[Footnote 18: Mélange de Critique Religieuse, par Edmond Scherer—Conversations Théologiques, pp. 169-187.]
But it is not towards heaven that the earth would march if it followed the path in which the adversaries of the Supernatural are impelling it. It is this peculiarity, they say, of the Supernatural, that being incredible, it is in its very essence anti-human. Now it is precisely to something not anti-human but superhuman that the human soul aspires, and there seeks to realize these aspirations in the Supernatural. We should be never weary of repeating it; the whole finite world in its entirety, with all its facts and all its laws, comprising indeed man himself, suffices not for the soul of man; it requires something grander and more perfect for the subject of its contemplation, the object of its love; it desires to fix its trust in something more stable; to lean upon something less fragile. This supreme and sublime ambition it is to which religion, in its widest sense, gives birth and supplies nourishment; and this supreme and sublime ambition it is also that the religion of Christ more particularly responds to and satisfies. Let those, therefore, who flatter themselves that although abolishing the belief in the Supernatural, they leave Christians still Christians, undeceive themselves; what they are abolishing, destroying, is very religion, for their arguments assail all religion in general, and Christianity in particular. It may be that they do not inflict upon themselves all this evil, and that in retaining a sincere religious sentiment they really believe themselves nearly Christians; the soul struggles against the errors of the thought, and a moral suicide is a rare spectacle. But the evil even in spreading unveils more plainly its nature and increases in intensity; besides men, in masses, draw from error far more logical conclusions than the man ever did in whom the error had its origin. The people are not the learned, neither are they philosophers, and only once succeed in destroying in them all faith in the Supernatural, and you may consider it certain that the faith in Christ must have previously disappeared. Have you well weighed all this? Have you pictured to yourself what a man, what mankind, what the soul of man, what human society itself would become if religion were in effect abolished, if religious faith entirely disappeared? I will not give way to anguish of soul or sinister presentiments, but I do not hesitate to affirm that no imagination can represent with adequate fidelity what would take place in us and around us if the place at present occupied by Christian belief were on a sudden to become vacant, and its empire annihilated. No one could pronounce to what degree of disorder and degradation humanity would be precipitated. But awful indeed would be the result if all faith in the Supernatural were extinct in the soul, and if man had in a supernatural state neither trust nor hope.
It is not my design, however, to confine myself here to the question regarded merely in its moral, practical light; I approach the Supernatural as viewed with the eyes of free and speculative reason.
It is condemned for its very name's sake. Nothing is or can be, it is said, beyond and above nature. Nature is one and complete; everything is comprised in it; in it, of necessity, all things cohere, enchain, and develop themselves.
We are here in thorough pantheism—that is to say, in absolute atheism. I do not hesitate to give to pantheism its real name. Amongst the men who at the present day declare themselves the opponents of the Supernatural, most, certainly, do not believe that they are nor do they desire to be atheists. But let me tell them that they are leading others whither they neither think nor wish themselves to go. The negation of the Supernatural, and that in the name of the unity and universality of nature, is pantheism, and pantheism is nothing more nor less than atheism. In the sequel of these Meditations, when I come to speak particularly of the actual state of the Christian religion, and of the different systems which combat it, I will in this respect justify my assertion; at present, I have to repel direct attacks upon the Supernatural—attacks less fundamental than those of pantheism, but not less serious, for in truth, whether men know it or not, and whether they mean it or not, all attacks in this warfare reach the same object, and as soon as the Supernatural is the aim it is religion itself that receives the shaft.
The fixity of the laws of nature is appealed to; that, say they, is the palpable and incontestable fact established by the experience of mankind, and upon which rests the conduct of human life. In presence of the permanent order of nature and the immutability of its laws, we cannot admit any partial, any momentary infractions; we cannot believe in the Supernatural, in miracles.
True, general and constant laws do govern nature. Are we, therefore, to affirm that those laws are necessary, and that no deviation from them is possible in nature? Who is there that does not discern an essential, an absolute difference between what is general and what is necessary? The permanence of the actual laws of nature is a fact established by experience, but it is not the only fact possible, the only fact conceivable by reason; those laws might have been other laws, they may change. Several of them have not always been what they now are, for science itself proves that the condition of the universe has been different from what it is at present; the universal and permanent order of which we form part, and in which we confide, has not always been what we now see it; it has had a beginning; the creation of the actual system of nature and of its laws is a fact as certain as the system itself is certain. And what is creation but a supernatural fact, the act of a Power superior to the actual laws of nature, and which has power to modify them just as much as it has had power to establish them? The first of miracles is God himself.
There is a second miracle—man. I resume what I have already said; by his title as a moral being and free agent, man lives beyond and above the influence of the general and permanent laws of nature; he creates by his will effects which are not at all the necessary consequence of any pre-existent law; and those effects take their place in a system absolutely distinct and independent from the visible order which governs the universe. The moral liberty of man is a fact as certain, and natural, as the order of nature, and it is at the same time a supernatural fact—that is to say, essentially foreign to the order of nature and to its laws.