Besides this apotheosis of religious sentiment, some at the present day have essayed a different, a more serious and more daring theory. Far from sounding the natural problems to which religions correspond, schools of philosophy, occupying a prominent intellectual position,—the Pantheistic School, and the so-called Positive School,—suppress and deny them altogether. In their view, the world has existed, of itself, from all eternity, as have the laws also by which it is sustained and developed. In their elementary principles, and taken altogether, all things have ever been what they now are, and what they will ever continue to be. There is no mystery in this universe; there exist only facts and laws, naturally and necessarily linked together; and these furnish the field for human science, which, although incomplete, is yet indefinitely progressive, in its power as well as in its operations.
According to these views, Divine Providence and human liberty, the origin of evil, the commingling and the strife of good and evil in the world, and in man, the imperfection of the present order of things, and the destiny of man, the prospect of the re-establishment of order in the future—these are all mere dreams, freaks of man's thought: no such questions indeed exist, inasmuch as the world is eternal, it is in its actual state complete, normal, and definitive, though at the same time progressive. The remedy for the moral and physical evils which afflict mankind, must then be sought, not in any power superior to the world, but simply in the progress of the sciences and the advance of human enlightenment.
I shall not here discuss this system; I do not even qualify it by its true name; I merely recapitulate its tenets. But, at the first and simple aspect, what contempt does it manifest of the spontaneous and universal instincts of man! What heedlessness of the facts which fill and never cease to characterize the universal history of the human race!
Nevertheless to this we are come: not a solution, but the negation of the natural problems, which irresistibly occupy the human soul, is presented to man for his full satisfaction and repose. Let him follow the mathematical or physical sciences; let him be a mechanician, chemist, critic, novelist, or poet; but let him not enter upon what is termed the sphere of religious and theological inquiry: here are no real questions to solve, nought to investigate, nothing to do,—nothing to expect,—absolutely nothing.
Second Meditation.
Christian Dogmas.
The Christian religion knows man better, and treats man better: it has other answers to his questions; and it is between the absolute negation of the problems of religion and the Christian solution of these problems that the discussion lies at the present day.