the course of things, and in my favour work miracles?  Could I, who must love above all else the order established by his wisdom and upheld by his providence, presume to wish such order troubled for my sake?  Nor do I ask of him the power of doing righteousness; why ask for what he has given me?  Has he not bestowed on me conscience to love what is good, reason to ascertain it, freedom to choose it?  If I do ill, I have no excuse; I do it because I will it.  To pray to him to change my will, is to seek from him what he seeks from me; it is to wish no longer to be human, it is to wish something other than what is, it is to wish disorder and evil."[343] We may admire both the logical consistency of such self-denial and the manliness which it would engender in the character that were strong enough to practise it.  But a divinity who has conceded no right of petition is still further away from our lives than the divinities of more popular creeds.

Even the fairest deism is of its essence a faith of egotism and complacency.  It does not incorporate in the very heart of the religious emotion the pitifulness and sorrow which Christianity first clothed with associations of sanctity, and which can never henceforth miss their place in any religious system to be accepted by men.  Why is this?  Because a religion that leaves them out, or thrusts them into a hidden corner, fails to comprehend at least one half, and that the most touching and impressive half, of the most conspicuous facts of human life.  Rousseau was fuller of the capacity of pity than ordinary men, and this pity was one of the deepest parts of himself.  Yet it did not enter into the composition of his religious faith, and this shows that his religious faith, though entirely free from suspicion of insincerity or ostentatious assumption, was like deism in so many cases, whether rationalistic or emotional, a kind of gratuitously adopted superfluity, not the satisfaction of a profound inner craving and resistless spiritual necessity.  He speaks of the good and the wicked with the precision and assurance of the most pharisaic theologian, and he begins by asking of what concern it is to him whether the wicked are punished with eternal torment or not, though he concludes more graciously with the hope that in another state the wicked, delivered from their malignity, may enjoy a bliss no less than his own.[344] But the divine pitifulness which we owe to Christianity, and which will not be the less eagerly cherished by those who repudiate Christian tradition and doctrines, enjoins upon us that we should ask, Who are the wicked, and which is he that is without sin among us?  Rousseau answered this glibly enough by some formula of metaphysics, about the human will having been left and constituted free by the creator of the world; and that man is the bad man who abuses his freedom.  Grace, fate, destiny, force of circumstances, are all so many names for the protests which the frank sense of fact has forced from man against this miserably inadequate explanation of the foundations of moral responsibility.