XXX.
Oh, joy! the vile desires of sensual passion were annulled (as she had wished) in the full possession of each other's soul, and happiness, as happiness ever does, made me feel better and more pious than I had ever been. God and my love were so mingled in my heart, that my adoration of her became a perpetual adoration of the Supreme Being who had created her. During the day, when we loitered on the sloping hills or on the borders of the lake, or sat on the root of some tree in a sunny lawn, to rest, to gaze, and to admire, our conversation would often, from the natural overflowing of two full hearts, tend towards that fathomless abyss of all thought,—the Infinite! and towards Him who alone can fill infinite space,—God! When I pronounced this last word, with the heartfelt gratitude which reveals so much in one single accent, I was surprised to see her averted looks, or remark on her brow and in the corners of her mouth a trace of sad and painful incredulity, which seemed to me in contradiction with our enthusiasm. One day, I asked her, timidly, the reason. "It is that that word gives me pain," she answered. "And how," said I, "how can the word that comprehends all life, all love, and all goodness give pain to the most perfect of God's creations?" "Alas!" she said with the tone of a despairing soul, "that word represents the idea of a Being, whose existence I have passionately desired might not be a dream; and yet that Being," she added in a low and mournful tone, "in my eyes, and in those of the sages whose lessons I have received, is but the most marvellous and unreal delusion of our thoughts." "What!" said I, "your teachers do not believe there is a God? But you, who love, how can you disbelieve? Does not every throb of our hearts proclaim Him?" "Oh," she answered hastily, "do not interpret as folly the wisdom of those men who have uplifted for me the veils of philosophy, and have caused the broad day of reason and of science to shine before my eyes, instead of the pale and glimmering lamp with which Superstition lights the voluntary darkness, that she wilfully casts around her childish divinity. It is in the God of your mother and my nurse that I no longer believe, and not the God of Nature and of Science. I believe in a Being who is the Principle and Cause, spring and end of all other beings, or rather, who is himself the eternity, form, and law of all those beings, visible or invisible, intelligent or unintelligent, animate or inanimate, quick or dead, of which is composed the only real name of this Being of beings, the Infinite. But the idea of the incommensurable greatness, the sovereign fatality, the inflexible and absolute necessity of all the acts of this Being, whom you call God and we term Law, excludes from our thoughts all precise intelligibility, exact denomination, reasonable imagining, personal manifestation, revelation, or incarnation, and the idea of any possible relation between that Being and ourselves, even of homage and of prayer. Wherefore should the Consequence pray to the Cause?
"It is a cruel thought," she added; "for how many blessings, prayers, and tears I should have poured out at His feet since I have loved you! But," she resumed, "I surprise and pain you; pray forgive me. Is not truth the first of virtues, if virtue there be? On this single point we cannot agree; let us never speak of it. You have been brought up by a pious mother, in the midst of a Christian family, and have inhaled with your first breath the holy credulity of your home. You have been led by the hand into the temples; you have been shown images, mysteries, and altars; you have been taught prayers and told, God is here, who listens and will answer you; and you believed, for you were not of an age to inquire. Since then, you have discarded these baubles of your childhood, to conceive a less feminine and less puerile God, than this God of the Christian tabernacles; but the first dazzling glare has not departed from your eyes; the real light that you have thought to see has been blended, unknown to yourself, with that false brightness which fascinated you on your entrance into life; you have retained two weaknesses of intelligence,—mystery and prayer. There is no mystery" she said, in a more solemn tone; "there is only reason, which dispels all mystery! It is man, crafty or credulous man, who invented mystery,—God made reason! And prayer does not exist," she continued mournfully, "for an inflexible law will not relent, and a necessary law cannot be changed.
"The ancients, with that profound wisdom which was often hidden beneath their popular ignorance, knew that full well," she added; "for they prayed to all the gods of their invention, but they never implored the supreme law,—Destiny."
She was silent. "It appears to me," I said after a long pause, "that the teachers who have instilled their wisdom into you have too much subordinated the feeling to the reasoning Being, in their theory of the relation of God to man; in a word, they have overlooked the heart in man,—the heart which is the organ of love, as intelligence is the organ of thought. The imaginings of man in respect of God may be puerile and mistaken, but his instincts, which are his unwritten law, must be sometimes right; if not, Nature would have lied in creating him. You do not think Nature a lie," I said smiling,—"you, who said just now that truth was perhaps the only virtue? Now, whatever may have been the intention of God in giving those two instincts, mystery and prayer, whether he meant thereby to show that he was the incomprehensible God, and that his name was Mystery; or that he desired that all creatures should give him honor and praise, and that prayer should be the universal incense of nature,—it is most certain that man, when he thinks on God, feels within him two instincts, mystery and adoration. Reason's province," I pursued, "is to enlighten and disperse mystery, more and more every day, but never to dispel it entirely. Prayer is the natural desire of the heart to pour forth unceasingly its supplications, efficacious or not, heard or unheard, as a precious perfume on the feet of God. What matters it if the perfume fall to the ground, or whether it anoint the feet of God? It is always a tribute of weakness, humility, and adoration.
"But who can say that it is ever lost?" I added in the tone of one whose hopes triumph over his doubts; "who can say that prayer, the mysterious communication with invisible Omnipotence, is not in reality the greatest of all the natural or supernatural powers of man? Who can say that the supreme and immortal Will has not ordained from all eternity that prayer should be continually inspired and heard, and that man should thus, by his invocations, participate in the ordering of his own destiny? Who knows whether God, in his love, and perpetual blessing on the beings which emanate from him, has not established this bond with them, as the invisible chain which links the thoughts of all worlds to his? Who knows but that, in his majestic solitude which he peoples alone, he has willed that this living murmur, this continual communing with nature, should ascend and descend continually in all space from him to all the beings that he vivifies and loves, and from those beings to him? At all events, prayer is the highest privilege of man, since it allows him to speak to God. If God were deaf to our prayers, we should still pray; for if in his majesty he would not hear us, still prayer would dignify man."
I saw that my reasonings touched without convincing her, and that the springs of her soul, which science had dried up, had not yet flowed towards God. But love was to soften her religion as it had softened her heart; the delights and anguish of passion were soon to bring forth adoration and prayer, those two perfumes of the souls that burn and languish. The one is full of rapture; the other full of tears,—both are divine!