“Good God!” cried the rector, in a flush of sacred patriotism, “how can such enlightened minds as these,” and he motioned to Clousier, Roubaud, and Gerard, “how can they see evil so clearly and suggest remedies without first looking within and applying a remedy to themselves?  All of you, who represent the attacked classes, recognize the necessity of the passive obedience of the masses of the State, like that of soldiers during a war; you want the unity of power, and you desire that it shall never be brought into question.  What England has obtained by the development of her pride and self-interest (a part of her creed) cannot be obtained in France but through sentiments due to Catholicism, and none of you are Catholics!  Here am I, a priest, obliged to leave my own ground and argue with arguers.  How can you expect the masses to become religious and obedient when they see irreligion and want of discipline above them?  All peoples united by any faith whatever will inevitably get the better of peoples without any faith at all.  The law of public interest, which gives birth to patriotism, is destroyed by the law of private interest, which it sanctions, but which gives birth to selfishness.  There is nothing solid and durable but that which is natural; and the natural thing in human policy is the Family.  The family must be the point of departure for all institutions.  A universal effect proves a universal cause; and what you have just been setting forth as evident on all sides comes from the social principle itself; which is now without force because it has taken for its basis independence of thought and will, and such freedom is the parent of individualism.  To make happiness depend on the stability, intelligence, and capacity of all is not as wise as to make happiness depend on the stability and intelligence of institutions and the capacity of a single head.  It is easier to find wisdom in one man than in a whole nation.  Peoples have heart and no eyes; they feel, and see not.  Governments ought to see, and not determine anything through sentiment.  There is, therefore, an evident contradiction between the impulses of the multitude and the action of power whose function it is to direct and unify those impulses.  To meet with a great prince is certainly a rare chance (to use your term), but to trust to a whole assembly, even though it is composed of honest men only, is folly.  France is committing that folly at this moment.  Alas! you are just as much convinced of that as I am.  If all right-minded men, like yourselves, would only set an example around them, if all intelligent hands would raise, in the great republic of souls, the altars of the one Church which has set the interests of humanity before her, we might again behold in France the miracles our fathers did here.”

“But the difficulty is, monsieur,” said Gerard,—­“if I may speak to you with the freedom of the confessional,—­I look upon faith as a lie we tell to ourselves, on hope as a lie we tell about the future, and on charity as a trick for children to keep them good by the promise of sugar-plums.”