de Lamennais in his
"Esquisse." It was impossible, indeed, for them to reply to it;
for, reasoning from a false conception of evil and of free will,
and in profound ignorance of the laws of humanity, they were
equally without reasons by which either to triumph over their own
doubts or to refute the believers.
Let us leave the sphere of the finite and infinite, and place
ourselves in the conception of order. Can God make a round
circle, a right-angled square? Certainly.
Would God be guilty if, after having created the world according
to the laws of geometry, he had put it into our minds, or even
allowed us to believe without fault of our own, that a circle may
be square or a square circular, though, in consequence of this
false opinion, we should have to suffer an incalculable series of
evils? Again, undoubtedly.
Well! that is exactly what God, the God of Providence, has done
in the government of humanity; it is of that that I accuse him.
He knew from all eternity--inasmuch as we mortals have discovered
it after six thousand years of painful experience--that order in
society--that is, liberty, wealth, science--is realized by the
reconciliation of opposite ideas which, were each to be taken as
absolute in itself, would precipitate us into an abyss of misery:
why did he not warn us? Why did he not correct our judgment at
the start? Why did he abandon us to our imperfect logic,
especially when our egoism must find a pretext in his acts of
injustice and perfidy? He knew, this jealous God, that, if he
exposed us to the hazards of experience, we should not find until
very late that security of life which constitutes our entire
happiness: why did he not abridge this long apprenticeship
by a revelation of our own laws? Why, instead of fascinating us
with contradictory opinions, did he not reverse experience by
causing us to reach the antinomies by the path of analysis of
synthetic ideas, instead of leaving us to painfully clamber up
the steeps of antinomy to synthesis?
If, as was formerly thought, the evil from which humanity suffers
arose solely from the imperfection inevitable in every creature,
or better, if this evil were caused only by the antagonism of the
potentialities and inclinations which constitute our being, and
which reason should teach us to master and guide, we should have
no right to complain.
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