CHAPTER VIII--FAITH, LAW

  A few words more.

  We blame the church when she is saturated with intrigues, we despise thespiritual which is harsh toward the temporal; but we everywhere honorthe thoughtful man.

  We salute the man who kneels.

  A faith; this is a necessity for man. Woe to him who believes nothing.

  One is not unoccupied because one is absorbed. There is visible laborand invisible labor.

  To contemplate is to labor, to think is to act.

  Folded arms toil, clasped hands work. A gaze fixed on heaven is a work.

  Thales remained motionless for four years. He founded philosophy.

  In our opinion, cenobites are not lazy men, and recluses are not idlers.

  To meditate on the Shadow is a serious thing.

  Without invalidating anything that we have just said, we believe thata perpetual memory of the tomb is proper for the living. On this point,the priest and the philosopher agree. _We must die_. The Abbé de laTrappe replies to Horace.

  To mingle with one's life a certain presence of the sepulchre,--this isthe law of the sage; and it is the law of the ascetic. In this respect,the ascetic and the sage converge. There is a material growth; weadmit it. There is a moral grandeur; we hold to that. Thoughtless andvivacious spirits say:--

  "What is the good of those motionless figures on the side of mystery?What purpose do they serve? What do they do?"

  Alas! In the presence of the darkness which environs us, and whichawaits us, in our ignorance of what the immense dispersion will make ofus, we reply: "There is probably no work more divine than that performedby these souls." And we add: "There is probably no work which is moreuseful."

  There certainly must be some who pray constantly for those who neverpray at all.

  In our opinion the whole question lies in the amount of thought that ismingled with prayer.

  Leibnitz praying is grand, Voltaire adoring is fine. _Deo erexitVoltaire_.

  We are for religion as against religions.

  We are of the number who believe in the wretchedness of orisons, and thesublimity of prayer.

  Moreover, at this minute which we are now traversing,--a minute whichwill not, fortunately, leave its impress on the nineteenth century,--atthis hour, when so many men have low brows and souls but littleelevated, among so many mortals whose morality consists in enjoyment,and who are busied with the brief and misshapen things of matter,whoever exiles himself seems worthy of veneration to us.

  The monastery is a renunciation. Sacrifice wrongly directed is stillsacrifice. To mistake a grave error for a duty has a grandeur of itsown.

  Taken by itself, and ideally, and in order to examine the truth on allsides until all aspects have been impartially exhausted, the monastery,the female convent in particular,--for in our century it is woman whosuffers the most, and in this exile of the cloister there is somethingof protestation,--the female convent has incontestably a certainmajesty.

  This cloistered existence which is so austere, so depressing, a few ofwhose features we have just traced, is not life, for it is not liberty;it is not the tomb, for it is not plenitude; it is the strange placewhence one beholds, as from the crest of a lofty mountain, on one sidethe abyss where we are, on the other, the abyss whither we shall go; itis the narrow and misty frontier separating two worlds, illuminatedand obscured by both at the same time, where the ray of life which hasbecome enfeebled is mingled with the vague ray of death; it is the halfobscurity of the tomb.

  We, who do not believe what these women believe, but who, like them,live by faith,--we have never been able to think without a sort oftender and religious terror, without a sort of pity, that is full ofenvy, of those devoted, trembling and trusting creatures, of thesehumble and august souls, who dare to dwell on the very brink of themystery, waiting between the world which is closed and heaven which isnot yet open, turned towards the light which one cannot see, possessingthe sole happiness of thinking that they know where it is, aspiringtowards the gulf, and the unknown, their eyes fixed motionless on thedarkness, kneeling, bewildered, stupefied, shuddering, half lifted, attimes, by the deep breaths of eternity.

  BOOK EIGHTH.--CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM