God then above all is He who _is_,--the Absolute, the Infinite, the
Eternal,--in the ever mysterious depths of His own essence. In His
relation to the world, He is the cause; in His relation to the lofty
aspirations of the soul, He is the ideal. He is the ideal, because being
the absolute cause, He is the unique source, at the same time that He is
the object, of our aspirations: He is the absolute cause, because being
He who _is_, in His supreme unity, nothing could have existence except
by the act of His power. We are able already to recognize here, in
passing, the source at which are fed the most serious aberrations of
religious thought. Are truth, holiness, beauty considered separately
from the real and infinite Spirit in which is found their reason for
existing? We see thus appear philosophies noble in their commencement,
but which soon descend a fatal slope. The divine, so-called, is spoken
of still; but the divine is an abstraction, and apart from God has no
real existence. If truth, beauty, holiness are not the attributes of an
eternal mind, but the simple expression of the tendencies of our soul,
man may render at first a sort of worship to these lofty manifestations
of his own nature; but logic, inexorable logic, forces him soon to
dismiss the divine to the region of chimeras. These rays are
extinguished together with their luminous centre; the soul loses the
secret of its destinies, and, in the measureless grief which possesses
it, it proclaims at length that all is vanity. We shall have, in the
sequel, to be witnesses together of this sorrowful spectacle.

Such is the basis of our idea of God: we must now discover its summit.
Before the thought of this Sovereign Being, by whose Will are all
things, and who is without cause and without beginning, our soul is
overwhelmed. We are so feeble! the thought of absolute power crushes us.
Creatures of a day, how should we understand the Eternal? Frail as we