The consideration of the beautiful would give occasion to analogous observations.  The human mind becoming the object of our adoration, we must give up judging it in every particular, and suppress the rules of the ideal in art, as those of morals in the conduct, and truth in the intellect.  We must form a system of aesthetics which accepts all, and finds equally legitimate whatever affords recreation to the Humanity-God, in the great variety of its tastes.  Then high aspirations are extinguished, the beautiful gives place to the agreeable; and since the ugly and misshapen please a vicious taste, room must be made for the ugly in the Pantheon of beauty.  Art despoiled of its crown becomes the sad, and often the ignoble slave of the tastes and caprices of the public.  I do not insist further.  The pretension of the worshippers of humanity is to make their conscience wide enough to accept all, and to have their intellect broad enough to understand all.  They explain all, except these three small particulars—­the conscience, the heart, and the reason.  Goodness and truth avenge themselves in the end for the long contempt cast upon them; and the first punishment those suffer who accept all, in the hope of understanding all, is no longer to understand what constitutes the life of humanity.

Let us not, Sirs, be setting up altars to the human mind; for an adulterous incense stupefies it, and ends by destroying it.  Man is great, he is sublime, with immortal hope in his heart, and the divine aureole around his brow; but that he may preserve his greatness, let us leave him in his proper place.  Let us leave to him the struggles which make his glory, that condemnation of his own miseries which does him honor, the tears shed over his faults which are the most unexceptionable testimony to his dignity.  Let us leave him tears, repentance, conflict, and hope; but let us not deify him; for, no sooner shall he have said, “I am God,” than, deprived that instant of all his blessings, he shall find himself naked and spoiled.

Before they deified man, the pagans at least transfigured him by placing him in Olympus.  At this day, it is humanity as it is upon earth that is proposed to our adoration, humanity with its profound miseries and its fearful defilements.  They seek to throw a veil over the mad audacity of this attempt, by telling us of the progress which is to bring about, by little and little, the realization of our divinity.  But, alas! our history is long already, and no reasonable induction justifies the vague hopes of heated imaginations.  Great progress is being effected, but none which gives any promise that the profound needs of our nature can ever be satisfied in this life.  Charity has appeared on the earth; but there are still poor amongst us, and it seems that there always will be.  A breath of justice and humanity has penetrated social institutions; still politics have not become the domain of perfect truth and of absolute justice, and there seems small