a smile,
"Do you happen to believe in God?" one may reply to him, smiling in
turn, "Have I said that God is a real Being?" And if a religious man
asks, "Are you falling then into atheism?" one may assume an indignant
tone, and say: "We have never denied God: whoever says we have is a
slanderer!" So God remains, for the necessities of poetry and art. But
as we cannot know either what He is, or whether He is, real life goes on
in complete and entire independence of Him. The taking up of this
position with regard to religion may, in certain cases, be a literary
artifice. In other cases it is seriously done. There are certain natures
of extreme delicacy, which, touched by the breath of modern scepticism,
have lost all positive faith; but their better aspirations, and an
instinctive love of purity, guard and direct them, in the absence of all
belief, and they do not deny that which they believe no longer. Such a
mind is in an exceptional position. Is it yours? and would you preserve
it? Keep a solitary path, and do not seek to communicate your ideas to
others. Contact with the public, and such an unfolding even of your own
thoughts as would be required in carrying on a work of proselytism,
would place you under the empire of those laws which govern the human
mind in these matters. Now what are these laws? A poet has already
answered for us this question:

En presence du Ciel, il faut croire ou nier.[161]

A famous writer expands the same thought as follows: "Doubt about things
which it highly concerns us to know," says Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "is a
condition which does too great violence to the human mind; nor does it
long bear up against it, but in spite of itself comes to a decision one
way or another, and likes better to be mistaken than to believe
nothing."[162] Such is the law. We have met with the pretension to
maintain the mind independent of God, without either denying or
asserting His existence, and we have seen how completely this pretension
fails in the presence of facts. The sceptic makes vain efforts to
continue in a state of doubt, but the ground fails him, and he slips
into negation: he affirms that humanity has been mistaken, and that God
is not. But neither does this negation succeed any the more in keeping
its ground; it strikes too violently against all the instincts of our
nature. The human mind is under an imperious necessity to worship
something; if God fails it, it sets itself to adore nature