Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/309

womb of a woman, and if he had not died upon a cross for all mankind, the meanest reptile which I trample under my feet would seem less despicable to me than man. The point of faith which most oppresses and weighs upon my reason is that of the nobility and dignity of the human species; a dignity and nobility which I wish to grasp and understand, and cannot. It is in vain that I turn from the frightful contemplation of the annals of crime, and reflect upon the more elevated and serene aspects of human life; it is in vain that I recall the remembrance of the vaunted virtues of those whom the world calls heroic, and of whose actions history is full, because my conscience tells me that all these heroic virtues resolve themselves into heroic vices, which in their turn are but a blind pride and an insensate ambition. Mankind appears to me like an immense multitude, prostrated at the feet of its heroes, who are its idols; while these heroes, like idols, are adoring themselves. Before I can believe in the nobleness of this stupid multitude I must receive the fact as a revelation from God. He who denies such a revelation cannot affirm his own greatness, for how can man know that he is noble unless God has revealed it to him? What surpasses my comprehension and astonishes me is, that any one should suppose that it requires a weaker faith to believe in the incomprehensible mystery of the dignity of human nature, than to believe in the adorable mystery of God made man in the womb of a virgin, by the power of the Holy Ghost. It only proves that man always remains subject to faith, and that when he seems to reject its teachings in order to follow his own reason, he only abandons that faith which is divinely mysterious in order to embrace what is mysteriously absurd.