The Heavenly Father | Page 2

which many who affect to guide the religious
opinions of our youth would teach them to despise as the heritage of
narrow minds, and to cast away as incompatible with the highest
intellectual cultivation. Such doctrines are those of the fall and ruin of
man by nature, the necessity for Divine agency in his recovery, his
need of propitiation by the sacrifice of the God-Man--l'Homme-Dieu.
These truths are explicitly stated by the Author in his former course of
lectures--La Vie Eternelle,[1] in which, while discoursing eloquently on
that eternal life which is the portion of the righteous, he does not shrink
from declaring his belief in its awful counterpart, the eternal
condemnation of the wicked.
"The offence of the Cross" has not "ceased," and many finding that
these are the opinions of this Author, will perhaps lay down his book as
unworthy of their attention: yet the editor, biographer, and expositor of
the great French thinker, Maine de Biran, will not need introduction to
the intellectual magnates of our own or of any country. The translator
will be thankful, if some of those,--the youth more especially,--of his

own country, who have been dazzled by the glare of false science, shall
find in this work a help to the reassuring of their faith, while they learn
in a fresh example that there are men quite competent to deal with the
profoundest problems which can exercise our thoughts, who at the
same time have come to a conviction,--compatible as they believe with
principles of the clearest reason,--of the truth of those very doctrines
which form the substance of evangelical Christianity. In saying this, the
translator is far from claiming the Author as belonging to the same
school of theology with himself: but differing with him on some
important points, he has yet believed that this volume is calculated to
be of much use in the present condition of religious thought in England,
and in this hope and prayer he commends it to the blessing of Him,
whose being and attributes, as our God and Father in Jesus Christ, are
therein asserted and defended.
GENEVA, November, 1865.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] A translation of this work, by an English lady, has been published
by Mr. Dalton, 28, Cockspur street.

CONTENTS.
LECTURE I. PAGE OUR IDEA OF GOD 1
LECTURE II.
LIFE WITHOUT GOD 43
PART I.--THE INDIVIDUAL 45

PART II.--SOCIETY 72

LECTURE III.
THE REVIVAL OF ATHEISM 117
LECTURE IV.
NATURE 175
LECTURE V.
HUMANITY 245
LECTURE VI.
THE CREATOR 297
LECTURE VII.
THE FATHER 340

LECTURE I.
OUR IDEA OF GOD.
(At Geneva, 17th Nov. 1863.--At Lausanne, 11th Jan. 1864.)
GENTLEMEN,
Some five-and-twenty or thirty years ago, a German writer published a
piece of verse which began in this way: "Our hearts are oppressed with
the emotions of a pious sadness, at the thought of the ancient Jehovah
who is preparing to die." The verses were a dirge upon the death of the
living God; and the author, like a well educated son of the nineteenth
century, bestowed a few poetic tears upon the obsequies of the Eternal.
I was young when these strange words met my eyes, and they produced
in me a kind of painful bewilderment, which has, I think, for ever
engraven them in my memory. Since then, I have had occasion to learn

by many tokens that this fact was not at all an exceptional one, but that
men of influence, famous schools, important tendencies of the modern
mind, are agreed in proclaiming that the time of religion is over, of
religion in all its forms, of religion in the largest sense of the word.
Beneath the social disturbances of the day, beneath the discussions of
science, beneath the anxiety of some and the sadness of others, beneath
the ironical and more or less insulting joy of a few, we read at the
foundation of many intellectual manifestations of our time these
gloomy words: "Henceforth no more God for humanity!" What may
well send a shudder of fright through society--more than threatening
war, more than possible revolution, more than the plots which may be
hatching in the dark against the security of persons or of property--is,
the number, the importance, and the extent of the efforts which are
making in our days to extinguish in men's souls their faith in the living
God.
This fear, Gentlemen, I should wish to communicate to you, but I
should wish also to confine it within its just limits. Religion (I take this
term in its most general acceptation) is not, as many say that it is, either
dead or dying. I want no other proof of this than the pains which so
many people are taking to kill it. It is often those who say that it is dead,
or falling rapidly into