to make ourselves the centre of the world.  To “live for self” is the motto of selfishness, and the watchword of unhappiness.  To live for God is the way to happiness.  To live to God, that is to say, over the ruins of our shattered selfishness, to enter into order, to take our place in the spiritual edifice of charity, and to share in the joy which God allots to all His children—­this is the end of our creation.  Once lifted to the height of this thought, we are able to understand the great struggle which rent the conscience of the ancients, because in their times the light of truth illumined only at intervals the clouds of error which covered the world.

There are in man two voices; the one leading him to happiness, the other calling him to holiness.  The first impulse of his nature is to start in eager pursuit of mere enjoyment; but ere long the second voice is heard, the voice of conscience, striving to arrest him in his course.  If man do not obey her call, conscience becomes his chastiser.  Hence arises a painful struggle of conflicting feelings, and the human mind is the subject of a strong temptation to pacify itself by silencing one of the two voices.  It is the history of antiquity.  Socrates, the wise Socrates, had indeed cried aloud:  Woe! woe to the man who separates the just from the useful; and had warned men that happiness may be found apart from what is right and good.  Cicero put into beautiful Latin the lessons of the Grecian sage; but the torn heart of man was not long in tearing the mantle of the philosopher.  From the thought, full and complete as it is, of Socrates issued two celebrated sects, one of which wished to establish man’s life on the basis of duty without reference to happiness; and the other on the basis of happiness without reference to duty.

The Stoics attached themselves to duty; but the need of happiness asserted itself in spite of them, and sought satisfaction in the gloomy pleasure of isolation, and in the savage joy of pride.  The sage of these philosophers sets himself free, not only from all the cares of earth, but from all the bonds of the heart, from all natural affection.  Finally, by a consequence, at once sad and odd, of the same doctrine, the highest point of self-possession is to prove that man is master of himself, by the emancipation of suicide and in the liberty of death.  The Stoic philosopher declares himself insensible to the ills of life; he denies that pain is an evil; and, on the other hand, he claims the right to kill himself in order to escape from the ills of existence!  So ended this famous school.  At the same period, the herd of Epicurus’ followers, giving themselves over to weak and shameful indulgences, were thus in fact laboring with all their might (this is Montesquieu’s opinion) to prepare that enormous corruption under which were to sink together the glory of Rome and the civilization of the ancient world.