need of consolation; nothing can compensate them, nor pass itself off for it. In blunting the sting of grief time does indeed succeed better than pride, for time wears everything away; but it wears the soul as well as all the rest; the power of forgetting is only a weakness; life may be made less sad by it, but it is also less important, less noble; and even though we may have gradually forgotten all we have suffered, life has no less lost its prestige, for we never suffer with impunity; illusions are for ever dispelled; we know what the promises of life are worth, and whatever turn events may take, they will never more find us expecting an impossible happiness.

III. The Fall and Depravity of Man-Traces of the Image of God, Liberty, Different Degrees of Morality.

He who would found human life on God, will not be long in recognising-unless, indeed, he reduce God to a mere name-that the relations of man to his Maker are broken, there being no longer any proportion between what the very idea of God demands and what the human heart offers; between what God wills and what man wills. It is from this idea, or rather from this fact, that morality must spring, under pain, as I have said, of being false morality.

In the person of Adam, humanity committed a crime that each of its members repeats and confirms, so to speak, as far as in him lies This crime is

But no.

that of denying God. It is something still worse; it consists in saying, There is a God, but I will act as though there were none. Now this crime is fundamental, the parent of all crimes, and just in the same way that man had he not committed it would have committed no other, so having committed it he is capable of all others, for all spring from this

one source.

This doctrine of the fall of man, who is there that will receive it? No one, and yet every one. It irritates human pride, but it finds an echo in the human conscience, and conscience will finally prove stronger than pride. But the Cæsars and all their power? Their persecution like a hammer will only break the iron into shape on the anvil, the obstacle will become the means.

There are two tendencies in man; one which impels him towards truth, when truth does not injure him; another which draws him towards falsehood, when falsehood serves or flatters him. In detail human depravity is fully acknowledged, it is taken for granted even when not openly seen; but when it comes to re-uniting all these scattered instances into one gradual and comprehensive judgment, the censors of humanity become its most valiant champions, because they feel that blame that expressly aims at humanity necessarily includes and compromises themselves. It remains for them to make their opinions harmonize if they can.

Man can neither renounce God nor his sins; his

corruption chains him to this world; a mysterious impulse impels him towards the invisible world.

If in his general dispensations, treating peoples and humanity itself as a single man, God seems to take small account of individuals, to fuse them into one solidarity, and without caring for exact assessment, to demand merely a certain total of misery below which his justice cannot descend; still everything, down to the least sigh, is secretly noted in his divine memory; the tears of each one are, as Scripture says, put into separate bottles; no individual suffering exists without a reason, or transcends its appointed purpose, and of all these sorrows not one is lost or forgotten; order subsisting in the apparent disorder, and triumphing by means of it.

It is necessary, in order to man's existing as a moral being, that sin should be possible, and God consented to this; and since he acted freely his purpose has not been defeated. But in creating the glory and perils of liberty for man, it was essential that God should beforehand secure his own glory. He had to be eternally and invariably glorified, either in the obedience of the moral agent, or in the results of his disobedience. Order had still to be found intact, whether in the will or in the destinies of man. Voluntarily or involuntarily man had to bend to law. Thus, whether accomplished or avenged, law remained unimpaired, and man in spite of himself obeyed it in every particular. Hence, given the punishment of evil, God is not overcome by evil; but were evil to

be unpunished, God would be overcome thereby; and in such a conflict (of which the very idea is impious), Satan would be the conqueror of God!

In the early days of moral life, what an opinion is formed of the sacredness of duty, and, as it were, of the impossibility of infringing it ! What love of purity! what distaste to all that impairs it! what surprise at the sight of human weaknesses and perversities! And yet evil is already there; the ideal has already been departed from; our first steps have been falls; but in that season of thoughtlessness we count not so much the false steps taken, as those we resolve to avoid! Happy age! Festival of hope, how soon will the clouds gather over you!

One after the other passions present themselves; at first we resist, and then we compromise. In this unequal conflict, all that for the most part we can succeed in, is to simplify our defeat and shame, to yield to one single passion which takes the place of several incompatible passions; we are conquered, indeed, but we have but one conqueror, and we give credit to conscience for a result which is only necessary, and refuse to see that the passion to which we have submitted our life has inherited the might of all those other passions which have given up their claim, so that virtually we have been conquered by them all.

That which is so amazing in man is the empty place where so many great things ought to be; the sublime flights that end in falls, the infinite desires

that break themselves upon nothingness, the search of the truly good where it is not to be found; it is, in short, his character of a displaced, bewildered, lost being; the disproportion between means and end.

There is within us, in spite of ourselves, a witness to the truth, a timid and reluctant witness indeed, but one that a superior force draws from its retreat and compels at length to speak out.

A thousand thousand successive distractions making one long distraction of our whole life; our natural frivolity, or some pertinacious passion; these protect us from our conscience. We cross with a firm step by night a path that we should shudder at by day; for that path was only a narrow ridge between two abysses; as it was, our temerity itself was our safeguard, and we escaped from danger by not discerning it. But when we are constrained to behold it; when in the midst of our worldly preoccupations some cause or other snatches us from our illusions; when the vanity of all that we have desired, admired, loved, overwhelms us with its evidence; when the meaning of life escapes us, or when it appears formidable; when, re-descending into the recesses of our conscience, we find there nothing but sin; when our clouded reason makes us doubt of God's existence, or, left to its own natural lights, proclaims a God of vengeance; then in this immensity either void of God or full of his wrath, an agony seizes hold of our hearts; our mind becomes confused and bewildered; this vast universe is