or, if it
do no harm, at least retards the perfect understanding that should
obtain between the deeply felt reality and our manner of interpreting
and accepting it? What were the divine right of kings, the
infallibility of the Church, the belief in rewards beyond the grave,
but illusions whose sacrifice reason deferred too long? Nor was
anything gained by this dilatoriness beyond a few sterile hopes, a
little deceptive peace, a few consolations that at times were
disastrous. But many days had been lost; and we have no days to lose,
we who at last are seeking the truth, and find in its search an
all-sufficient reason for existence. Nor does anything retard us more
than the illusion which, though torn from its roots, we still permit to
linger among us; for this will display the most extraordinary activity
and be constantly changing its form.

But what does it matter, some will ask, whether man do the thing that
is just because he thinks God is watching; because he believes in a
kind of justice that pervades the universe; or for the simple reason
that to his conscience this thing seems just? It matters above all.
We have there three different men. The first, whom God is watching,
will do much that is not just, for every god whom man has hitherto
worshipped has decreed many unjust things. And the second will not
always act in the same way as the third, who is indeed the true man to
whom the moralist will turn, for he will survive both the others; and
to foretell how man will conduct himself in truth, which is his natural
element, is more interesting to the moralist than to watch his
behaviour when enmeshed in falsehood.

8

It may seem idle to those who do not believe in the existence of a
sovereign Judge to discuss so seriously this inadmissible idea of the
justice of things; and inadmissible it does indeed become when
presented thus in its true colours, as it were, pinned to the wall.
This, however, is not our way of regarding it in every-day life. When
we observe how disaster follows crime, how ruin at last overtakes
ill-gotten prosperity; when we witness the miserable end of the
debauchee, the short-lived triumph of iniquity, it is our constant
habit to confuse the physical effect with the moral cause; and however
little we may believe in the existence of a Judge, we nearly all of us
end by a more or less complete submission to a strange, vague faith in
the justice of things. And although our reason, our