When man casts a vague glance over the world, extinguishing the while the inner light of conscience; when he resigns himself to the things he contemplates without applying to them any standard, what first strikes his attention, as we have said before, is success.  And what next?  Scandal.  Nothing comes more into view than scandal.  In a vast city, thousands of young men gain their livelihood laboriously, and devote themselves to the good of their families:  no one speaks of them.  A libertine loses other men’s money at play, and blows out his brains:  all the city knows it.  Honest women live in retirement; the king’s mistresses form the subject of general conversation.  Crime and baseness hide themselves; but up to the limits of what the world calls infamy, evil delights in putting itself forward, because eclat and noise supply the means of deadening the conscience; while, as regards the grand instincts of charity, it has been well said that—­“the obscure acts of devotedness are the most magnificent.”  The poor and wretched shed tears in obscurity over benefits done secretly, while folly loves to display its glittering spangles, and shakes its bells in the public squares.  There is in each one of us more evil than we think; but there is in the world more good than is commonly known.  There are concealed virtues which only show themselves to the eye of the faith which looks for them, and of the attention which discovers them.  Bethink you, especially, how the laws of morality set at defiance appear again triumphant in the sorrows of repentance; those laws have their hour, and that hour is usually a silent one.  Let a poet of genius defile his works by the impure traces of a life spent in dissipation, and his brow shall shine in the sight of all with the twofold splendor of success and of scandal.  But if, stretched on a bed of pain, he renders a tardy but sincere homage to the law which he has violated, to the truth which he has ignored, his voice will often be confined to the sick chamber; his companions in debauchery and infidelity will mount guard perhaps around his dwelling, in order to prevent the public from learning that their friend is a defaulter.  The ball and the theatre make a noise and attract observation; but men turn their eyes from hospitals, those abodes in which, in the silence of sickness, or amidst the dull cries of pain, there germinate so many seeds of immortality.  Yes, Sirs, evil is more apparent than good.  The violations of the divine law have more eclat than penitence.  And what is the consequence?  The man who abandons himself to the spectacle of the world, and who takes that spectacle for the rule of his thoughts, will see the world under a false aspect, and, in his estimation, evil will have more advantage over good than it has in reality.  It will appear to him altogether dominant, and will thenceforward become his rule.  From the glorification of success, we passed to the glorification of fact; from the glorification of fact, we arrive