Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

“Crumble into dust, O idolatries and creeds! Fall, O too feeble keystones of the social arches, for ye have never retarded the destruction, the death, the oblivion, that have come upon all the nations of the past, however securely they were founded. Fall, O morality and justice! . Our crimes are but relative, they are divine results of which the causes are unknown to us! Everything is God. Hither we are God, or God is not! Child of an age of which each year has left on your brow the cold touch of its.scepticism—Old

p. 121

Man! this is the sum-total of your science and your long meditations!

‘Dear Pastor Becker, you have rested your head on the pillow of doubt, finding it the easiest solution, acting indeed like the majority of the human race. They say to themselves, We will think no more of this question if God will not vouchsafe us an algebraic demonstration for its solution, while He has given us so many that lead us safely up from the earth to the stars—

‘‘Now, are not these your secret thoughts? Have I missed them? Have I not, on the contrary, precisely stated them?—Hither the dogma of the two elementary principles, an antagonism in which God is destroyed by the very fact that He—who is Almighty—plays at a struggle; or the ridiculous Pantheism in which all things being God, God is no more—these two founts, whence flow the creeds to whose triumph the earth is devoted, are equally pernicious.

‘“There, between us, lies the two-edged axe with which you behead the white-haired Ancient of Days whom you enthrone on painted clouds! :

‘‘Now, give me the axe!”’

The pastor and Wilfrid looked at the girl in a sort of dismay.

‘‘Belief,’’ said Seraphita in her gentle voice—for the man had been speaking hitherto—‘‘belief is a gift! Belief is feeling. To believe in God, you must feel God. This sense is a faculty slowly acquired by the human being, as those wonderful powers are acquired which you admire in great men—in warriors, artists, men of science—those who act, those who produce, those who know. Thought, a bundle of the relations which you discern between different (6)—Vol. 25

LZ2 BALZAC’S WORKS

things, is an intellectual language that may be learned, is — it not? Belief, a bundle of heavenly truths, is in the same way a language, but as far above thought as thought is above instinct. This language too can be learned.

‘‘The believer answers in a single cry, a single sign; faith places in his hand a flaming sword which cuts and throws light on everything. The seer does not come down again from heaven; he contemplates it and is silent. There is a being who both believes and sees, who has knowledge and power, who loves, prays, and waits. That being is resigned, and aspires to the realm of light; he has neither the believer’s lofty scorn, nor the Seer’s dumbness; he both listens and replies. To him the doubt of the dark ages is not a lethal weapon, but a guiding clew; he accepts the battle in whatever guise; he can accommodate his tongue to every language; he is never wroth, he pities; he neither condemns nor kills, he redeems and comforts; he has not the harshness of an aggressor, but rather the mild fluidity of light which penetrates and warms and lights up every place. In his eyes scepticism is not impiety, is not blasphemy, is not a crime; it is a stage of transition whence a man must go forward toward the light, or back into the darkness.