he suppliant. There will remain for him only the silence
of despair, or the heroism of resignation.

To sum up:--Religion is a universal fact. "There is no religion without
prayer," said Voltaire, and he never said better. There is no prayer
without a confused, perhaps, but real, conviction of the goodness of the
First Cause of the universe. If you could stifle in man's heart the
feeling that the Principle of things is good, you would silence over the
whole globe that voice of prayer which is ever rising to God. Thus
humanity itself testifies to the truth for which I am contending.
Humanity prays; it believes therefore in the goodness of God. This fact
is an argument. The heart of man is organized to believe that God is
good: it is the mark set by the Worker Himself upon His work.

Let us study now another of the elements of the universe. We have heard
the answer of man's heart; let us ask for the answer of reason. Has
reason nothing to tell us respecting the intentions of the Creator? Let
us place it in presence of the idea of God--of the Infinite Being, and
see what it will be able to teach us.

To attain my object, I must explain more particularly than as yet I have
done, a word rendered frivolous by the levity of our heart, a word
defiled by the disorder of our passions, and too often by the
unworthiness, and worse, of poets and novelists, but which still, in its
virgin purity, is ever protesting against the outrages to which it has
been subjected: that word is _love_.

This word has two principal meanings. In the Platonic sense of it, it is
the search after what is beautiful, great, noble, pure,--after what, as
being of the very real nature of the soul, attracts, fills, and delights
it. But there is another sort of love, which does not pursue greatness
and beauty, but which gives itself; a love which seeks the wretched to
enrich him, the poor to make him happy, the fallen to raise him up.
These two kinds of love seem to follow different and even contrary laws.
Here, for instance, is a description of what often occurs in a large
city.[176] A man leaves his house in the evening in order to be present
at performances in which I am willing to believe that everything bears
the stamp of nobleness and grandeur, or at least of a pure and wholesome
taste. He experiences keen enjoyment, and that of an elevated kind. The
spectacle over, he returns to his dwelling, and at a still later hour he
retires at length to his repos