be a fact
without which we can have no knowledge of ourselves. For it is beyond doubt
that there is nothing which more shocks our reason than to say that the sin
of the first man has rendered guilty those who, being so removed from this
source, seem incapable of participation in it. This transmission does not
only seem to us impossible, it seems also very unjust. For what is more
contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than to damn eternally an
infant incapable of will, for a sin wherein he seems to have so little a
share that it was committed six thousand years before he was in existence?
Certainly nothing offends us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet without
this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to
ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this
abyss, so that man is more inconceivable without this mystery than this
mystery is inconceivable to man.

Whence it seems that God, willing to render the difficulty of our existence
unintelligible to ourselves, has concealed the knot so high, or, better
speaking, so low, that we are quite incapable of reaching it; so that it is
not by the proud exertions of our reason, but by the simple submissions of
reason, that we can truly know ourselves.

These foundations, solidly established on the inviolable authority of
religion, make us know that there are two truths of faith equally certain:
the one, that man, in the state of creation, or in that of grace, is raised
above all na