The Witness to universal truth appears before Rome as represented by a deputy of Caesar.  He is a fanatic, says the Roman; then he goes his way, and leaves Him to be put to death.  But ere long, a dull hoarse murmur of the nations, extending through all the length and breadth of the mighty empire, gives token that He who was dead is alive again, and is speaking to the general conscience.  Then Rome starts from her sleep; Rome; the politic tolerant Rome, sheds rivers of blood.  Her tolerance allowed men to believe everything, but on condition that they believed seriously in nothing.  Rome was directed by the sure instinct of despotism.  She did not fear the gods of the Pantheon, because she could always place above them the statue of the Emperor:  whereas what was now in question was, while leaving to Caesar the things which were Caesar’s, to place a Sovereign above the Emperor, and to raise a legislation above the legislation of the empire.  Therefore the Roman city determined to give a death-blow to Christianity,—­to the idea of universal truth, because if that idea gained entrance into the understanding, the cause of the liberty of souls was gained.  So it was that indifference became ferocious, and that doubt led back to fanaticism.

I have told you whence liberty does not come; but whence comes it?  Whence comes liberty?  Ask any scholar of the Lyceums of France; he will answer you, without hesitation:  Liberty comes from the French revolution!—­No doubt, whispers an older comrade in his ear; but do not forget the philosophy of the eighteenth century which developed the principles which the revolution put in practice.—­That is all very well, a Protestant will say; but let us consider the grand fact of the Reformation:  it is from the sixteenth century that liberty has its date.—­Well and good, adds an historian; but do you not know that the Germans were they who poured a generous and free blood into the impoverished blood of the men who had been fashioned by the slavery of the empire?  I contest nothing, and I am not sufficiently well-informed to pronounce with confidence upon the action of all these historic causes.  But this I venture to affirm,—­that if any one thinks to fix definitely the hour when liberty was born in history, he is mistaken:  for it has no other date than that of the human conscience, and I will say with M. Lamartine: 

     Give me the freedom which that hour had birth,
     With the free soul, when first in conscious worth
     The just man braved the stronger![31]

Liberty had birth the first time that, urged by his fellow men to acts which wounded his conscience, a man, relying upon God, felt himself stronger than the world.  That Socrates had not studied, I fancy, in the school of the Encyclopedists, and was no German either, that I know of, who said to the judges of Athens, with death in prospect:  “It is better to obey God than men.”  And when those words were repeated by the Apostles of the universal truth,