It is love, we are led to understand, which teaches Julie to believe in God. "There is a God," she said; "there is an infinite love, of which ours is only one drop, a drop which falls back into the divine ocean from which we have drawn it. This ocean is God. At this moment I feel, I see, I understand Him by means of my happiness.... Yes," she continued, with even more ardour in her glance and voice, "let the perishable names by which we have called the attraction which draws us to one another be forgotten. There is only one name which expresses it--that is God. He has revealed Himself to me in your eyes. God, God, God!" she called, as if teaching herself a new language; "God is you; God is what I am to you. We are God."
All this impresses us as having more purpose in it than truth to nature. Not such is the eloquence of happy love.
Had Julie's husband, the old philosopher, happened to overhear these effusions, he could have told the lovers that such doctrines and such emotions, far from being Christian, are pure pantheism. We cannot doubt that he would have done so with perfect calmness, for he does not feel the slightest jealousy. He knows that Julie and Raphael write to each other every day, and he also knows the ethereal nature of their love. When Raphael comes to Paris, all he says to him is: "Remember that you have not one friend but two in this house. Julie could not make a better choice of a brother, nor I of a son." It is comical that Raphael, for his part, should feel no disquietude concerning the old man, unless we reckon as such a feeling of regret that he is drawing near to the grave without any belief in immortality; and it is characteristic of the period that even the aged scientist is in the end converted.
The old man has, in a manner, no ground for jealousy. Lamartine has very naïvely introduced into his novel a piece of realism, which, while it explains many things, weakens the edifying effect which he aimed at producing. Julie's reply to Raphael's first confession of love decides once and for all the nature of their mutual relations. She says: "I believe only in an invisible God, who has imprinted His image upon nature, His law upon our instincts, and His morality upon our reason. Reason, feeling, and conscience are the only revelations I acknowledge. None of these three oracles of my life would forbid me to belong to you; my whole soul would prostrate itself at your feet, if this could purchase your happiness. But are we not more certain of the spirituality and eternity of our love when it remains on the heights of pure thought, in regions inaccessible to change and death, than when it degrades and profanes itself by descending to the base regions of sensuality?"