"[329]
And she concludes:--
"The day will come when we shall no longer talk about God idly, nay,
when we shall talk about him as little as possible. We shall cease to
set him forth dogmatically, to dispute about his nature. We shall put
compulsion on no one to pray to him, we shall leave the whole business
of worship within the sanctuary of each man's conscience. And this will
happen when we are really religious."[330]
Meanwhile the sense of this spirit or presence which animates us, the
sense of the divine, is our stronghold and our consolation. A man may
say of it: "It comes not by my desert, but the atom of divine sense
given to me nothing can rob me of." _Divine sense_,--the phrase is a
vague one; but it stands to Madame Sand for that to which are to be
referred "all the best thoughts and the best actions of life, suffering
endured, duty achieved, whatever purifies our existence, whatever
vivifies our love."
Madame Sand is a Frenchwoman, and her religion is therefore, as we might
expect, with peculiar fervency social.
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