and efforts have been used to acquire it; and what it has added, so to speak, to his intellectual worth, and to the extent of his existence. But if, by that means, scientific beliefs are nearer to faith than natural and irreflective beliefs, yet, on other sides, they remain much further removed from them, and from the first they are confined to doubt and uncertainty. They measure, and almost admit, various degrees of probability; and even when they are confident of their legitimacy, they do not deny that they can be modified and even overturned by a wider and more exact science, whilst the most entire and immoveable certitude is the fundamental characteristic of faith. All science is felt to be bounded and incomplete; every man who studies, whatever be the object of his study, however advanced and assured he himself may be of his own knowledge, knows that he has not reached the boundary of his career, and that for him, as for every other, fresh efforts will lead to fresh progress. Faith, on the contrary, is in its own eyes a complete and finished belief; and if it should appear that something yet remains for it to acquire, it would not be faith. It has nothing progressive, it excludes all idea that anything is wanting, and judges itself to be in full possession of the truth which is its object. From thence proceeds a vast inequality of power between the different kinds of conviction; faith, freed from all intellectual labour and from all study (since, so far as knowledge is concerned, it is complete), turns all the force of its possessor towards action. As soon as he becomes penetrated by it, only one task remains for his accomplishmentthat of causing the idea which has taken possession of his faith to reign and to be realized without. The history of religionsof all religions-proves, at each step, this expansive and practical energy of belief, with which the characters of faith have been converted. It displays itself even on occasions when in no way it appears provoked or sustained by the moral importance or the visible grandeur of results.

I could cite a singular example of it. In the course of our Revolution, the theoretical and actual superiority of the new system of weights and measures quickly became for some men, who were the subordinate servants of an administration charged with establishing it, a complete and imperious truth to which nothing could be objected, added, or refused. They pursued from that time its triumphs with an ardour, an obstinacy, and sometimes a prodigious devotion. I have known a public officer, who, more than twenty years after the birth of the system, and when no one scarcely dreamed of disturbing himself any more about it, gave himself up, day and night, to extraordinary labours, letters, instructions, and verifications, which his superiors did not

demand, and which he had often great trouble in causing to be adopted, in order to accelerate its extension and strength. The new system of weights and measures was for this man the object of a true faith; he would reproach himself for his repose, whilst anything remained to be done for its success. Scientific beliefs, even when they would admit of immediate application, rarely carry a man so to struggle against the outer world as to reduce it under his dominion. When the human mind is, above all, preoccupied with the design or the pleasure of knowledge, it there concentrates and, so to speak, exhausts itself; and there remains for it neither desires nor powers to be otherwise employed. Scientific beliefs, accustomed to doubts, to groping in darkness, and to contempts, hesitate to command: without efforts and without anger, they make their appeals to ignorance, uncertainty, and even error, and scarcely know how to propagate themselves, or to act, but by methods which conduct to science; that is to say, by inciting to meditation and study, they proceed too slowly to be able to exercise outwardly an extensive and actual power.

Perhaps, also, the very origin of scientific beliefs might be counted amongst the causes which deprive them of that empire, and that confidence in action and command, which is the general characteristic of faith. It is to himself that man owes his science; it is his own work, the fruit of his own labour, and the reward of his own merit. Perhaps, even in the midst of the pride which such a conquest often inspires, a secret warning feeling comes over him, that, in claiming and exercising authority in the name of his science, it is to the reason and the understanding of one man that he pretends to subjugate men,- -a feeble and doubtful title to great power; and which, at the moment of action, can certainly, without their own consciousness, cast into the soul of the proudest some timidity. Nothing like this is met with in faith. However profoundly individual it is, from the time it has entered into the heart of man, it signifies not by what means, it banishes all idea of a conquest which can be his own, or of a discovery the glory of which he can attribute to himself. He is no longer occupied with himself; wholly absorbed by the truth which he believes, no personal sentiment any longer raises itself with his knowledge, excepting the sentiment of the happiness it procures for him, and of the mission it imposes upon him. The learned man is the conqueror and the inventor of his science; the believer is the agent and the servant of his faith. It is not in the name of his own superiority, but in the name of that truth to which he has yielded himself, that the believer claims obedience. Charged to procure for it sovereignty, he bears himself, in reference to it, with a passionate disinterested

ness; and this persuasion impresses upon his language and upon his acts, a confidence and authority, with which the proudest science would in vain endeavour to invest itself. Let us consider how different is the pride which is produced by science, from that which accompanies faith: the one is scornful and full of personality: the other is imperious and full of blindness. The learned man isolates himself from those who do not comprehend what he knows; the believer pursues with his indignation or his pity those who do not yield themselves to what he believes. The first desires personal distinction; the other desires that all should unite themselves under the law of the master whom he serves. What can this variety of the same fault import, excepting that the learned man beholds himself and reckons himself, in his science; whilst the believing man forgets and abdicates himself in favour of his faith? It is further necessary to explain how the same idea, the same doctrine, can remain cold and inactive in the hands of the learned man, and without any practical use even in men whose understanding it has illuminated; whilst, in the hands of the believer, it can become communicative, expansive, and an energetic principle of action and power.

Faith does not, then, enter exclusively either into the one or the other of these two kinds of beliefs, which, at first sight, appear to share the soul of man. It partakes of, and at the same time differs from, natural and scientific beliefs. It is, like the latter, individual and particular: like the former, it is firm, complete, active, and sovereign. Considered in itself, and independent of all comparison with this or that analogous condition, faith is the full security of the man in the possession of his belief; a possession freed as much from labour as from doubt; in the midst of which every thought of the path by which it has been reached disappears, and leaves no other sentiment but that of the natural and pre-established harmony between the human mind and truth. As soon as faith exists, all search after truth ceases; man considers himself to have arrived at his object; his belief is no longer for him anything but a source of enjoyments and precepts; it satisfies his understanding and governs his life, bestows upon him repose, and regulates and absorbs, without extinguishing, his intellectual activity; and directs his liberty without destroying it. Is he disposed to contemplation? his faith opens an illimitable field for his thoughts; they can run over it in all directions, and without fatigue, for he is no longer vexed by the necessity of reaching the object, and discovering the path to it; he has touched the boundary, and has nothing more to do but to cultivate, at his leisure, a world which belongs to him. Is he called to action? He throws himself wholly into it, sure of never wanting impulse and

guidance, tranquil and animated, urged on and sustained by the double force of duty and passion. For the man, in short, being penetrated by faith, and within the sphere which is its object, the understanding and the will have no more problems to solve, and no more interior obstacles to surmount: he feels himself to be in the full possession of the truth for enlightening and guiding him, and of himself for acting according to the truth.

But if such is the state of the human soul, if faith differs essentially from other kinds of belief, it is evident at the same time that neither natural nor scientific beliefs have anything which excludes faith; that both one and the other can invest their characters with it; and, further still, that either one or the other is always the foundation on which faith supports itself, or the path which leads to it.

See a man in whom the idea of God has never been but a vague and spontaneous belief-the simple result of a course of life and of external circumstances-an idea which holds a place in his mind and conduct, but on which he has never fallen back and fixed his intellectual regards, and which he has never appropriated to himself by an act of voluntary and briefly-sustained reflection. Let any cause whatsoever as a great danger or sorrow—strike him with a powerful emotion, and present to him the misery of his condition and the weakness of his nature, and awaken within him this need of superior succour-this instinct of prayer, often lulled to sleep, but never extinguished in the heart of man. All at once the idea of God, till then abstract, cold, and proud, will appear to this man, living, urgent, and particular;-it has attached itself to him with ardour—it will penetrate into all his thoughts—his belief will become faith; and Pascal will be borne out when he said, 'faith is God sensibly realised by the heart.'

Another has lived in submission to religious practices, without having associated with them any truly personal conviction; as an infant, others might make a law for him; as master of himself, he has retained the habit of obedience, docile to a fact rather than attached to a duty, and not dreaming of penetrating further into the sense of the rule than to verify its authority. A time has arrived when occasions and temptations to offend against this law have presented themselves; a contest has arisen between the habits and tastes, between the desires, and, perhaps, the passions. What this person could practise without thought has now become a subject of reflection, anxiety, and inward sorrow. To preserve its empire, it becomes necessary that the rule, until then mistress only of the exterior life of the man, should penetrate and establish itself within his soul. It has succeeded in that; and to remain true to his practices, he has been required to make sacrifices for

them; and he has made them. The state of his soul is changed: habit is converted into conviction; practice into duty; and observance into moral want. In the day of trial, the long submission to a general rule, and to a power clothed with the right to prescribe, has brought forth a particular and individual adhesion of thought and will-that is to say, what was wanting to faith.

For scientific beliefs this transition to the state of faith is more difficult and more rare. Even when by meditation, reasoning, and study, any one has attained to conviction, he remains nearly always occupied with the labour which has conducted to it, his long uncertainties, the deviations by which he has been misled, and the false steps he has made. He has arrived at his object, but the remembrance of the route is present to him, with all its embarrassments, accidents, and chances. He has come into the presence of light, but the impression of the darkness, and the dubious lights he has crossed, are yet present to his thoughts. In vain his conviction is entire; there are yet to be discovered traces of the labour which has presided over its formation. It wants simplicity and confidence. There is a certain fatigue connected with it, which enervates its practical virtue and fruitfulness. He finds trouble in forgetting and overthrowing the scaffolding of the science, in order that the truth, of which it is the object, may wholly belong to his nature. We might say, the butterfly is restrained by the shell in which it was born, and from which it is not fully disengaged.

Nevertheless, although the difficulty is great, it is not insurmountable. More than once, for the glory of humanity, man, by the force of his intelligence and scientific meditations, has reached to beliefs, to which there has been wanting none of the characteristics of faith-neither fullness nor certainty of conviction, nor the forgetfulness of personality, nor expansive and practical power, nor the pure and profound enjoyments of contemplation. Who would refuse to recognise in the belief of the most illustrious stoics in the sovereignty of moral good-in Cleanthes, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius-a true faith? And was not the religious faith of the principal reformers, or reformed, of the sixteenth centuryZwingle, Melancthon, Duplessis Mornay-the fruit of study and science, as well as the philosophical doctrines of Descartes and Leibnitz? And lately, under the idea that falsehood is the source of all the vices of man, and that, at no price, in no moment, and for no cause, can it be necessary to swerve from the truth, did not Kant arrive, by a long series of meditations, to a conviction perfectly analogous to faith? The analogy was such, that the day when his certainty of the principle became complete and definite constituted an epoch in his memory and life, as others call to mind