In these days more than ever morality has need of God. I am far from thinking ill of my country or of my age; I believe that they progress, that they have a future; but humanity is now-a-days exposed to a rude trial. On one side we have been witnesses to events of the most contradictory character: everything in the world of opinion has been questioned; everything in that of facts has been shaken, overthrown, raised up again, left tottering. { 79} Oppressed by this spectacle, what remains to men's minds more than feeble convictions--dim hopes? On the other side, in the midst of this universal shock of minds, science, and man's power over the surrounding world, have been prodigiously extended and confirmed; light has shone more and more brightly upon the material world, at the very moment when it was becoming paler and paler, declining more and more, in the moral world. We have plucked and are still plucking, more actively than ever, the fruit of the tree of knowledge; whereas the rules of human conduct, the laws of good and of evil, have become indistinct in our thought. Man remains divided between pride and doubt; intoxicated by his power, and disquieted by his weakness. Man's soul, how perturbed! human morality, how endangered!
Thus far I have treated the subject with far more reserve and indulgence for the opinions of others than I intended. I have limited myself to the bounds assigned to the question by the advocates of the theory of independent morality themselves. I have done nothing more than set in broad daylight the intimate, natural, and necessary connection of morals with religion; of man, moral being, with God, moral sovereign. I am only at the threshold of the truth. It is not merely to religion in general that morality pertains; it is not merely the idea of God of which it has need; it requires the constant presence of God, his unceasing action upon the human soul. It is from Christianity alone that morality can now derive the clearness, force, and security, indispensable for the exercise of its empire. And it is not for her practical utility, it is for her truth, her intrinsic value, that I hold Christianity to be necessary to the human soul, and to human societies. It is because she is in perfect harmony with man's moral nature; and because she has been already tested in man's history; that Christianity is the faithful expression of the moral law, and the legitimate master of the moral being.