Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/241

Rh Deep, assuredly, are the wounds of our age, and cruel are its perplexities. It can never be with impunity that so many problems present themselves all at once before the elements for solving them are in our possession. It is not we who have shattered that paradise of crystal, with its silver and azure gleams, by which so many eyes have been ravished and consoled. But there it is in fragments; what is shattered is shattered, and never will an earnest spirit undertake the puerile task of bringing back ignorance destroyed or restoring illusions dispelled. The populations of great towns have almost everywhere lost faith in the supernatural; were we to sacrifice our convictions and our sincerity in an attempt to give it them back, we should not succeed. But the supernatural, as formerly understood, is not the ideal.

The cause of the supernatural is compromised, the cause of the ideal is untouched; it ever will be. The ideal remains the soul of the world, the permanent God, the primordial, efficient, and Final Cause of this universe. This is the basis of eternal religion. We, no more than Spinoza, need, in order to adore God, miracles or self-interested prayers. So long as there be in the human heart one fibre to vibrate at the sound of what is true, just, and honest; so long as the instinctively pure prefer purity to life; so long as there be found friends of truth ready to sacrifice their repose to science; friends of goodness to devote themselves to useful and holy works of mercy; woman-hearts to love whatever is worthy, beautiful, and pure; artists to render it by sound, and color, and inspired accents—so long will God live in us. It could only be when egoism, meanness of soul, narrowness of mind, indifference to knowledge, contempt for human rights, oblivion of what is great and noble, invaded the world—it could only be then that God would cease to be in humanity. But far from us thoughts like these!

Our aspirations, our sufferings, our very faults and rashness, are the proof that the ideal lives in us. Yes, human life is still something divine! Our apparent negations are often merely the scruples of timid minds that fear to overpass the limits of their knowledge. They are a worthier homage to the Divinity than the hypocritical adoration of a spirit of routine. God is still in us; believe it. God is in us! Est Deus in vobis.

Let us all unite in bending before the great and illustrious thinker who, two hundred years ago, proved better than any other, both by the examples of his life and by the power, still fresh and young, of his works, how much there is of spiritual joy and holy unction in thoughts like these. Let us, with Schleiermacher, pay the homage of the best we can do to the ashes of the holy and misunderstood Spinoza:

"The sublime spirit of the world penetrated him; the infinite was his beginning and his end; the universal his only and eternal love. Living in holy innocence and profound humility, he contemplated himself in the eternal world, and