a clear view of God; we reason without thinking distinctly of the principles on which we reason, just as, when we are in a hurry, we take the shortest cut without thinking of the axiom of geometry which prescribes the straight line.  But if we pass from the natural order of our thoughts into the domain of science, if we ask—­what is it which guarantees to me the value of my reason? then the question is put, and many perish in the passage which separates natural faith from the domain of science,—­that dangerous passage where doubt spreads out its perfidious fogs and its deceitful marshes.  The moment the question is started of the worth of reason, and all the schools of scepticism do start it, our answer must be—­God; and we must find light in this answer, or see thought invaded in its totality by an irremediable doubt.  Then men come to ask themselves if all be not a lie; and they speak of the universal vanity, without making the reserve of Ecclesiastes.[23] There are more souls ill of this malady than are supposed to be so.  Many begin by setting up proudly against God what they call the rights of reason, and by and by we see this reason, which has revolted against its Principle, vacillate, doubt of itself, and at last, losing itself in a bitter irony, wrap itself, with all beside, in the shroud of a universal scorn.

Without God reason is extinguished.  What, in like case, will happen to the conscience?  The conscience is a reality.  I will say willingly in the style of the prophets:  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, ere I deny conscience, and disparage the sacred name of duty!  Yes, conscience is a reality; but God is in it:  He it is who gives to it its necessary basis and its indispensable support.  The conscience is the august voice of the Master of the universe.  God has given us the light of the understanding that we may see and comprehend some portions of the works which He has created without us:  a work there is for which He would have us to be fellow-workers with Him.  The heaven of stars is a spectacle for the eyes of the body, a grander spectacle still for the contemplation of the mind which has understood their wondrous mechanism.  We admire them; but if the stars failed to attract our admiration, no one of them on that account would cease to trace its orbit.  There is another heaven, a heaven of loving stars and free, the sight of which is one day to fill us with rapture, and the realization of which is to be the work of our love and of our will.  Before we contemplate it we must make it; this is our high and awful privilege.  The plan of the spiritual heavens is deposited in the soul, and the utterances of the conscience reveal it to the will.  It is a law of justice and of love.  This law is evermore violated, because it is proposed to liberty, and liberty rebels:  it subsists evermore, because it is the work of the Almighty.  Humanity, in its strange destiny, has never ceased to outrage the rule which it acknowledges, and to pronounce upon its own acts a ceaseless condemnation.  The laws which are investigated by the physical sciences are the plan of the Creator realized in nature:  the law proposed to liberty is the plan of the Creator to be realized by the community of minds.  Such is the explanation of the conscience:  God is its solid foundation.