De L'Orme. / The Works of G. P. R. James, Esq., Vol. XVI.

by G. P. R. James

"Nay, my son, not so," replied the old man. "What you call foresight, is in the Deity what memory would be in man, if it were perfect. It is knowledge. Standing in the midst of eternity, all is present to the eye of God; and he knows what man will do, as well as what man has done; but that does not imply that man has not the liberty of choice, for it is his very own choice that conducts him to the results which God already knows. When a lizard runs away frightened from before your footsteps, you may know positively that it will fly to its hole, but your knowledge does not affect its purpose; nor would it, if your knowledge was as certain as Omniscience. If you ask me why, if man's choice will be bad, the Omnipotent does not will it to be good? I say, it is to leave him that very freedom of choice which you deny. Farther, if there were no evil in the world, morally or physically,--and it would be easy to show that one cannot exist without the other--what would the world be? There would be no virtue, because there could be no possibility of vice; there would be no passions, because there would be nothing to excite them; there would be no wishes, because privation being an ill, no desire for anything could possibly exist; there could be no motion, for the movement of one thing would displace another, which was in its proper place before; there would be no action, for there being neither passions nor wishes, nothing would prompt action. In short, the argument might be carried on to show that the universe would not be, and that the whole would be God alone. No one will deny that the least imperfection is in itself evil, and that without God created what was equal to himself--which implies, as far as the act of creation goes, a mathematical impossibility--whatever he created must have been subject to imperfection, and consequently would admit of evil. Evil once admitted, all the rest follows; and if any one dare to ask, why then God created at all? let him look round on the splendid universe, the thousand magnificent effects of divine love, of divine bounty, and of divine power, and feel himself rebuked for thinking that such attributes could slumber unexerted."

"But," said the Chevalier, "it appears to me that your argument militates against the first principle of our religion--the divinity of Christ: for you say it implies an impossibility that God should create what was equal to himself."

"Christ was not created," replied the priest, and laying his hand on his breast he bowed his head reverently, repeating the words of Scripture: "This is my only begotten Son, in whom I am well pleased."

Whether the Chevalier retained his own opinions or not I cannot tell; but most probably he did, for certain it is, that nothing is more difficult to find in any man, than the faculty of being convinced. However, he dropped the subject, and never more to my knowledge, resumed it.

Father Francis, whose whole heart was mildness and humility, began to fancy after a few minutes that he had been guilty of some presumption in arguing so boldly on the secrets of Providence. "God forgive me," said he, "if I have done irreverently in seeking, as far as my poor intellect could go, to demonstrate by simple reasoning, that which we ought to receive as a matter of faith; but often, in my more solitary hours, in thinking over these subjects I would find a degree of obscurity and confusion in my own ideas, which impelled me to endeavour to clear and to arrange them."

"I am convinced you did very right, my good father," replied the Chevalier, "and that one great object in the good regulations of one's mind is to obtain fixed principles on every subject which comes under our review, carrying to the examination an ardent desire for truth; and to religious inquiries, that profound reverence and humble diffidence of human reason, that so deep and so important a subject imperatively requires."

Here dropped the conversation, leaving both parties better satisfied with each other than usually happens after any discussion, but more especially where religion is at all involved.

CHAPTER VIII.

My first care, after finding myself completely settled at Saragossa, was to overcome the difficulties of the Spanish language. I had studied it superficially long before, and, thanks to my Bearnaise tongue, I now accomplished the hardest part of the undertaking, namely, the pronunciation, which is very rarely acquired by Frenchmen in general. By the time this was gained, I had been three months in Spain, living in a state of high ease and tranquillity, very much against my will; finding nothing to excite or to romance upon; and, at best, meeting with but those little adventures which are unworthy, if not unfit for detail. It was not, however, my fault. I went continually to the Teatro, to the Plaza de Toros, and to all those places where one may most easily get one's self into mischief, without accomplishing my object; going from one to the other with the most provoking, quiet, uninterrupted facility that fortune could furnish forth to annoy me withal. Every one was calm, polite, and cold; no one fell in love with me; no one quarrelled with me; no one took any notice of me, and I was beginning to think the Spaniards the most stupid, sober, mole-like race that the world contained, when some circumstances occurred, which, from the very first excited my curiosity, if they did not reach any more violent passion.

I have said, that the room which I had chosen looked into the street wherein we lodged, and also that that street was very narrow. At first, I had hoped to draw something from this circumstance, having always entertained high ideas of the pleasures and agitations of making love across a street, and for the whole first night after our arrival, I amused myself with fancying some very beautiful lady, with some very horrible guardian, who would find means of conversing with me from the jalousies on the other side.