Duty and God, morality and religion, are inseparable principles; all the efforts of a false philosophy have never succeeded, and never will succeed, in disjoining them.  Men will never be prevented from believing that God is holy, and that His will is binding upon them:  they will never be prevented from believing that holiness is divine, and that the will of God reveals itself in the admonitions of the conscience.  Therefore the progress of religion and the progress of morality are closely united; the morality of a people depends above all on the idea which it forms to itself of God.  The conscience, in fact, at the same time that it is real and permanent in its bases, is variable in the degrees of its light.  It is enlightened or obscured, according as the man’s religious conceptions are pure or corrupted; and, on the other hand, when the religious worship is degraded beyond a certain limit by error and the passions, the conscience protests, and by its protest purifies the religious conceptions.  It has often been said, that in the onward march of humanity, morality is separated from faith, and comes at last to rest upon its own bases.  It is a notion of the eighteenth century, which, although its root has been cut, is still throwing out shoots in our time.  The attempt has been made to support this theory by the great name of Socrates.  It is affirmed that the sage of Athens, breaking the bond which connects the earth with heaven, separated duty from its primitive source.  Listen:  Placed in the alternative of either renouncing his mission or dying, it is thus that Socrates addresses his judges:  “Athenians, I honor you and I love you, but I will obey the Deity rather than you.  My whole occupation is to persuade you, young and old, that before the care of the body and of riches, before every other care, is that of the soul and of its improvement.  Know that this it is which the Deity prescribes to me, and I am persuaded that there can be nothing more advantageous to the republic than my zeal to fulfil the behest of the Deity."[24] Does the man who speaks in this way appear to you to have wished to break the link which connects morality with religion?  He separates himself from the established religion; he pursues with his biting raillery shameful objects of worship; his conscience protests.  But, while it protests, it attaches itself immediately to a higher and holier idea of that God, of whose perfections the sage of Athens had succeeded in obtaining a glimpse.

God then is the explanation of the conscience:  He is moreover its support.  It has need in sooth to be supported,—­that voice which speaks within us; because it is unceasingly contradicted and denied.  The spectacle which the world presents is not an edifying one; the facts which are taking place on the earth are not all of a nature to maintain the steadfastness of the moral feeling.  Let us imagine an example, a striking example, such as it would be easy to find realized on a small scale in