it discerns the Divine image deposited in every human soul.  But do not mistake here:  we cannot love, with a love natural and direct, the rags of squalid poverty, the brands of vice, the languors and sores of sickness; but let God manifest Himself, and our eyes are opened.  The beauty of souls breaks forth to our view beneath the wasting of the haggard frame, and from under the filth of vice.  We love those immortal creatures fallen and degraded; a sacred desire possesses us to restore them to their true destination.  Has an artist discovered in a mass of rubbish, under vulgar appearances, a product of the marvellous chisel of the Greeks?  He sets himself, with a zeal full of respect, to free the noble statue from the impurities which defile it.  Every soul of man is the work of art Divine, and every charitable heart is an artist who desires to labor at its restoration.  Henceforward we can understand that love of suffering and of poverty, that passion for the galleys and the hospital, which have at times thrown Christians into extravagances which our age has no reason to dread.  God in the poor man, God in the sick man, God in the vicious man and the criminal; this, I repeat, is the grand secret of charity.  Charity passes from the heart of men and from individual practice into social customs and institutions.  Charity it is which, by degrees, takes from law its needless rigors, and from justice its useless tortures; which substitutes the prison in which it is sought to reform the guilty for the galley, which completes the corruption of the criminal; it is charity that opens public asylums for all forms of suffering; and that will realize, up to the limits of what is possible, all the hopes of philanthropy.  If God ceases to be present to the mind and conscience of men, justice and love lose their power.  Without the powerful action of justice and of love, society would descend again, by the ways of corruption, towards the struggles of barbarism.  Observe, study well, all that is going on around us.  Does our civilization appear to you sufficiently solid to give you the idea that it can henceforth dispense with the foundations on which it has reposed hitherto?

The sentiments of justice and of benevolence which form the double basis of the progress of society, suppose a more general sentiment which is their common support—­the sentiment of humanity.  The idea that man has a value in himself, that he is, in virtue of his quality as man, independently of the places which he inhabits and of the position which he occupies in the world, an object of justice and of love;—­this idea includes in itself all the moral part of civilization.  Social progress is only the recognition, ever more and more explicit, of the value of one soul, of the rights of one conscience.  Now, the idea of humanity has the closest possible connection with the knowledge of God, considered as the Father of the human race.  Ancient wisdom, superior to the worship of idols, had gained a glimpse of the fact that the philosopher is a citizen of the universe; and that famous line of Terence:  “I am a man, and I reckon nothing human foreign to me,” excited, it is said, the applause of the Roman spectators.  But these were mere gleams, extinguished soon by the general current of thought.  It was the pale dawn of the idea of humanity.  Whence came the day?