We have said enough to show that Fabre is decidedly of the race of those great men who soar high above the vulgar prejudices, pedantries, and weaknesses, and whose wonderful discoveries bring them nearer to God as they uplift them above the common level of humanity.
Having written The Harmony of the World, and casting a final glance at the charts of the heavens and also at the long labour of his life, Kepler offered his God this homage:
O Thou, who by the light of Nature hast caused us to sigh after the light of grace, in order to reveal unto us the light of Thy glory, I thank Thee, my Creator and my God, that Thou hast permitted me to admire and to love Thy works. I have now finished the work of my life with the strength of the understanding which Thou hast vouchsafed me; I [[356]]have recounted to men the glory of Thy works, in so far as my mind has been able to comprehend their infinite majesty.… Praise the Creator, O my soul! It is by Him and in Him that all exists, the material world as well as the spiritual world, all that we know and all that we do not know as yet, for there remains much for us to do that we leave unfinished.…
Uniting the point of view of exegesis with that of natural science, one of the greatest and broadest minds of antiquity, Origen, has written these noble words:
The providential action of God manifests itself in the minute corpuscles of the animals as well as in the superior beings; it directs with the same foresight the step of an ant and the courses of the sun and the moon. It is the same in the supernatural domain. The Holy Spirit which has inspired our sacred Scriptures has penetrated them with its inspiration to the last letter: Divina sapientia omnem Scripturam divitus datam vel adunam usque litterulam attigit.…[28]
The reader will doubtless pardon a professor of exegesis, whose admiration for the prince of entomologists has made him his biographer, for terminating this analysis of [[357]]the naturalist’s philosophical and religious ideas by a synthetic view which brings him into closer communion with his hero: “all things are linked together,” as he himself has said,[29] and the study of the Holy Scriptures, if he could have devoted himself thereto, would certainly have led this noble and penetrating mind to render the same testimony to the truth of Christ and the Church as that which it has rendered to the truth of the soul and God. [[358]]
[1] J. P. Lafitte, La Nature, March 26, 1910. [↑]