against the commonest decency. We
should have to descend into blood and mire, continuing to declare the
while that everything is right. I pause therefore, and leave the rest to
your imaginations. Open the most dismal pages of history. Choose out the
acts which inspire the most vivid horror and disgust, the blackest
examples of ingratitude, the meanest instances of cowardice, the cases
of most refined cruelty, and the most hideous debaucheries: thence let
your thoughts pass to facts which bedew the eyelid with the tear of
tenderest emotion, to the cases of most heroic self-devotion, to
sacrifices the most humble in their greatness; and then try to apply the
rule of the modern savant, and to say that all this is equally right and
good, and that whatever is has the right to be. Open the book of your
own heart. Think of one of those base temptations which assault the best
of us, one of those thoughts which raise a blush in solitude; then think
of the best, the purest, the most disinterested of the feelings which
have ever been given to your soul; and try again to apply the rule of
the modern savant, and to affirm that all this is equally good, and that
all that is has the right to be. I know very well that in general these
doctrines are applied to things looked at in the mass, and to the
far-off past of history; but this is a poor subterfuge for the defenders
of these monstrous theses. Things viewed in the mass are only the
assemblage of things viewed in detail. If the distinction of good and
evil do not exist for general facts, how should it exist for particular
facts? And how can we apply to the past a rule which we refuse to apply
to the present, seeing that the present is nothing else than the past
of the future, and that the facts of our own time are matter for history
to our posterity? These, I repeat, are but vain subterfuges. If humanity
is always adorable, it is so in the faults of the meanest of men as in
the splendid sins of the magnates of the earth; it is so to-day as it
was thirty centuries ago; the god in growing old does not cease to be
the same.

When the mind is engaged in these pernicious ways, the spring of the
moral life is broken, and the practical consequence is not long in
appearing. The philosophers of success, having become the philosophers
of the _fait accompli_, accept all and endure all; but in another sense
than that in which charity accepts all, that it may transform all by the
power of love.