Our condition being all that it could be,
God would be justified.
But, in view of this wilful delusion of our minds, a delusion
which it was so easy to dissipate and the effects of which must
be so terrible, where is the excuse of Providence? Is it not
true that grace failed man here? God, whom faith represents as a
tender father and a prudent master, abandons us to the fatality
of our incomplete conceptions; he digs the ditch under our feet;
he causes us to move blindly: and then, at every fall, he
punishes us as rascals. What do I say? It seems as if it were
in spite of him that at last, covered with bruises from our
journey, we recognize our road; as if we offended his glory in
becoming more intelligent and free through the trials which he
imposes upon us. What need, then, have we to continually invoke
Divinity, and what have we to do with those satellites of a
Providence which for sixty centuries, by the aid of a thousand
religions, has deceived and misled us?
What! God, through his gospel-bearers and by the law which he
has put in our hearts, commands us to love our neighbor as
ourselves, to do to others as we wish to be done by, to render
each his due, not to keep back anything from the laborer's hire,
and not to lend at usury; he knows, moreover, that in us charity
is lukewarm and conscience vacillating, and that the slightest
pretext always seems to us a sufficient reason for exemption from
the law: and yet he involves us, with such dispositions, in the
contradictions of commerce and property, in which, by the
necessity of the theory, charity and justice are bound to perish!
Instead of enlightening our reason concerning the bearing of
principles which impose themselves upon it with all the power of
necessity, but whose consequences, adopted by egoism, are fatal
to human fraternity, he places this abused reason at the service
of our passion; by seduction of the mind, he destroys our
equilibrium of conscience; he justifies in our own eyes our
usurpations and our avarice; he makes the separation of man from
his fellow inevitable and legitimate; he creates division and
hatred among us in rendering equality by labor and by right
impossible; he makes us believe that this equality, the law of
the world, is unjust among men; and then he proscribes us en
masse for not having known how to practise his incomprehensible
precepts! I believe I have proved, to be sure, that our
abandonment by Providence does not justify us; but, whatever our
crime, toward it we are not guilty; and if there is a being who,
before ourselves and more than ourselves, is deserving of
hell,--I am bound to name him,--it is God.
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