What I Propose.

I propose a great, a worthy subject for your study.  At those oratorical sessions which are rapidly increasing under the name of conferences, sessions at which so many distinguished men take the floor, you have been told in elegant terms, often in eloquent terms, of the sciences, of their application and of their progress.  You have listened to discourses upon art, its primitive purity, its supposed principles, its decadence, its renaissance, its multifarious changes; its masterpieces have been pointed out to you; they have been described to you; you have, in some degree, been made familiar with their origin.  You have heard the story of the lives of the great artists.  They have been shown to you in their weakness and in their strength.  The times and manners amid which they lived have been painted for you in more or less imaginary colors.  I propose something better than all this.

I offer you a work superior even to those sciences which have been described to you; superior to all which the genius of a Michael Angelo or a Raphael could conceive; a work in comparison with which all the magnificences of science and of art must pale.  I propose that you should contemplate yourselves!

Nothing is so unfamiliar to man as himself.  I will, therefore, as I have promised, show you the marvels which God himself has placed within you, in the transluminous obscurities of your being.

Now, if there be more science, more genius in the production of a violet or a worm than is revealed by all the combined powers of science and of art, how much admiration should we not feel at the sight of all the splendors which God has spread broadcast in the privileged work wherein He was pleased to reveal his own image!  But a light inaccessible to the vain demonstrations of your sciences constantly removes this mysterious image from your gaze.  As light eludes the eye which it illumines, if we would seize and contemplate it, we must have two things:  we must have a special and a supernatural object.  There must be light within you, and it must pierce the depths wherein that image dwells.

Here there is no question of the light which shines to show us the things of the natural world by which we are surrounded.  Nor is it a question of the intellectual light sometimes visible to scholars.  I speak of that light which is hidden from those very scholars because their eyes could not bear its lustre, a transluminous light which fills the soul with beatific visions, and of which it is said that God wraps it about Him as a mantle.

Now, three worlds, of the nature of which man partakes, are offered for our contemplation.  These three worlds are:  The natural, the intellectual, and the supernatural.

Three sorts of vision have been given man to initiate him into these three worlds.  These different forms of vision are:  Direct, inward and higher.