volcanoes, disgorging vast masses of smoke, were extinguished, and one of the four elements, fire, perished together with light.

The world was now covered with horrible shades which sent forth the most terrific cries. Amid the humid darkness, the remnant of living creatures, the tiger and the lamb, the eagle and the dove, the reptile and the insect, man and woman, hastened together to the most elevated rock on the surface of the globe; but Ocean still pursued them, and, raising around them his stupendous and menacing waters, buried the last point of land beneath his stormy wastes.

God, having accomplished his vengeance, commanded the seas to retire within the abyss; but he determined to impress on the globe everlasting traces of his wrath. The relics of the elephant of India were piled up in the regions of Siberia; the shell-fish of the Magellanic shores were fixed in the quarries of France; whole beds of marine substances settled upon the summits of the Alps, of Taurus, and of the Cordilleras; and those mountains themselves were the monuments which God left in the three worlds to commemorate his triumph over the wicked, as a monarch erects a trophy on the field where he has defeated his enemies.

He was not satisfied, however, with these general attestations of his past indignation. Knowing how soon the remembrance of calamity is effaced from the mind of man, he spread memorials of it everywhere around him. The sun had now no other throne in the morning, no other couch at night, than the watery element, in which it seemed to be daily extinguished as at the time of the deluge. Often the clouds of heaven resembled waves heaped upon one another, sandy shores or whitened cliffs. On land, the rocks discharged torrents of water. The light of the moon and the white vapors of evening at times gave to the valleys the appearance of being covered with a sheet of water. In the most arid situations grew trees, whose bending branches hung heavily toward the earth, as if they had just risen from the bosom of the waves. Twice a day the sea was commanded to rise again in its bed, and to invade its deep resounding shores. The caverns of the mountains retained a hollow and mournful sound. The summits of the solitary woods presented an image of the rolling billows, and the ocean seemed to have left the roar of its waters in the recesses of the forest.

CHAPTER V.

YOUTH AND OLD AGE OF THE EARTH.

WE now come to the third objection relative to the modern origin of the globe. "The earth," it is said, "is an aged nurse, who betrays her antiquity in every thing. Examine her fossils, her marbles, her granites, her lavas, and you will discover in them a series of innumerable years, marked by circles, strata, or branches, as the age of a serpent is determined by his rattles, that of a horse by his teeth, or that of a stag by his antlers."

This difficulty has been solved a hundred times by the following answer: God might have created, and doubtless did create, the world with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which it now exhibits.

What, in fact, can be more probable than that the Author of nature originally produced both venerable forests and young plantations, and that the animals were created, some full of days, others adorned with the graces of infancy? The oaks, on springing from the fruitful soil, doubtless bore at once the aged crows and the new progeny of doves. Worm, chrysalis, and butterfly— the insect crawled upon the grass, suspended its golden egg in the forest, or fluttered aloft in the air. The bee, though she had lived but a morning, already gathered her ambrosia from generations of flowers. We may imagine that the ewe was not without her lamb, nor the linnet without her young; and that the flowering shrubs concealed among their buds nightingales, astonished at the warbling notes in which they expressed the tenderness of their first enjoyments.

If the world had not been at the same time young and old, the grand, the serious, the moral, would have been banished from the face of nature; for these are ideas essentially inherent in antique objects. Every scene would have lost its wonders. The rock in ruins would no longer have overhung the abyss with its pendent herbage. The forests, stripped of their accidents, would

1 See note K.

no longer have exhibited the pleasing irregularity of trees curved in every direction, and of trunks bending over the currents of rivers. The inspired thoughts, the venerable sounds, the magic voices, the sacred awe of the forests, would have been wanting, together with the darksome bowers which serve for their retreats; and the solitudes of earth and heaven would have remained bare and unattractive without those columns of oaks which join them together. We may well suppose, that the very day the ocean poured its first waves upon the shores, they dashed against rocks already worn, over strands covered with fragments of shell-fish, and around barren capes which protected the sinking coasts against the ravages of the waters.

Without this original antiquity, there would have been neither beauty nor magnificence in the work of the Almighty; and, what could not possibly be the case, nature, in a state of innocence, would have been less charming than she is in her present degenerate condition. A general infancy of plants, of animals, of elements, would have spread an air of dulness and languor throughout the world, and stripped it of all poetical inspiration. But God was not so unskilful a designer of the groves of Eden as infidels pretend. Man, the lord of the earth, was ushered into life with the maturity of thirty years, that the majesty of his being might accord with the antique grandeur of his new empire; and in like manner his partner, doubtless, shone in all the blooming graces of female beauty when she was formed from Adam, that she might be in unison with the flowers and the birds, with innocence and love, and with all the youthful part of the universe.

12*

BOOK V.

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD DEMONSTRATED BY THE WORKS OF NATURE.

CHAPTER I.

OBJECT OF THIS BOOK.

ONE of the principal doctrines of Christianity yet remains to be examined; that is, the state of rewards and punishments in another life. But we cannot enter upon this important subject without first speaking of the two pillars which support the edifice of all the religions in the world—the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul.

These topics are, moreover, suggested by the natural development of our subject; since it is only after having followed Faith here below that we can accompany her to those heavenly mansions to which she speeds her flight on leaving the earth. Adhering scrupulously to our plan, we shall banish all abstract ideas from our proofs of the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and shall employ only such arguments as may be derived from poetical and sentimental considerations, or, in other words, from the wonders of nature and the moral feelings. Plato and Cicero among the ancients, Clarke and Leibnitz among the moderns, have metaphysically, and almost mathematically, demonstrated the existence of a Supreme Being,' while the brightest geniuses in every age have admitted this consoling dogma. If it is rejected by certain sophists, God can exist just as well without their suffrage. Death alone, to which atheists would reduce all things, stands in need of defenders to vindicate its rights, since it has but little reality for man. Let us leave it, then, its deplorable partisans, who are not even agreed among themselves; for if they who believe in Providence concur in the principal points of their doctrine, they, on the contrary, who deny the Creator, are involved

See note L.

in everlasting disputes concerning the basis of their nothingness. They have before them an abyss. To fill it up, they want only the foundation-stone, but they are at a loss where to procure it. Such, moreover, is the essential character of error, that when this error is not our own it instantly shocks and disgusts us; hence the interminable quarrels among atheists.

CHAPTER II.

A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE UNIVERSE.

THERE is a God. The plants of the valley and the cedars of the mountain bless his name; the insect hums his praise; the elephant salutes him with the rising day; the bird glorifies him among the foliage; the lightning bespeaks his power, and the ocean declares his immensity. Man alone has said, "There is no God."

Has he then in adversity never raised his eyes toward heaven? has he in prosperity never cast them on the earth? Is Nature so far from him that he has not been able to contemplate its wonders; or does he consider them as the mere result of fortuitous causes? But how could chance have compelled crude and stubborn materials to arrange themselves in such exquisite order?

It might be asserted that man is the idea of God displayed, and the universe his imagination made manifest. They who have admitted the beauty of nature as a proof of a supreme intelligence, ought to have pointed out a truth which greatly enlarges the sphere of wonders. It is this: motion and rest, darkness and light, the seasons, the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, which give variety to the decorations of the world, are successive only in appearance, and permanent in reality. The scene that fades upon our view is painted in brilliant colors for another people; it is not the spectacle that is changed, but the spectator. Thus God has combined in his work absolute duration and progressive duration. The first is placed in time, the second in space; by means of the former, the beauties of the universe are one, infinite, and invariable; by means of the latter,