of supreme liberty.  Allow me to introduce into this discussion some eloquent words, uttered in the year 1848, in the midst of the revolutionary agitations of Paris.  The problem which we are debating was treated then, in the presence of an excited crowd, by Pere Lacordaire.[181] He is entering upon this question:  What can have been the motive of the creation?  And he distinguishes between love in the Platonic sense of it, for which he retains the name of love, and the love which gives itself, which he designates by the term—­goodness.  “Was it then love,” he asks, “which impelled the Divine Will, and said to it unceasingly:  Go and create?  Is it love which we must thus regard as our first father?  But, alas! love itself has a cause in the beauty of its object; and what beauty could that dead and icy shade possess before God, which preceded the universe, and to which we cannot give a name without betraying the truth?...  There remained something, Sirs, be very sure, more generous than self-interest, more elevated than duty, more powerful than love.  Search your own hearts, and if you find it hard to understand me, if your own endowments are unknown to you, listen to Bossuet speaking of you:—­’When God,’ says he, ’made the heart of man, the first thing He planted there was goodness:’  goodness; that is to say, that virtue which does not consult self-interest, which does not wait for the commands of duty, which needs not to be solicited by the attraction of the beautiful, but which stoops towards its object all the more, as it is poorer, more miserable, more abandoned, more worthy of contempt!  It is true, Sirs, it is true:  man possesses that adorable faculty.  It is not genius, nor glory, nor love, which measures the elevation of his soul,—­it is goodness.  This it is which gives to the human countenance its principal and most powerful charm; this it is which draws us together; this it is which brings into communication the good and the evil, and which is everywhere, from heaven to earth, the great mediating principle.  See, at the foot of the Alps, yon miserable cretin, which, eyeless, smileless, tearless, is not even conscious of its own degradation, and which looks like an effort of nature to insult itself in the dishonor of the greatest of its own productions:  but beware how you imagine that that wretched object has not found the road to any heart, or that his debasement has deprived him of the love of all the world.  No:  he is beloved; he has a mother, he has brothers and sisters; he has a place at the cottage-hearth; he has the best place and the most sacred of all, just because of all he may seem to have the least claim to any.  The bosom which nursed him supports him still, and the superstition of love never speaks of him but as of a blessing sent of God.  Such is man!

“But can I say, Such is man, without saying also, Such is God!  From whom would man derive goodness, if God were not the primordial Ocean of goodness, and if, when He formed our heart, He had not first of all poured into it a drop from His own?  Yes, God is good; yes, goodness is the attribute which includes in it all the rest; and it is not without reason that antiquity engraved on the pediment of its temples that famous inscription, in which goodness preceded greatness.”