all directions.  What if I too made trial of liberty!” Here lies the temptation.  When the soul aspires to become larger than conscience and more tolerant than duty, it is not far from a fall.  The honest woman will be tempted to repine at the liberty of the courtesan, and the man who is bound by his word will become capable of looking with envy on the liberty of the liar.  Then come terrible experiences which teach at length that the unbinding of the passions is the hardest of slaveries, and that, in the struggle between inclination and duty, it is liberty which oppresses and law which sets free.  Happy then is he who, feeling himself to be sinking in gloomy waters, cries to that God who is able to rescue him from the abyss, and strengthens his shaken conscience by replacing it on its solid foundation.  “God speaks and reigns.  All rebellion is transient in its nature; justice will at length be done.  Justice may be slow in the eyes of the creature of a day, seeing that He who shall dispense it has eternity at his disposal.”  But if God be not a refuge for us from men and from the world, if, when we see all that is passing around us, we cannot cast a look beyond and above the earth, men may lose their faith in duty.  And this faith is lost in fact.  If there are not dead consciences, there are consciences at any rate singularly sunk in sleep.  There are men for whom goodness, truth, justice, honor, seem to be a coinage of which they make use because it is current, but without for themselves attaching to it any value.  These pieces of money have no longer in their eyes any visible impression, because the conception of the almighty and just God is the impression which determines duty and guarantees its value.

When the necessary alliance of moral order with religious thought is denied, the reality of conscience is opposed to what are called theological hypotheses always open to discussion.  It is seen well enough that men may doubt of God, but it is supposed to be impossible to doubt of conscience.  This is an illusion of generous minds.  Those who would keep this illusion must not open the pages of the history of philosophy where the negation of duty does not occupy less space than the negation of God; they must not cast their eyes too much about them; they must also take care not to open the most widely circulated books, and the most fashionable periodicals:  otherwise, as we shall see, they would not be long in finding out that this morality which they would fain have superior to all attacks, is perhaps what of all things is most attacked now-a-days, and that that conscience which it is impossible to deny is in fact the object of denials the most audacious on the part of a few of the present favorites of fame.  The voice of duty is heard no doubt even when God does not come distinctly into mind; but when the questions are clearly put, if God is denied, conscience grows dim, and comes at last to be extinguished.  This obscuration does