they revive under the breath of a true and living being, and they depart to spread life.  Then they fulfil their role as educators.  To educate is to explain a being to itself.  And this is the benign service that the voice performs.  It tells us what we think better than we can ourselves.  It unbinds the chains of the captive soul and permits it to take its flight.  Happy the child, happy the young man who meets with a voice to decipher him to himself!  This is what Christ did in those blest hours when He reunited the children of His people, as a bird reunites its brood under its wings!

What the voice does in detail, it continues to accomplish on the larger scale.  At certain moments societies seem a prey to a sort of chaos.  A number of contrary forces clash and perturb them, as they perturb and rend individual souls.  Men seek, feeling their way, a road that seems to elude them.  A crowd of spirits, by the very fact of their contemporaneity, feel themselves distracted and agitated all in the same way.  Confusedly and provoked by the same sufferings they elaborate the same ideal and formulate the same desires.  But they all wander along twilit paths on the side of the night where the light seems to be breaking through, without, however, being able to pierce the darkness.  These are the preliminary agonies of the great historical epochs.  Then let a being more powerful, more vital, an elect soul that has passed through this phase and conquered these shadows, become incarnate in a voice!  That is enough.  The personal word which expresses the soul of that epoch and responds to its needs, is found.  It sounds through the world like a new fiat lux!  Everywhere, in those who listen to it and feel secret affinities with it in themselves, it constitutes a magnificent revelation of light and life.  All these hearts vibrate in unison with one; and, gathering up all these scattered notes into a single harmony, he who expresses the sentiments of all, renders an account of the wonderful power of which he is the instrument.  No, it is no longer a man that speaks:  what sounds upon his lips, is the whole soul of a people, is a whole epoch, is a new world.

A voice is also that inimitable sigh, that pure sob which tells of grief because it issues from a suffering heart.  It is pity and compassion, it is the angel of God arriving among us on the caressing breath, a messenger of mercy, and pouring into the tortured depths of our poor heart its healing dew.  It is Jesus saying to Mary, and, in her, to all those whom grief afflicts:  “Why weepest thou?” It is David singing:  “Why art thou cast down, O my soul?” It is Isaiah crying:  “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people; speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem!”

A voice is, on the solitary path where our will strays, the faithful shepherd calling his sheep; it is every sign, even tho it be made by the hand of a child, which in the days of forgetfulness and unrestraint, suddenly wakes us and warns us that our feet skirt the abysses.