nd the age; and philosophy, upheld in a final swoon by
Hegel and Hamilton, has just yielded its last breath in the arms of M.
Cousin: so M. Renan informs us.[50] To choose a side between the
defenders of the idea of God and its opponents; to choose between Plato
and Epicurus, between Origen and Celsus, between Descartes and Hobbes,
between Leibnitz and Spinoza, would be to make one's self the Don
Quixote of thought. An honest man may find amusement in reading the
Amadis of Gaul; the Knight of _la Manche_ went mad through putting
faith in the adventures of that hero. A like fate befalls those minds
which are simple enough to believe still, in the midst of the nineteenth
century, in the brave chimeras of former days. Let us study history, let
us study nature; beyond that we do not know, and we never shall know,
anything. Our fashionable men of letters develop their thesis with so
much assurance; they lavish upon believers so many expressions of
amiable disdain; they appear so sure of being the interpreters of the
mind of the age, that they seem ready to repeat to young people dazzled
by their success, the lesson which Gilbert had expressed in these terms:

Between ourselves--you own a God, I fear!
Beware lest in your verse the fact appear:
Dread the wits' laughter, friend, and know your betters:
Our grandsires might have worn those old-world fetters;
But in our days! Come, you must learn respect,--
Content _your age to follow_, not direct.[51]

To believe in God would be vulgar; to deny the existence of God would be
a want of taste; the divine world must remain as a subject for poetry.
So our critics speak. Their direct affirmation is scepticism. But they
follow the destinies of the positivist school; they do not succeed in
maintaining their balance between the affirmation and negation of God.
Alfred de Musset has described this position of the soul, and its
inevitable issue. Must I hope in God? Must I reject all faith and all
hope?

Between these paths how difficult the choice!
Ah! might I find some smoother, easier way.
"None such exists," whispers a secret voice,
"God _is_, or _is not_--own, or slight, His sway."
In sooth, I think so: troubled souls in turn
By each extreme are tossed and harassed sore:
They are but atheists, who feel no concern;
If once they doubted they would sleep no more.[52]

The indifference of the critical