"Now, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I missed them? Have I not, on the contrary, precisely stated them?—Either the dogma of the two elementary principles, an antagonism in which God is destroyed by the very fact that He—who is Almighty—plays at a struggle; or the ridiculous Pantheism in which all things being God, God is no more—these two founts, whence flow the creeds to whose triumph the earth is devoted, are equally pernicious.
"There, between us, lies the two-edged axe with which you behead the white-haired Ancient of Days whom you enthrone on painted clouds!
"Now, give me the axe!"
The pastor and Wilfrid looked at the girl in a sort of dismay.
"Belief," said Seraphita in her gentle voice—for the man had been speaking hitherto—"belief is a gift! Belief is feeling. To believe in God, you must feel God. This sense is a faculty slowly acquired by the human being, as those wonderful powers are acquired which you admire in great men—in warriors, artists, men of science—those who act, those who produce, those who know. Thought, a bundle of the relations which you discern between different things, is an intellectual language that may be learned, is it not? Belief, a bundle of heavenly truths, is in the same way a language, but as far above thought as thought is above instinct. This language too can be learned.
"The believer answers in a single cry, a single sign; faith places in his hand a flaming sword which cuts and throws light on everything. The seer does not come down again from heaven; he contemplates it and is silent. There is a being who both believes and sees, who has knowledge and power, who loves, prays, and waits. That being is resigned, and aspires to the realm of light; he has neither the believer's lofty scorn, nor the Seer's dumbness; he both listens and replies. To him the doubt of the dark ages is not a lethal weapon, but a guiding clue; he accepts the battle in whatever guise; he can accommodate his tongue to every language; he is never wroth, he pities; he neither condemns nor kills, he redeems and comforts; he has not the harshness of an aggressor, but rather the mild fluidity of light which penetrates and warms and lights up every place. In his eyes scepticism is not impiety, is not blasphemy, is not a crime; it is a stage of transition whence a man must go forward towards the light, or back into the darkness.
"So now, dear Pastor, let us reason together. You do not believe in God. Why?—God, as you express it, is incomprehensible and inexplicable. I grant it. I will not retort that to comprehend God altogether is to be God. I will not tell you that you deny what you think inexplicable simply to give myself a right of affirming what seems to me believable. To you there is an evident fact dwelling within you. In you matter is conterminous with intelligence; and yet you think that human intelligence will end in darkness, in doubt, in nothingness? Even if God seems to you incomprehensible and inexplicable, confess at least that in all physical phenomena you recognize in Him a consistent and exquisite Craftsman.
"Then why should His logic end at man, as His most finished work? Though the question may not be convincing, it deserves some consideration at any rate. Though you deny God, to give a basis to your doubts, you happily can appreciate certain double-edged truths which demolish your arguments as effectually as your arguments demolish God.
"We both admit that matter and spirit are two separate creations, neither of which contains the other; that the spiritual world consists of infinite relations to which the finite material world gives rise; and that whereas no one on earth has ever been able to identify himself by a sheer effort of mind with the sum-total of earthly creations, all the more certainly can he not rise to an apprehension of the relations which the spirit discerns between these creations. So I might end the matter with one blow by denying you the faculty of understanding God, just as you deny the pebbles by the fiord the faculty of counting or of seeing themselves. How do you know that they may not deny the existence of man, though man uses them to build his house with?
"There is one fact which overthrows you—Infinitude. If you feel it within you, how is it that you do not recognize the consequences? Can the finite fully apprehend the infinite? If you cannot comprehend the relations which, by your own admission, are infinite, how can you comprehend the remote finality in which they are summed up? Order, of which the manifestation is one of your needs, being infinite, can your finite reason comprehend it?