Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/184
must also receive as plausible the hypothesis of an infinite being ... against which I must struggle even unto death; for this is my destiny, even as it is that of Israel to contend against Jehovah."
Nothing here remains of the previously given definition of God, except the negation of providence, and even this negation disappears with this contradictory affirmation: "We are thus conducted by chance, when guided by Providence, which never warns save when it strikes us."[1]
In the foregoing paragraphs, we perceive that Mr. Proudhon goes through all the gradations of rationalistic contradictions, and is successively pantheist, humanist, and manicheist. He professes to believe in an impersonal God and then declares as monstrous and absurd the idea of a God, unless the God conceived is personal; and finally, he affirms and denies Providence at the same time. Nor is this all. We have seen, in one of the preceding chapters, in what manner the Manichean theory of a rivalry between God and man makes man, according to the system of Proudhon, the representative of good, and God the representative of evil. We shall now see in what way, according to Mr. Proudhon, this same system falls to the ground.
In the second chapter of the work already cited, he makes use of the following language: "Either nature or the Deity has mistrusted our hearts and has doubted the love of man for his fellow-creatures. All the discoveries of science respecting the designs of Providence in social progress, and I say it with shame for the human conscience, (but our hypocrisy must know it,)
- ↑ System of Contradictions, chap. iii.