It is this belief—instinctive, and hitherto indestructible—which is qualified as a radical error; this universal and enduring fact in man's history it is which men seek to abolish. They go farther; they affirm that it is already abolished—that the people no longer believe in the Supernatural, and that any attempt to bring them back to it would be vain. Incredible conceit of man! What, because in a corner of the world in one day among ages brilliant progress may have been made in natural and historical science—because in the name of the sciences, and in brilliant books, the Supernatural has been combated, they proclaim the Supernatural vanquished, abolished; and we hear the judgment pronounced, not merely in the name of the learned, but of the people! Have you then completely forgotten, or have you never thoroughly comprehended, humanity and the history of humanity? Do you ignore absolutely what the people really is, and what all those nations are that cover the surface of the earth? Have you never then penetrated into those millions of souls in which the belief in the Supernatural is and abides, present and active even when the words which move their lips disown it? Are you then unconscious of the immense distance which there is between the depths and the surface of those souls, between the variable breaths which only ruffle the minds of men, and the immutable instincts which preside over their very being? True, there are, in our days, amongst the people, many fathers, mothers, children, who believe themselves incredulous, and mock scorn fully at miracles; but follow them in the intimacy of their homes, amongst the trials of their lives, how do these parents act, when their child is ill, those farmers when their crops are threatened, those sailors when they float upon the waters a prey to the tempest? They elevate their eyes to heaven, they burst forth in prayer, they invoke that Supernatural power said by you to be abolished in their very thought. By their spontaneous and irresistible acts they give to your words and to their own a striking disavowal.
But to advance a step towards you, admitted that the faith in the Supernatural is abolished; let us enter together that society and those classes to whom this moral ruin is a triumph and a vaunt. What then ensues? In the place of God's miracles, man's miracles make their appearance. They are searched for, they are called for; men are found to invent them, and to contrive them to be recognised by thousands of beholders. It is not necessary to go either far in time or wide in space to see the Supernatural of Superstition raising itself in the place of the Supernatural of Religion, and Credulity hurrying to meet Falsehood half-way.
But away with these unhealthy paroxysms of humanity; and to return to its sober and enduring history. We will admit that the instinctive belief in the Supernatural has been the source and abides the foundation of all religions, of religion in the most general sense of the word, and of essential religion. The most serious, at the same time the most perplexed, of the thinkers who in our days have approached the subject, M. Edmond Scherer, saw plainly enough that that was the question at issue, and he has so put it in the third of his "Conversations Théologiques," noble yet sad imaging forth of the fermentation in his own ideas and the struggles which they occasion in his soul. "The Supernatural is not a something external to religion," says one of the two speakers between whom M. Scherer supposes the discussion, "it is religion itself." "No," says the other, "the Supernatural is not the peculiar element of religion, but rather of superstition: the Supernatural fact has no relation with the human soul, for it is the essence of the Supernatural that it goes beyond all those conditions which constitute credibility; its essence indeed is the being anti-human." The discussion continues and becomes animated: the contrary nature of the perplexities experienced by the two speakers becomes manifest. "Perhaps," says the Rationalist, "the Supernatural was a necessary form of religion for ill cultivated minds: but rightly or wrongly, our modern civilization rejects miracles; without positive denial, it remains indifferent to them. Even the preacher knows not how to deal with them; the more he is in earnest, the more his Christian feeling has inwardness and vitality, the more does the miracle also disappear from his teaching. Miracles formerly constituted the great force of the sermon, at the present day what are they but a secret source of embarrassment? Everybody feels vaguely when confronted by the marvellous accounts in our sacred volumes, what he feels when confronted by the Legends of the Saints; it is impossible for that to be religion, it is only its superfoetation." "It is true," exclaims with sorrow the hesitating Christian, "we believe no longer in miracles; you might have added that neither do we any more believe in God himself; the two things go together. We hear much now-a-days of Christian Spiritualism—of the religion of the conscience, and you yourself seem to see that men in giving up miracles are making progress in religion. Ah! why is it that the intimate experience of my own heart cannot express itself in a forcible protest against any such opinion? Whenever I find my faith in miraculous agency vacillating within me, the image of my God seems to be fading away from my eyes: He ceases to be for me God the free, the living, the personal; the God with whom the soul converses, as with a master and friend; and this holy dialogue once interrupted, what is left us? How does life become sad? how does it lose its illusions? Reduced to the satisfaction of mere physical wants, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to make money, deprived of all horizon, how puerile does our maturity appear, how sorrowful our old age, how meaningless our anxieties!
"No more mystery, no more innocence, no more infinity, no longer any heaven above our heads, no more poesy. Ah! be sure: the incredulity which rejects the miracle has a tendency to unpeople heaven, and to disenchant the earth. The Supernatural is the natural sphere of the soul. It is the essence of its faith, of its hope, of its love. I know how specious criticism is, how victorious its arguments often appear; but I know one thing besides, and perhaps I might here even appeal to your own testimony; in ceasing to believe in what is miraculous, the soul finds that it has lost the secret of divine life; henceforth it is urged downwards towards the abyss, soon it lies on the earth, and not seldom in the dirt."
In his turn the disbeliever in the Supernatural is troubled and saddened: "Listen," he says: "the history of humanity seems to be sometimes moving in obedience to the following scheme. The world begins with religion, and, referring all phenomena to a first cause, it sees God everywhere. Then comes philosophy, which, having discovered the connection of secondary causes, and the laws of their operation, makes a corresponding deduction from the direct intervention of divinity, and then founding itself upon the idea of necessity (for it is only necessity which falls within the domain of science, and science is in fact but the knowledge of what is necessary); philosophy tends in its very fundamental principle to exclude God from the world. It does more; it finishes by denying human liberty as it has denied God. The reason is evident: liberty is a cause beyond the sphere of the necessary connection of causes, a first cause, a cause which serves as cause to itself: and from that moment philosophy, unequal to any explanation, feels itself disposed to deny that first cause. A philosophy true to itself will ever be fatalistic. For from that moment philosophy corrupts and destroys itself. When it has no other God than the universe, no other man than the chief of the mammalia, what is it but a mere system of Zoology? Zoology constitutes the whole science of the epoch, of the Materialists, and to speak plainly, that is our position at the present day. But materialism can never be the be-all and the end-all of the human race. Corrupt and enervated, society is passing through immense catastrophes, is falling in ruins; the iron harrow of Revolution is breaking up mankind like the clods of the field; in the bloody furrows germinate new races; the soul in the agony of its distress believes once more; it resumes its faith in virtue, it finds again the language of prayer. To the age of the Renaissance succeeded that of the Reformation; to the Germany of Frederick the Great, the Germany of 1812. So faith springs up for ever and ever out of its ashes. Ah, that I must add it, humanity rises again but to resume the march which I have just described. But can it be said of it besides, that like this Globe of ours it is making any movement in advance whilst it is so turning round itself, and if it does so advance, towards what is it gravitating?
'Whither, whither, O Lord,
marches the earth in the heavens?'" [Footnote 18]