When the cross became the “foolishness” of the cross, it took possession of the masses.  And in our own day, those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, like poets who should declaim against poetry, or women who should decry love.  Faith consists in the acceptance of the incomprehensible, and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated with its own sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances.

It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which stultifies the so-called liberal Christianity.  It is the realization of it which constitutes the strength of Catholicism.

Apparently, no positive religion can survive the supernatural element which is the reason for its existence.  Natural religion seems to be the tomb of all historic cults.  All concrete religions die eventually in the pure air of philosophy.  So long then as the life of nations is in need of religion as a motive and sanction of morality, as food for faith, hope, and charity, so long will the masses turn away from pure reason and naked truth, so long will they adore mystery, so long—­and rightly so—­will they rest in faith, the only region where the ideal presents itself to them in an attractive form.

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October 26th, 1870.—­If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes.  The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and vulgar crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.  When any society produces an increasing number of literary exquisites, of satirists, skeptics, and beaux esprits, some chemical disorganization of fabric may be inferred.  Take, for example, the century of Augustus and that of Louis XV.  Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who stand aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remoteness are of no service to society against any ill which may attack it.  Their cultivation consists in having got rid of feeling.  And thus they fall farther and farther away from true humanity, and approach nearer to the demoniacal nature.  What was it that Mephistopheles lacked?  Not intelligence, certainly, but goodness.

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December 11th, 1875.—­The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, the manner in which she understands duty and life, contain the fate of the community.  Her faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the animating principle that fashions the future of all belonging to her.  Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family.  She carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.

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