According to my philosophy, which regards the world in its entirety as full of a divine afflation, there is no place for individual will in the government of the universe.  Individual Providence, in the sense formerly attached to it, has never been proved by any unmistakable fact.  But for this, I should assuredly be thankful to yield to a combination of circumstances in which a mind, less subjugated than my own by general reasoning, would detect the traces of the special protection of benevolent deities.  The play of chances which brings up a ternion or a quaternion is nothing compared to what has been required to prevent the combination of which I am reaping the fruits from being disturbed.  If my origin had been less lowly in the eyes of the world, I should not have entered or persevered upon that royal road of the intellectual life to which my early training for the priesthood attached me.  The displacement of a single atom would have broken the chain of fortuitous facts which, in the remote district of Brittany, was preparing me for a privileged life; which brought me from Brittany to Paris; which, when I was in Paris, took me to the establishment of all others where the best and most solid education was to be had; which, when I left the seminary, saved me from two or three mistakes which would have been the ruin of me; which, when I was on my travels, extricated me from certain dangers that, according to the doctrine of chances, would have been fatal to me; which, to cite one special instance, brought Dr. Suquet over from America to rescue me from the jaws of death which were yawning to swallow me up.  The only conclusion I would fain draw from all this is that the unconscious effort towards what is good and true in the universe has its throw of the dice through the intermediary of each one of us.  There is no combination but what comes up, quaternions like any other.  We may disarrange the designs of Providence in respect to ourselves; but we have next to no influence upon their accomplishment. Quid habes quod non accepisti?  The dogma of grace is the truest of all the Christian dogmas.

My experience of life has, therefore, been very pleasant; and I do not think that there are many human beings happier than I am.  I have a keen liking for the universe.  There may have been moments when subjective scepticism has gained a hold upon me, but it never made me seriously doubt of the reality, and the objections which it has evoked are sequestered by me as it were within an inclosure of forgetfulness; I never give them any thought, my peace of mind is undisturbed.  Then, again, I have found a fund of goodness in nature and in society.  Thanks to the remarkable good luck which has attended me all my life, and always thrown me into communication with very worthy men, I have never had to make sudden changes in my attitudes.  Thanks, also, to an almost unchangeable good temper, the result of moral healthiness, which is itself the