We have not seen God in
the sum of any of our additions!" They pierce, with eye and glass,
into the dazzling mysteries of night, to discover, across thousands
and thousands of leagues, the groups and the evolutions of the
celestial worlds, and say, "We have not discovered God at the end of
our telescopes! The existence of God does not concern us; it is no
affair of ours!"--Madmen! They do not suspect that the knowledge and
adoration of God are, at bottom, the only business of the creature;
and that all these distances, these globes, these numbers, these
mysteries of the living being, this dissected mechanism of the dead,
these compositions and decompositions of combined elements, these
hosts of stars, and these eternal evolutions of suns around the divine
hand which guides them, have no other reason for existence, for
movement, and for duration, than to compel the acknowledgment, fear,
admiration, and adoration of God, by that supreme sense, that sense
superior to all other senses, that sense imponderable and impalpable,
invisible yet beholding all things,--that sense which we call
_intelligence_!

Alas! it is not that God has denied this sense to these men of
figures, of science, and calculation; but they have blinded
themselves, they have cultivated the other senses so much, that they
have weakened this. They have believed too much in matter, and so they
have lost the eye of the spirit. These men, we are told, have made
great progress in experimental science, but they have made good, evil,
to the People, by saying to them, "We, who are so high, we cannot see
God!--blind men! what do you see, then?"

IX.

Besides these men, there is still another class,--inventors of another
science, which they call "_Political Economy_." This is the class of
_Economists_. I do not, indeed, speak of all of them: there are among
them some who are as spiritual as Fenelon, and these are, perhaps, at
this day, the greater number. I speak only of those who, considering
this world alone, have been driven, voluntarily or involuntarily, to
Atheism in another way. Leaving the eternal and fastidious metaphysical
and religions disputes in which the theologians of past centuries
wasted the time, the good sense, and the blood of men, to honor their
pretended God by immolating to Him the enemies of their faith, these
_false economists_ have said to governments and people, "Leave all
this; there is only one science which is good for any t