Pantheism recognizes the omnipresence of God in the universe, or, if you like the terms of the school, the immanence of God; this is its portion of truth.  When I open the Hindoos’ songs of adoration, and find therein the unlimited enumeration of the manifestations of God in nature, I find nothing to complain of.  But when, in those same hymns, I see liberty denied, the origin of evil attributed to the Holy One, and man cowering before Destiny, instead of turning his eyes freely towards the Heavenly Father, then I stand only more erect and say:  You forget that if your God is the Cause of all, He is the Cause of liberty.  If liberty exists, evil, the revolt of liberty, is not the work of the Creator.  Your system contradicts itself.  You make of God the universal Principle, and you are right; make of Him then the Author of free wills, so that He will be no longer the source of evil, and we shall be agreed.

Deism and pantheism therefore, pushed to their legitimate consequences, are transformed and united in the truth.  And you see plainly that I am not making, for my part, an arbitrary selection in these systems.  I am walking by one sole light, the light which has been given to us, and which serves me everywhere as a guiding clue:—­The Lord is God, and there is no other God but He.

Such, Gentlemen, is the fundamental truth on which rests all religion, and all philosophy capable of accounting for facts.  Such is the grand cause which claims all the efforts which we are wasting too often in barren conflicts—­the cause of God.  But do I say the truth?  Is it the cause of God which is at stake?  When a surgeon, by a successful operation, has restored sight to a blind man, we are not wont to say that he has rendered a service to the sun.  This cause is our own; it is that of society at large, it is that of families, that of individuals; it is the cause which concerns our dignity, our happiness; it is the cause of all, even of those who attack it in words of which they do not calculate the import, and who, were they to succeed in banishing God from the public conscience, would, with us, recoil in terror at sight of the frightful abysses into which we all should fall together.

It is time to sum up these considerations.

Inert and unintelligent matter is not the cause of life and intelligence.

Human consciences would be plunged in irremediable misery, if ever they could be persuaded that there is nothing superior to man.

The universe is the work of wisdom and of power; it is the creation of the Infinite Mind.  What can still be wanting to our hearts?  The thought that God desires our good,—­that He loves us.  If it is so, we shall be able to understand that our cause is His, that He is not an impassible sun whose rays fall on us with indifference, but a Father who is moved at our sorrows, and who would have us find joy and peace in Him.  This will be the subject of our next and concluding lecture.