Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God.  A God-Reason, a theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation.  With this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood as the supreme expression of human felicity.  A quietist God, in short, as reason, by its very essence, is quietist.

There remains the other famous proof of God’s existence, that of the supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples.  But this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour of the rational God who explains the Universe, but of the God of the heart, who makes us live.  We should be justified in calling it a rational proof only on the supposition that we believed that reason was identical with a more or less unanimous agreement among all peoples, that it corresponded with the verdict of a universal suffrage, only on the supposition that we held that vox populi, which is said to be vox Dei, was actually the voice of reason.

Such was, indeed, the belief of Lamennais, that tragic and ardent spirit, who affirmed that life and truth were essentially one and the same thing—­would that they were!—­and that reason was one, universal, everlasting and holy (Essai sur l’indifference, partie iv., chap, viii.).  He invoked the aut omnibus credendum est aut nemini of Lactantius—­we must believe all or none—­and the saying of Heraclitus that every individual opinion is fallible, and that of Aristotle that the strongest proof consists in the general agreement of mankind, and above all that of Pliny (Paneg.  Trajani, lxii.), to the effect that one man cannot deceive all men or be deceived by all—­nemo omnes, neminem omnes fefellerunt.  Would that it were so!  And so he concludes with the dictum of Cicero (De natura deorum, lib. iii., cap. ii., 5 and 6), that we must believe the tradition of our ancestors even though they fail to render us a reason—­maioribus autem nostris, etiam nulla ratione reddita credere.

Let us suppose that this belief of the ancients in the divine interpenetration of the whole of Nature is universal and constant, and that it is, as Aristotle calls it, an ancestral dogma (patrios doxa) (Metaphysica, lib. vii., cap. vii.); this would prove only that there is a motive impelling peoples and individuals—­that is to say, all or almost all or a majority of them—­to believe in a God.  But may it not be that there are illusions and fallacies rooted in human nature itself?  Do not all peoples begin by believing that the sun turns round the earth?  And do we not all naturally incline to believe that which satisfies our desires?  Shall we say with Hermann[40] that, “if there is a God, He has not left us without some indication of Himself, and if is His will that we should find Him.”