We must imitate the clock.  In full consciousness, through absolute submission, man should make himself the humble instrument of truth, and go through supreme servitude to supreme power.  When he does not do this, he is only an imperfect timepiece.  But when, bound by his word, chained to the truth that he serves, he has become its slave, and when, without hate, without preference, without human fear, without other desire than that of being faithful, he proclaims what is just, true, right, good, the rocks are less firm on their base than this man:  for he is a voice!

A voice is, if you like, a slight thing.  Stilled as soon as it awakened, it is heard only by a few and for a little while.  It is said that singers are greatly to be pitied, since posterity can not hear them.  Nothing of them remains.  And yet how many marvelous forces underlie this apparent fragility!  The thunder has its roar, the breeze has its tenderness, but their power is transitory; they are sounds and not voices.  A voice is a living sound, it is the vibrant echo of a soul.  It is doubtless that most fragile thing, a breath, but joined to that which is most durable, spirit.  And it is for this reason that, if the instant when it is born sees it die, centuries of centuries can not destroy its effect.  The truth which is in it confers immortality upon it, and when this voice escapes from a human breast, he who speaks, sings or weeps, feels indeed that eternity has concluded an alliance with him.  Peeling his fragile testimony confirmed by all that endures and can not die, he says with Christ:  “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away!”

The holy labors entrusted to the voice can never be counted.  Because of the very fact that it lives and that it contains a soul, it is the great awakener, the incomparable evoker.  When, obscure still and unknown, a thought distracts us and slumbers at the bottom of our being, a voice is all that is needed to make it emerge into the light.  With maternal tenderness, the voice borrows all the energies of incubation, to infuse with warmth, to fortify, the nascent germs of spiritual life.  In it lives and breaks forth what, in the evolving soul, tends feebly and furtively toward the flowering.  In short, the voice, speech, the tongue, condenses in a single focus incalculable quantities of rays.

Only think of the efforts that human thought must have made to reach that clearness that enables it to become speech.  Every word that you utter without giving it a thought is a monument toward which centuries and multitudes of minds have wrought.  A world is contained in it.  Poor words! one man decks himself out in them, another wraps himself up in them, but how few know of the warmth of life and love that has put them into the world that they may be forever the witnesses of the past for posterity!  No matter, for when they have been made sufficiently to resound like an inanimate cymbal, there comes an hour when