set him forth dogmatically, to dispute about his nature. We shall put
compulsion on no one to pray to him, we shall leave the whole business
of worship within the sanctuary of each man's conscience. And this will
happen when we are really religious."[330]

Meanwhile the sense of this spirit or presence which animates us, the
sense of the divine, is our stronghold and our consolation. A man may
say of it: "It comes not by my desert, but the atom of divine sense
given to me nothing can rob me of." _Divine sense_,--the phrase is a
vague one; but it stands to Madame Sand for that to which are to be
referred "all the best thoughts and the best actions of life, suffering
endured, duty achieved, whatever purifies our existence, whatever
vivifies our love."

Madame Sand is a Frenchwoman, and her religion is therefore, as we might
expect, with peculiar fervency social. Always she has before her mind
"the natural law which _will have it_ (the italics are her own) that the
species _man_ cannot subsist and prosper but by _association_." Whatever
else we may be in creation, we are, first and foremost, "at the head of
the species which are called by instinct, and led by necessity, to the
life of _association_." The word _love_--the great word, as she justly
says, of the New Testament--acquires from her social enthusiasm a
peculiar significance to her:--

"The word is a great one, because it involves infinite consequences. To
love means to help one another, to have joint aspirations, to act in
concert, to labor for the same end, to develop to its ideal consummation
the fraternal instinct, thanks to which mankind have brought the earth
under their dominion. Every time that he has been false to this instinct
which is his law of life, his natural destiny, man has seen his temples
crumble, his societies dissolve, his intellectual sense go wrong, his
moral sense die out. The future is founded on love."[331]

So long as love is thus spoken of in the general, the ordinary serious
Englishman will have no difficulty in inclining himself with respect
while Madame Sand speaks of it. But when he finds that love implies,
with her, social equality, he will begin to be staggered. And in truth
for almost every Englishman Madame Sand's strong language about
equality, and about France as the chosen vessel for exhibiting it, will
sound exaggerated. "The human ideal," she says, "as well as the social
ideal, is to achieve equality."[332] France, which