the truth from the individual prepossessions of our own minds; good and evil, disengaged from the narrownesses of habit, will appear to us in their real and enduring nature.  Our taste will be formed, our conscience purified, our mind enlarged; we shall more and more become men, in the high and full acceptation of the term.  In order that the meeting together of the individual and of humanity may produce such fruits, God must dwell continually in the sanctuary of the conscience.  The inner light is kindled in the intercourse of the soul with its Creator; it is afterwards brightened and nurtured by the soul’s intercourse with the traces of God which humanity reveals.  But this light makes manifest within us, and without us, great darkness.  We have no right to abandon ourselves to every spectacle which strikes our view.  If, in presence of what is passing in the world, we are tempted to regard the prosperity of the wicked with cowardly envy; if we would fill up, for the satisfaction of our evil desires, the abyss which separates the holy from the impure, the inner voice lifts itself up and cries to us:  “Woe! woe to them who call evil good, and good evil."[142] God is our Master, even as He is our good and our hope.  The fact of the revolts of humanity can have no effect against His sovereign will.  Soldiers in the service of the Almighty, life is for us a conflict, and duty imposes on us a combat.

Such, Sirs, is the explanation of our destinies, an old, and, if you like, a vulgar one.  Let us now give our attention to the doctrine which deifies humanity, and follow out its consequences.  Humanity carries within its bosom the idea of truth, the love of beauty, the sense of good.  What does it need more?  These noble aspirations mark for it the end of its efforts.  What will be wanting to a life regulated by duty, enlightened by truth, ennobled by art?  What will be wanting to such a life?  Nothing, or everything.  Nothing, if the search after good, truth, and beauty leads to God.  Everything, if it be sought to carry it on without any reference to God, because from the moment that man desires to be the source of light to himself, the light will be changed into darkness, as we said at the beginning of this lecture.  Put God out of view, and good, beauty, and truth will disappear; while you will see produced the decline of art, the dissolution of thought in scepticism, the absolute negation of morality.  Let us consider with the attention it deserves, and in contemporary examples, this sad and curious spectacle.

I open a treatise by M. Taine.  The English historian Macaulay speaks of literary men who “have taken pains to strip vice of its odiousness, to render virtue ridiculous, to rank adultery among the elegant fashions and obligatory achievements of a man of taste.”  The honest Englishman takes the liberty to judge and to condemn men who have made so pernicious a use of their talents.  This pretension to make the conscience