the good and the evil found therein; not all the good nor all the evil, but all the good for which the multitude feel both a love and a need, and all the evil which society loves and which it can endure without being dissolved. It expresses, therefore, what we might call the average moral condition; but all that is between the two limits which we have indicated, they exalt, they exaggerate, they raise to the top of this species of mediocrity of general manners. All that the people love, wish, and feel, is thus consecrated; and, it is only right to observe, that the interests of the mass having dictated religion, and this interest being naturally more analogous to order and conservation than such and such individual interests, religions, considering the state of manners and culture, lean proportionally less upon the evil than the good, and are more beneficent and more moral than the absence of all religion would be. In a word, in this latter case, public manners would be delivered over to themselves, and would not have as moderator that ideal species which national religion presents to them, and which, although drawn from themselves, is notwithstanding better than themselves. But all degenerates and changes. Religion falls into hands whose interest it is to make it always more distinct from morality, or to form from it a partial morality, altogether arbitrary and conventional. But before this epoch, and nearer its origin, religion sustains the character which we have assigned to it, and may in a relative sense pass for a beneficent institution. All religion is social, while atheism is immensely anti-social. The first effect of any religion whatsoever is to oblige men towards each other: for it impossible, as we have seen, that they should not attribute some good qualities to their gods, and it is impossible that they should not believe themselves bound to imitate the good qualities of their gods. First types of their gods, they must afterwards become their imitators. The chain of virtue made fast in some measure to the Divinity, becomes thereby more tight and strong. If adulterous Venus authorise licentiousness of manners, hospitable Jupiter constrains to hospitality. Every duty which nature and interest dispose us to practise takes a character of holiness. Every vice which society could endure is held under a stronger curb. Montesquieu was aware of all this, and has more than once expressed it. We quote the following passage from his "Lettres Persanes:"--" In any existing religion observation of laws, love of men, piety towards parents, are always the first acts of religion. In any existing religion from the moment we suppose one we must also suppose that God loves men, seeing he has established a religion to render them happy; that if he loves men, we are assured of pleasing him by loving them also, that is to say, by exercising towards them all the duties of charity and humanity, and by not violating the laws under which they live."

These details would conduct us too far. Let us return to our principal idea. Human religion represents, without really going beyond them, the character, the moral condition, the physical constitution, and the intellectual habitudes of the people who speak it; yes, who speak it, for such a religion is a language. Religion, just as literature, but in a still stricter sense, is the expression of society; but this definition which, applied to a government would do it honour, does not do so to a religion. A government has done enough when it reproduces the better tendencies of the people whom it governs. Religion desires to be the mistress and the rule of these tendencies. Her dimensions, her height, are immutable, and she conceives but one way of harmonising the will of God and that of man, that is to bring the second under the sovereign power of the first. To sum up, human religions are literally the apotheosis of the will.

This is not the immediate cause of their progressive swooning and of their irrevocable decease. But it is right we should seek the principle of it. What is human is mortal. Doubtless also what is divine may become corrupt in human hands; but the divine germ resists and cannot die. Its immortality has its agonies; its light grows pale or becomes concentrated in a narrow circle; but its life has no gaps, and knows no end. To each failure of its light succeeds a more lively jet of the heavenly flame. Religious truth, although it may have been acquired and have a date, is sealed in the bottom of human nature, like the most elementary and instinctive beliefs. It belongs irrevocably to humanity, or, to speak more correctly, humanity belongs to it. It is not the same with religions which man has drawn from his own substance. Stars extinguished can never be re-lighted; and when sacerdotal hypocrisy and political devotion have once profaned them, when the illusion which sustains them under the name of faith is slowly dissipated, it is over for ever; the people for ever undeceived beg, under the name of religion, some new error. The sage exclaims with scorn, "What is truth?" and no longer knows of any choice between the doctrines of Epicurus and those of Zeno.

It is not within our design to speak of the former, but the others demand attentive consideration. Stoicism, that is the man who, to have a god, becomes God to himself. The Stoic, it is true, sometimes speaks of gods, but in a sense in which he must deceive himself. They are another name for his ideal, not the rule nor the primary reason of his will. The Stoic conceives of virtue under the notion of force, not under that of obedience. It does not present itself to him under the aspect of duty, but under that of dignity, either personal or collective. Doubtless in the distance the obscure sense of duty opens up as the source of this notion of virtue; but

the Stoic hides from himself this origin, and if in this religion of pride the word duty is still pronounced, it is duty towards oneself which is meant, and respect towards oneself is the motive and substance of all good. There are in this religion appearances of permanent hostility, of mortal war against the will, but only appearances, for obeying oneself is not obedience, and duties of which self is the first and last term are not duties. Here again the will itself is deified. We exalt it; indeed, we raise it up in some sort above itself that we may more conveniently adore it. We make it nearly inaccessible in order that we may fancy in the will some other and greater thing than the will. But all these involuntary artifices are useless, and behold what happens: either we lower the rule level to ourselves so that we may be able to reach it, or else we maintain it at its former height, and pride, severely warned of its impotency, sinks to despair. We avow that God would not have put the rule so high as we have put it; that God who made nature would not have slain nature; he had no need. The implicit sacrifice of the will is all he would have asked. Thence more tension, more unmeasured efforts; a tranquil and serene disposition founded on confidence in God and on the promise of his aid. And on great occasions the certainty that force will come, the humble appeal to the Giver of this force, in short, love, the first of all forces-love, whose elasticity has no known limits-love, which transforms all things, even to the making of suffering itself exquisite food-in a word, love which desires an object outside the soul, and which consequently is a stranger to the Stoic's principle of action, whose virtue is but a rotatory movement upon its own axis. Whatever may be the rational and moral worth of Stoicism it has its men, and in each of them its province and its time. It is less a system and a faith than the temperament of certain strong minds, and in these minds it does not take to all as does love. It cultivates only one part of the soul's field; it is ordinarily compelled to harden itself that it may be strong, and especially should unexpected moments occur it learns at length to try its strength. After having broken rocks it is itself broken against a grain of sand. It did not uniformly and equally cover the entire soul. Its brasen breastplate, its ces triplex (triple shield), always had a defect somewhere. It belied itself terribly. Perhaps it did not bend, but it broke; it never stooped, but it fell, and its falls are striking in proportion to its great height, for Stoicism is but the most spiritual form of pride, "and pride," saith eternal wisdom, "goeth before destruction."

We

may say all these things without scorn, without depreciation, and even pay deference to Stoicism. The believer who feels himself upborne can admire those who endeavour to bear up themselves, but he admires them with alarm, with compassion, for he knows their danger, and he knows, in every case, that the man so

tenderly taught to say: "Thy will be done," has not been invited to say so to himself. If there is a God, to him this invocation should be made, fully, absolutely, and without reserve.

All we have just said ought to indicate at once both the true nature of the problem proposed to humanity and the impossibility she feels of resolving it. Stoicism has perfected the proof. Here we see the will incessantly fleeing from itself, yet always present. It does not become man to say, I will not will, I will not do my will. That itself is an act of will, of sovereignty. The will is really deposed and subdued on one side, and on the other intrinsically good only when that of God's has been imposed upon it in an authentic manner. And the difficulty appears beyond all measure when we reflect that, without regarding it, no religion can be true, in which the will is not taken into account. It ought, on the contrary, to find therein its full satisfaction; for truth is inseparable from happiness, and happiness is the proper object of the will, its immutable pole; and man, by the very fact that he wills, wills happiness, and he cannot will anything else. Divest the will of this tendency, it is annihilated.

The task at first sight appears contradictory; but to say that it is contradictory is to affirm that there is no God, or that he has forsaken us. The conclusion is stern, and I am astonished that thought does not plunge into it. In fact, logic drives it towards this abyss; but the instinct of nature has furnished it with grappling irons which retain it upon the slope.

I have said that the task appears at first contradictory. A system which at once accomplishes our will and confounds it, a system in which it may be at the same time vanquished and victorious, how can we conceive it, how can we believe in its possibility? for it seems that if it be presented at first with the last of these marks, that is to say with the attribute of happiness, the mind will rush upon it by attraction, instead of yielding to it by submission, and if it offers at first only its harsh side, the mind, not by choice and deliberation, but irresistibly, and by virtue of its nature, will refuse to adopt it. Overwhelming fact! The will must find its triumph in its defeat and its defeat in its triumph, truth in happiness and happiness in truth, liberty in submission and submission in liberty. These things being premised, I study Christianity, but at its source, in the Gospel, and nowhere else.

Before entering upon a more particular examination I am struck in the Gospel with a general feature spread over its whole surface, and affecting its whole aspect. The Gospel is a discipline of the will, or to say the same thing in other words, the Gospel is essentially practical. I have little to detain me on this well-known character, and which I will develope in another essay. I add only one remark. Not only does the practical element superabound, but

all in the Gospel is subordinate thereto, all tends to the unfolding and the increasing of its force. It is important to remark that differently from other religions the Gospel admits speculation only as a fulcrum and auxiliary to practice, and only in proportion as the necessity of the practical demands it. Not only, as it is easy to convince one's self, is no doctrine inactive, but the exposition of the doctrine is suspended precisely, I dare to say abruptly, at the point wherein the practical, being satisfied, would have no advantage to reap from a further development. In other religions, doctrine, after having established practice, is continued beyond for its own satisfaction, and prolonged under the form of poesy or metaphysics, according to the taste and intellectual temperament of the people, or the age for which it has been conceived. There are, in this respect, superfluities in religions intellectually the poorest. Thought and imagination are unwilling to leave incomplete the circle that is commenced. The Christian religion proceeds otherwise. Solely pre-occupied with the restoration of the human will, she has uttered no doctrines or, to express ourselves better, no mysterious facts which have fallen under her knowledge, but such as were strictly necessary to her design. Far from fully satisfying human curiosity, she has sent it away fasting on many subjects, thus imposing upon it an exercise of submission before or after many others of the same species. This imperfection of the system, if it was a system, appears to me admirable in a religion, and communicates to ours an austere and holy character which belongs only to herself.

I pursue my examination, and I find that this religion, from the moment its foundations were laid by eternal love and wisdom, has prepared proofs of its truth, has written conformably thereto its title deeds, registered its vouchers, in a word, it alone, of all religions, has manifested the formal intention of being established in the understanding by means of criticism and science. I do not yet speak of the amount of force and evidence possessed by these proofs, too much neglected and slighted in our day even by Christians. I do not say that the most severe intellects have declared themselves satisfied therewith, that the greatest minds have rejoiced in the contemplation of these proofs, and that scientifically we should be very happy to be able to give to all the important facts of profane history, bases as certain as that of the details of Christian history; I only say that God has willed this religion should be a history, till the most abstract dogmas should become, within the limits of time and space, within the horizon of human life, external facts susceptible of being appreciated and verified by ordinary means. If this system does not absolutely hold aloof the will of the examiner, it is because in no species of investigation is the will entirely out of court. To pretend so in the case in question would be to make an impossible condition. But what was possible