“If these rigid and rigorous arguments lead to such conclusions confusion must reign.  The world would have no fixedness; nothing would advance, nothing would pause, all would change, nothing would be destroyed, all would reappear after self-renovation; for if your mind does not clearly demonstrate to you an end, it is equally impossible to demonstrate the destruction of the smallest particle of Matter; Matter can transform but not annihilate itself.

“Though blind force may provide arguments for the atheist, intelligent force is inexplicable; for if it emanates from God, why should it meet with obstacles? ought not its triumph to be immediate?  Where is God?  If the living cannot perceive Him, can the dead find Him?  Crumble, ye idolatries and ye religions!  Fall, feeble keystones of all social arches, powerless to retard the decay, the death, the oblivion that have overtaken all nations however firmly founded!  Fall, morality and justice! our crimes are purely relative; they are divine effects whose causes we are not allowed to know.  All is God.  Either we are God or God is not!—­Child of a century whose every year has laid upon your brow, old man, the ice of its unbelief, here, here is the summing up of your lifetime of thought, of your science and your reflections!  Dear Monsieur Becker, you have laid your head upon the pillow of Doubt, because it is the easiest of solutions; acting in this respect with the majority of mankind, who say in their hearts:  ’Let us think no more of these problems, since God has not vouchsafed to grant us the algebraic demonstrations that could solve them, while He has given us so many other ways to get from earth to heaven.’

“Tell me, dear pastor, are not these your secret thoughts?  Have I evaded the point of any? nay, rather, have I not clearly stated all?  First, in the dogma of two principles,—­an antagonism in which God perishes for the reason that being All-Powerful He chose to combat.  Secondly, in the absurd pantheism where, all being God, God exists no longer.  These two sources, from which have flowed all the religions for whose triumph Earth has toiled and prayed, are equally pernicious.  Behold in them the double-bladed axe with which you decapitate the white old man whom you enthrone among your painted clouds!  And now, to me the axe, I wield it!”

Monsieur Becker and Wilfrid gazed at the young girl with something like terror.

“To believe,” continued Seraphita, in her Woman’s voice, for the Man had finished speaking, “to believe is a gift.  To believe is to feel.  To believe in God we must feel God.  This feeling is a possession slowly acquired by the human being, just as other astonishing powers which you admire in great men, warriors, artists, scholars, those who know and those who act, are acquired.  Thought, that budget of the relations which you perceive among created things, is an intellectual language which can be learned, is it not?  Belief, the budget