of conscientious opinion there might be in the world. This is the first duty to be fulfilled, the first advantage to be pursued. This would be the first victory of truth. Where candour and clearness are, there

truth is not far off.

Man is not made for indifference; doubtless he can feel neither hate nor love for things that are completely foreign to him, and towards which no circumstance directs his attention; but all that touches him nearly, all that may have an influence upon his fate, or even all that he sees excite general interest, becomes to him an object of some feeling or other.

Indifferentism is the negation of the principles of all morality. Truth and virtue, which men seek to divide, are the same thing in principle. Virtue, which is but the realization of our real relations to the Author of our being, necessarily supposes the knowledge of those relations. To accomplish the final end of his being, man must know it, and to do this, he must know God.

In every indifferent person, there is the material of an enemy, a material which only waits an opportunity to unfold itself.

There is in the heart of the indifferent man, in spite of his impartiality and his pretended respect for sincere convictions, a fund of vexation, ready to vent itself on the man who comes, in the name of an idea, to trouble the repose of the world, or to give a different course to its agitations.

There is no principle which can hold out against the want of affection and sympathy; the indifferent man, however favourable he may theoretically be to liberty of opinion, soon tires of protecting people who, according to him, would have done just as well, both for themselves and the world in general, had they remained quiet. Let them cut out their own way; let them become strong, and they will be defended. To go to the help of the conqueror is the universal wisdom. Nay, more, if the persecuted opinion becomes dominant, and the basis of the national religion, the indifferent man will belong to it in his own way, by participating in all the external practices of a faith that he does not share,— the love of quiet composing all his religion. Hypocrisy forms part of his system; to defend his right of believing nothing, would be to believe something, would be to render a homage to truth, and he has said, "What is truth?" Hypocrisy, then, is the natural complement of indifference, only it is decked with a better name; it prefers to pass as condescension, accommodation, sacrifice to the interests of peace; it urges, after the example of a philosopher, "that the world has nothing to do with our thoughts, but that appearances are due to the public."

Indifferentism is already a degeneration of the soul; and no doubt it must be by fall after fall, by a long series of degradations, that the human soul has been able to reach a state in which, very far from loving, very far even from fearing God, it has come to care

no longer about him. Indifference in an individual soul is not disease, it is a living death; indifference in a people is a national death.

Indifference to truth is indifference to God himself; for on one side it refuses to know him, on the other it excuses itself from loving what he loves, defending what he defends, and choosing what he prefers.

Hate, horrible as it sounds, even hate is better than indifference. There is a homage in hatred. It is an avowal that one has at least felt those truths in the gospel that wound and condemn. It is a strange but an authentic manner of revealing our reception of the message of peace; it is a beginning of intelligence wliich may be succeeded by fuller intelligence. Hatred has often been the prelude to love, the soul having passed victoriously through a solemn crisis. But indifference, which denotes the greatest possible distance between man and God, is the last of outrages.

A Church may die of languor in full orthodoxy; and there is a neology which threatens it less than a certain dogmatic precision. The worst of all heresies is indifference.

The indifferent man who has risen into enmity can never fall back into indifference. There is only one change now for him, that is, to love.

2. Different Proofs of Christianity; Authority (External and Internal, Intellect and Conscience); Evidence; Miracles; Aspirations towards Christianity.

The true way in religious knowledge lies not from God to man, but from man to God; before he knows himself, man cannot know God.

Long or short, direct or circuitous, every road is right which leads to the foot of the cross.

Every truth leads to truth. No doubt, Christ is the centre of all truth; but to show that Christ is the centre, we must speak of the circle and the most remote circumferences.

Considered with respect to different modes of believing, humanity divides itself into two camps. In fact, and, as it were, of course, it is authority that prevails. Many more things are believed and practised on the faith of others than on the faith of proofs.

Conventional authority is departing; we must fall back on that other, which can be wielded by every interpreter of truth convinced of that truth.

If our personal beliefs be founded on examination and experience, we should be wrong to try to give them weight by authority; for to remove them from the ordeal of examination and the combat of discussion, would give room for supposing that our conviction was not as well established as we would

have it believed to be, and by a chimerical and contradictory respect for truth we should very seriously compromise its interests.

The property of authority is not to be matter of choice, not to depend either upon taste or temperament, but on reason and conscience.

There is no well founded and constantly useful authority but the one we respect. It is more beautiful, more rare, and more important to be believed, than to be obeyed.

The true power in this world is not authority, but influence. Influence is the queen of the world. Proud and refined minds know this well; they are not greedy of power, but of influence; they reckon that influence, and influence alone, can give them power; and even power, to consolidate and extend itself, needs to take and preserve the form of influence. The power which only aims at being power, and disdains influence, has but a feeble and precarious existence.

Christianity was never so strong as when, like its Author, it had not where to lay its head. Quietly, insensibly, it changed ideas, and through ideas all besides. It was still nothing in the state, when it was already everything in society; it had been obeyed in a thousand things, when it was believed to have hardly been listened to; it still seemed a slave, when in point of fact, it was already master. It was Æsop in the house of Xanthus.

The peculiarity of the theocratic error which ruled