These objects of our highest desires—­beauty in its supreme manifestation, absolute holiness, infinite truth—­are united in one and the same thought—­God!  The attributes of the spiritual are never in us but as borrowed attributes; they dwell naturally in Him who is their source.  God is the truth, not only because He knows all things, but because He is the very object of our thoughts; because, when we study the universe, we do but spell out some few of the laws which He has imposed on things; because, to know truth is never any thing else than to know the creation or the Creator, the world or its eternal Cause.  God it is who must be Himself the satisfaction of that craving of the conscience which urges us towards holiness.  If we had arrived at the highest degree of virtue, what should we have done?  We should have realized the plan which He has proposed to spiritual creatures in their freedom, at the same time that He is directing the stars in their courses by that other word which they accomplish without having heard it.  God is the eternal source of beauty.  He it is who has shed grace upon our valleys, and majesty upon our mountains; and He, again, it is (I quote St. Augustine) who acts within the souls of artists, those great artists, who, urged unceasingly towards the regions of the ideal, feel themselves drawn onwards towards a divine world.

God then above all is He who is,—­the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal,—­in the ever mysterious depths of His own essence.  In His relation to the world, He is the cause; in His relation to the lofty aspirations of the soul, He is the ideal.  He is the ideal, because being the absolute cause, He is the unique source, at the same time that He is the object, of our aspirations:  He is the absolute cause, because being He who is, in His supreme unity, nothing could have existence except by the act of His power.  We are able already to recognize here, in passing, the source at which are fed the most serious aberrations of religious thought.  Are truth, holiness, beauty considered separately from the real and infinite Spirit in which is found their reason for existing?  We see thus appear philosophies noble in their commencement, but which soon descend a fatal slope.  The divine, so-called, is spoken of still; but the divine is an abstraction, and apart from God has no real existence.  If truth, beauty, holiness are not the attributes of an eternal mind, but the simple expression of the tendencies of our soul, man may render at first a sort of worship to these lofty manifestations of his own nature; but logic, inexorable logic, forces him soon to dismiss the divine to the region of chimeras.  These rays are extinguished together with their luminous centre; the soul loses the secret of its destinies, and, in the measureless grief which possesses it, it proclaims at length that all is vanity.  We shall have, in the sequel, to be witnesses together of this sorrowful spectacle.