matter which is ourselves." Yet this author was no blockhead. What then
passed in his mind? He laid down the thesis of materialism: bodies in
motion are the only reality. But he is all the while a man. The need
for adoration is not destroyed in his soul, and he deceives himself. He
defines nature as consisting wholly of matter, and when he sets himself
to worship it, he entirely forgets his definition. This is not on his
part a piece of philosophical jugglery, but the manifestation of the
real condition of our nature, which is always giving the lie, in one
direction or another, to erroneous systems. The power of wholly
maintaining himself in error has not been granted to man. He who denies
God is always deifying something; and all worship which is not that of
the Eternal and Infinite Mind is stultified by glaring contradictions.
Here is a recent example of this: We were not a little surprised a short
time since to see M. Ernest Renan deny clearly enough the immortality of
our persons, and, in the opening of the very book in which this negation
appears, to find him invoking the soul of his sister at rest with
God.[134] Elsewhere, the same writer says that the Infinite Being does
not exist, that absolute reason and absolute justice exist only in
humanity, and he concludes his exposition of these views by an
invocation of the Heavenly Father.[135] The Baron d'Holbach had put
eight hundred and thirty-nine pages between his materialistic definition
of the universe and his invocation of nature. Now-a-days everything goes
faster; and M. Renan places but a few pages of the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_ between his denial of God and his prayer to the Heavenly Father.
With this difference, which is to the advantage of the writer of the
eighteenth century, the process is absolutely the same. The philosopher
declares God to be an imaginary being, and the future life an illusion;
but the man protests, and, by a touching illusion of the heart, the man
who in his system of doctrine has neither God nor hope, finds that he
has a sister in the realms eternal, and a Father in the heavens. It is