The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX fact; man is a religious animal. The word “religion” has then a necessary and absolute sense. Nature herself sanctifies the idea which this word represents, and exalts it to the height of a principle. The need of believing is closely linked with the need of loving; for that reason our souls need communion in the same hopes and in the same love. Isolated beliefs are only doubts: it is the bond of mutual confidence which, by creating faith, composes religion. Faith does not invent itself, does not impose itself, does not establish itself by any political agreement; like life, it manifests itself with a sort of fatality. The same power which directs the phenomena of nature, extends and limits the supernatural domain of faith, despite all human foresight. One does not imagine revelations; one undergoes them, and one believes in them. In vain does the spirit protest against the obscurities of dogma; it is subjugated by the attraction of these very obscurities, and often the least docile of reasoners would blush to accept the title of “irreligious man.” Religion holds a greater place among the realities of life than those who do without religion—or pretend to do without it—affect to believe. All ideas that raise man above the animal—moral love, devotion, honour—are sentiments essen- tially religious. The cult of the fatherland and of the family, fidelity to an oath and to memory, are things which humanity will never abjure without degrading itself utterly, and which could never exist without the belief in something greater than mortal life, with all its vicissitudes, its ignorance and its misery. If annihilation were the result of all our aspirations to 2