Happy they who escaped those times!  Happy they who passed over the abyss while looking up to Heaven.  There are such, doubtless, and they will pity us.

It is unfortunately true that there is in blasphemy a certain outlet which solaces the burdened heart.  When an atheist, drawing his watch, gave God a quarter of an hour in which to strike him dead, it is certain that it was a quarter of an hour of wrath and of atrocious joy.  It was the paroxysm of despair, a nameless appeal to all celestial powers; it was a poor, wretched creature squirming under the foot that was crushing him; it was a loud cry of pain.  Who knows?  In the eyes of Him who sees all things, it was perhaps a prayer.

Thus these youth found employment for their idle powers in a fondness for despair.  To scoff at glory, at religion, at love, at all the world, is a great consolation for those who do not know what to do; they mock at themselves, and in doing so prove the correctness of their view.  And then it is pleasant to believe one’s self unhappy when one is only idle and tired.  Debauchery, moreover, the first result of the principles of death, is a terrible millstone for grinding the energies.

The rich said:  “There is nothing real but riches, all else is a dream; let us enjoy and then let us die.”  Those of moderate fortune said:  “There is nothing real but oblivion, all else is a dream; let us forget and let us die.”  And the poor said:  “There is nothing real but unhappiness, all else is a dream; let us blaspheme and die.”

Is this too black?  Is it exaggerated?  What do you think of it?  Am I a misanthrope?  Allow me to make a reflection.

In reading the history of the fall of the Roman Empire, it is impossible to overlook the evil that the Christians, so admirable when in the desert, did to the State when they were in power.  “When I think,” said Montesquieu, “of the profound ignorance into which the Greek clergy plunged the laity, I am obliged to compare them to the Scythians of whom Herodotus speaks, who put out the eyes of their slaves in order that nothing might distract their attention from their work . . . .  No affair of State, no peace, no truce, no negotiations, no marriage could be transacted by any one but the clergy.  The evils of this system were beyond belief.”

Montesquieu might have added:  Christianity destroyed the emperors but it saved the people.  It opened to the barbarians the palaces of Constantinople, but it opened the doors of cottages to the ministering angels of Christ.  It had much to do with the great ones of earth.  And what is more interesting than the death-rattle of an empire corrupt to the very marrow of its bones, than the sombre galvanism under the influence of which the skeleton of tyranny danced upon the tombs of Heliogabalus and Caracalla?  How beautiful that mummy of Rome, embalmed in the perfumes of Nero and swathed in the shroud of Tiberius!  It had to do, my friends the politicians, with finding the poor and giving them life and peace; it had to do with allowing the worms and tumors to destroy the monuments of shame, while drawing from the ribs of this mummy a virgin as beautiful as the mother of the Redeemer, Hope, the friend of the oppressed.