I wish my children to believe in one God, not a God in the abstractness of pantheism, but in a Supreme Being with whom they have relationship, to whom they are accustomed to pray, and who at once awes and fortifies them.  This thought, you see, it is your belief as well as mine, is our strength in evil days, is our strength against what we call the world; the refuge; or better still, the strength of the weak.  It is this thought which gives women that stability which makes them resigned to a thousand little things in life, which makes them carry all their suffering to God, and ask of Him grace to fulfill their duty.  That religion, gentlemen, is the Christian religion, and it is that which establishes a relationship between God and man.  Christianity, in placing a sort of intermediary power between God and ourselves, renders God more accessible, and communication with Him easier.  That the Mother of Him who has made Himself the Saviour should receive the prayers of women, cannot affect, so far as I can see, purity, religious sanctity, or religious sentiment itself.  But here is where the change begins.  In order to accommodate a religion to all natures, all sorts of petty, miserable, paltry things are introduced.  The pomp of the ceremonies, instead of being a true pomp which lays hold on the soul, often degenerates into a commerce in relics, medals, of little saints and Virgins.  To what, gentlemen, do the minds of children, curious, ardent, and tender, lend themselves, especially the minds of young girls?  To all these enfeebled, attenuated, miserable images of the religious spirit.  They then take upon themselves little religious duties to put in practice, little devotions of tenderness, of love, and in the place of having in their soul the sentiment of God, the sentiment of duty, they abandon themselves to reveries, to little devices, to little devotions.  And then comes the poesy, and then comes, it is very necessary to say it, a thousand thoughts of charity, of tenderness, of mystic love, a thousand forms which deceive young girls and sensualize religion.  These poor children, naturally credulous and weak, take to all this poesy and reverie instead of attaching themselves to something more reasonable and severe.  Whence it happens that you have very many strong devotees among women who are not religious at all.  And when the wind blows them from the path where they ought to walk, in place of finding strength to combat it, they find only a kind of sensuality which bewilders them.

Ah! you have accused me of having confounded the religious element with sensualism, in the picture of modern society!  Accuse rather the society in the midst of which we live, but do not accuse the man who cries with Bossuet:  “Awake and be on thy guard against peril!” And say to the fathers of families:  Take care!  These are not good customs for your daughters; there is in all these mixtures of mysticism something which sensualises religion; say that, and