it, for its exponent repeatedly warns his disciple against the idleness of logomachy, and insists that the existence of the Divinity is traced upon every heart in letters that can never be effaced, if we are only content to read them with lowliness and simplicity.  You cannot demonstrate an emotion, nor prove an aspiration.  How reason, asks the Savoyard Vicar, about that which we cannot conceive?  Conscience is the best of all casuists, and conscience affirms the presence of a being who moves the universe and ordains all things, and to him we give the name of God.

“To this name I join the ideas of intelligence, power, will, which I have united in one, and that of goodness, which is a necessary consequence flowing from them.  But I do not know any the better for this the being to whom I have given the name; he escapes equally from my senses and my understanding; the more I think of him, the more I confound myself.  I have full assurance that he exists, and that he exists by himself.  I recognise my own being as subordinate to his and all the things that are known to me as being absolutely in the same case.  I perceive God everywhere in his works; I feel him in myself; I see him universally around me.  But when I fain would seek where he is, what he is, of what substance, he glides away from me, and my troubled soul discerns nothing."[339]

“In fine, the more earnestly I strive to contemplate his infinite essence, the less do I conceive it.  But it is, and that suffices me.  The less I conceive it, the more I adore.  I bow myself down, and say to him, O being of beings, I am because thou art; to meditate ceaselessly on thee by day and night, is to raise myself to my veritable source and fount.  The worthiest use of my reason is to make itself as naught before thee.  It is the ravishment of my soul, it is the solace of my weakness, to feel myself brought low before the awful majesty of thy greatness."[340]

Souls weary of the fierce mockeries that had so long been flying like fiery shafts against the far Jehovah of the Hebrews, and the silent Christ of the later doctors and dignitaries, and weary too of the orthodox demonstrations that did not demonstrate, and leaden refutations that could not refute, may well have turned with ardour to listen to this harmonious spiritual voice, sounding clear from a region towards which their hearts yearned with untold aspiration, but from which the spirit of their time had shut them off with brazen barriers.  It was the elevation and expansion of man, as much as it was the restoration of a divinity.  To realise this, one must turn to such a book as Helvetius’s, which was supposed to reveal the whole inner machinery of the heart.  Man was thought of as a singular piece of mechanism principally moved from without, not as a conscious organism, receiving nourishment and direction from the medium in which it is placed, but reacting with a life of its own from within.  It was this free and energetic inner life of the individual