of him implies the idea of existence; it is impossible to conceive of him as non-existing.

IV. What is understood by God? The Supreme Being, the being of beings, he who alone can say-I am He who is. To deny the existence of this being, is to say-He who is, is not!

V. Man thinks, and did not create himself; he is then the work of an intelligent being.

VI. Man does not think without speech; he speaks only as he is spoken to. We must then recognize a being who has spoken to man, or created him speaking, &c. &c. &c.

the Louvre, Notre Dame, St. Genevieve, &c. ; he sees all that I see, except Napoleon and the grand army, Philibert de Lorme, Perrault, Maurice de Sully, and Soufflet.

* It has been often objected that the idea of the infinite is negative; it has been as often answered that if this word includes a negative (not finite), it is only in the grammatical form, and that in fact it is peculiarly affirmative. What in reality is the finite being, if not the being which has limits, which fails of ulterior perfection? The idea of the finite, although announced under an affirmative form, is then essentially negative. The idea of the infinite, on the contrary, containing the absolute negation of every negation, is the most positive that can be conceived. It is the idea of being, and nothing but being, free from all idea of non-existence. See Fenelon, Demonstration de l'existence de Dieu, 2e. part, ch. 2.-Bossuet, Elevation, 2e. ch.

These principles, attentively considered, appeared so evident to Descartes, Bossuet, Fenelon, Pascal, Malebranche, La Bruyere, Leibnitz, Gerdil, de Maistre, Bonald, &c., that they could not conceive the extravagance of the atheist. "Oh God," cried the eagle of Meaux, "one is lost in such total blindness !"*

The heart also makes its demonstrations, unanswerable demonstrations for every man in whom brutal sensation has not extinguished sentiment.

I shall speak presently of the irresistible tendency of the heart towards the infinite-a tendency still more absurd than incontestible, if the infinite did not exist. At present I shall limit myself to a single fact.

"You cannot deny," I would say to the impious man, "that God has had and still has a multitude of ardent lovers, ready to suffer everything rather than displease him, and whose whole life is one perpetual aspiration towards heaven."

See the young Catholic missionary, tearing himself from the arms of his family and friends, traversing unknown seas, approaching, cross in hand, the cannibals of the forests of America, or the isles of Oceanica; braving every day, in Japan, Corea, Tong-King and Cochin China, tortures of which even the thought makes us shudder. What does he desire? To make his God known and loved, to enkindle all hearts with the fire that consumes him.

See the Sister of Charity at the pillow of the dying; the brother and the sister of the christian schools surrounded with half-naked children.

Let us listen to the Trappist, the Chartreux, the Carmelite, the Capuchin, chanting in the depths of midnight, the hymn of love, and only consoling themselves for the length of their exile, by the length of their prayers.

Let us follow the priest to the hospital of fever and

* Elevation, Ire.

cholera. See him by the light of philosophic omnipotence, refusing the word which would save his life, and going to death as if going to his bridal.*

Have you never heard the fervent christian on his death bed, sigh with more ardor after his God, than the hart fo the water-brooks?—(Ps. xli. 1.)

Could a sentiment so profound, so permanent, so hero' in its effects, exist without a real object? Is non-existence capable of teaching, of moving so powerfully the heart of man! He is too often led to mistake copper for gold, and to be in love with vanities; but has any one ever been known to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his dearest affections and his life to the pursuit of an absolute chimora !

If the spontaneous movement of the needle is only explained by the presence of the loadstone, how will you who deny the celestial magnet, explain the religious attraction of the human heart, of that heart no less subjected to the love of terrestrial beauty, than iron is to the law of gravity! Show us among your followers, the passionate lover of chance, the devotee of nature, the martyr of nothingness.

This is not all: God is hated. Thanks to the philosophy of the eighteenth century, we have seen what was never seen before, numerous assemblies convulsed at hearing the name of God pronounced. We have seen fanatics shrink before no crime that would annihilate the idea of the Supreme Being. Can nothingness inspire such hatred! Does not so furious a reaction in the heart of the impious man prove

The following is the expression of the commissary of September, Viollet, who was appointed to preside over the massacre of a hundred and eighty priests, confined at the Carmelite convent: "I am lost, I am overwhelmed with astonishment, I cannot conceive of it: your priests marched to execution with the same joy, the same as they would have gone to their nuptials." Barruel, Histoire du clergé pendant la Revolution, tom. II, p. 97.

Tantus amor nihili! (Anti-Lucret.)

that he feels himself wounded and crushed by the divine presence!

You who wish to see God, behold! You will see him alike in the sweet tears which the thought of him draws from the eyes of the dying just man, and in the rage that foams at the mention of his name, on the lips that deny him.

We now see that the christian alone shows himself a man by the solution he gives to this first question: Whence do I come? Let us proceed to the two following questions.

CHAPTER XIII.

VARIOUS SOLUTIONS OF THE TWO QUESTIONS: WHAT AM I? WHERE AM I GOING?

THE materialist answers: "I am matter; a more perfect organization giving me over other animals the advantage of speech and thought. Eager for pleasure, an enemy of suf fering, my only duty is to procure the one and avoid the other, till death comes to annihilate my being in the dust of the tomb."

The pantheist answers: "I am one of the innumerable manifestations of the universal being. Like the bubble which rises for an instant on the surface of the sea, I shall soon return to the common mass; to contribute to the life of the Great Whole, by the energetic display of my faculties, is my sole destiny and my sole duty, during my ephemeral existence."

The christian answers: "Man is an intelligence, created in the divine likeness and united to a body. Related to God by his superior faculties, and to visible nature by his bodily organs he is the link destined to unite the material creation