Your object, Christians have said to me, is to establish that the principle and ground of all things is goodness.  This you will not be able to do without departing from your prescribed plan, and entering upon the domain of Christian faith properly so called.  In your examination of the universe will you leave out of view Jesus Christ and His work?  Do you not know that it is by means of this work that the idea of the love of God has been implanted in the world, and that it is thence you have taken it?  Do you think to climb to the loftiest heights of thought, and to make the ascent by some other road than over the mountain of Nazareth and the hill of Calvary?

Gentlemen, I declared my whole mind on this subject at first starting.  The complete idea of God demands, for its maintenance, the grand doctrinal foundations of our faith.  Christian in its origin, firm faith in the love of God the Creator requires for its defence the armor of the Gospel.  But before defending this belief, we must first establish it; we must show that it has natural roots in human nature.  Christianity purifies and strengthens it, but it does not in an absolute sense create it.  The mark of truth is that it does not strike us as something absolutely new, but that it finds an echo in the depths of our soul.  When we meet with it, we seem to re-enter into the possession of our patrimony.  The Cross of Jesus Christ is without all contradiction the most transcendent proof of the mercy of the Creator; but the Cross of Jesus Christ rather warrants the Christian in believing in the Divine love than gives him the idea of it.  We must distinguish in the Gospel between the universal religion which it has restored, and the act itself of that restoration, which constitutes the Gospel in the special sense of the word.  Now what I am here maintaining is the fact of the existence in modern society of the elements of the universal religion.  I am far from sharing in the illusions of my fellow-countryman Rousseau, when he affirms that even if he had lived in a desert isle, and had never known a fellow-man, he would nevertheless have been able to write the Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard.  I know very well that if I were a Brahmin, born at the foot of the Himalayas, or a Chinese mandarin, I should not be able to say all that I am saying respecting the goodness of God.  The light which we have received—­I know whence it radiates; but, by the help of that light, I seek its kindred rays everywhere, and everywhere I find them in humanity.

Let us endeavor, then, according to our plan, to recognize in the universe the marks of the Divine goodness.  Let us first of all interrogate the human soul, which is certainly one of the essential elements of the world; and let us interrogate it with regard to the great fact of religion.

The universal religion presents to observation two principal forms of mental experience:  the sense of the necessity for appeasing the Divine justice, and the sense of the necessity for obtaining the help of God.