tness, are those Gothic edifices reared for the poor and
the orphan, those far nobler monuments of the piety of Christian
princes and the power of Christian faith. The rudeness of their
architecture may wound the delicacy of our taste, but they will be ever
beloved by feeling hearts. 'Let others admire in the retreat prepared
for those who have sacrificed in battle their lives or their health for
the State, all the gathered riches of the arts, displaying in the eyes
of all the nations the magnificence of Lewis the Fourteenth, and
carrying our renown to the level of that of Greece and Rome. What I will
admire is such a use of those arts; the sublime glory of serving the
weal of men raises them higher than they had ever been at Rome or at
Athens.'

[Footnote 33: See Martin's _Hist. de la France_, iii. 422. Or Morison's
_Life of Saint Bernard_, bk. iii. ch. vi.]

2. Let us turn from the action of the Christian faith in modifying the
passions of the individual, to its influence upon societies of men. How
has Christianity ameliorated the great art of government, with reference
to the two characteristic aims of that art, the happiness of
communities, and their stability? 'Nature has given all men the right of
being happy,' but the old lawgivers abandoned nature's wise economy, by
which she uses the desires and interests of individuals to fulfil her
general plans and ensure the common weal. Men like Lycurgus destroyed
all idea of property, violated the laws of modesty, and annihilated the
tenderest ties of blood. A false and mischievous spirit of system
seduced them away from the true method, the feeling after
experience.[34] A general injustice reigned in the laws of all nations;
among all of them what was called the public good was confined to a
small number of men. Love of country was less the love of
fellow-citizens than a common hatred towards strangers. Hence the
barbarities practised by the ancients upon their slaves, hence that
custom of slavery once spread over the whole earth, those horrible
cruelties in the wars of the Greeks and the Romans, that barbarous
inequality between the two sexes which still reigns in the East; hence
the tyranny of the great towards the common people in hereditary
aristocracies, the profound degradation of subject peoples. In short,
everywhere the stronger have made the laws and have crushed the weak;
and if they have sometimes consulted the interests of a given society,
they have always