nothing to complain of. But when, in those same hymns, I see liberty
denied, the origin of evil attributed to the Holy One, and man cowering
before Destiny, instead of turning his eyes freely towards the Heavenly
Father, then I stand only more erect and say: You forget that if your
God is the Cause of all, He is the Cause of liberty. If liberty exists,
evil, the revolt of liberty, is not the work of the Creator. Your system
contradicts itself. You make of God the universal Principle, and you are
right; make of Him then the Author of free wills, so that He will be no
longer the source of evil, and we shall be agreed.

Deism and pantheism therefore, pushed to their legitimate consequences,
are transformed and united in the truth. And you see plainly that I am
not making, for my part, an arbitrary selection in these systems. I am
walking by one sole light, the light which has been given to us, and
which serves me everywhere as a guiding clue:--The Lord is God, and
there is no other God but He.

Such, Gentlemen, is the fundamental truth on which rests all religion,
and all philosophy capable of accounting for facts. Such is the grand
cause which claims all the efforts which we are wasting too often in
barren conflicts--the cause of God. But do I say the truth? Is it the
cause of God which is at stake? When a surgeon, by a successful
operation, has restored sight to a blind man, we are not wont to say
that he has rendered a service to the sun. This cause is our own; it is
that of society at large, it is that of families, that of individuals;
it is the cause which concerns our dignity, our happiness; it is the
cause of all, even of those who attack it in words of which they do not
calculate the import, and who, were they to succeed in banishing God
from the public conscience, would, with us, recoil in terror at sight of
the frightful abysses into which we all should fall together.