A request is made, and for what?  For strength, for tranquillity, for peace; for happiness under all its forms.  And of whom is happiness asked?  Of goodness.  Justice is appeased, power is dreaded, but it is goodness which is invoked.  It is so in human relations.  The man who supplicates the fiercest tyrant only does so because he supposes that a fibre of goodness may still vibrate in that savage heart.  Take from him that thought; persuade him that the last gleam of pity is extinct in the heart to which he appeals, and you will arrest the prayer on the lips of the suppliant.  There will remain for him only the silence of despair, or the heroism of resignation.

To sum up:—­Religion is a universal fact.  “There is no religion without prayer,” said Voltaire, and he never said better.  There is no prayer without a confused, perhaps, but real, conviction of the goodness of the First Cause of the universe.  If you could stifle in man’s heart the feeling that the Principle of things is good, you would silence over the whole globe that voice of prayer which is ever rising to God.  Thus humanity itself testifies to the truth for which I am contending.  Humanity prays; it believes therefore in the goodness of God.  This fact is an argument.  The heart of man is organized to believe that God is good:  it is the mark set by the Worker Himself upon His work.

Let us study now another of the elements of the universe.  We have heard the answer of man’s heart; let us ask for the answer of reason.  Has reason nothing to tell us respecting the intentions of the Creator?  Let us place it in presence of the idea of God—­of the Infinite Being, and see what it will be able to teach us.

To attain my object, I must explain more particularly than as yet I have done, a word rendered frivolous by the levity of our heart, a word defiled by the disorder of our passions, and too often by the unworthiness, and worse, of poets and novelists, but which still, in its virgin purity, is ever protesting against the outrages to which it has been subjected:  that word is love.

This word has two principal meanings.  In the Platonic sense of it, it is the search after what is beautiful, great, noble, pure,—­after what, as being of the very real nature of the soul, attracts, fills, and delights it.  But there is another sort of love, which does not pursue greatness and beauty, but which gives itself; a love which seeks the wretched to enrich him, the poor to make him happy, the fallen to raise him up.  These two kinds of love seem to follow different and even contrary laws.  Here, for instance, is a description of what often occurs in a large city.[176] A man leaves his house in the evening in order to be present at performances in which I am willing to believe that everything bears the stamp of nobleness and grandeur, or at least of a pure and wholesome taste.  He experiences keen enjoyment, and that of an elevated kind.  The spectacle over, he returns to his dwelling, and at a still later hour he retires at length to his repose.  He has not long extinguished his luxurious tapers, perhaps, when other men, who have slept while others were seeking amusement, rise before daylight, and, lighting their small lanterns, go forth to succor the unfortunate, without witnesses and without ostentation.