ort instances when the night of our egotism is
illumined by a ray from God?"

No, the miracle is permanent. You see it, you have it before your
eyes, but you turn away your head. Uncommon, perhaps, in the lover, it
is everywhere visible in the mother. Mortal, you seek God in heaven
and under the earth, but he is in your own domestic circle.

Man, woman, and child, the unity of the three persons, and their mutual
mediation--this is the mystery of mysteries. The divine idea of
Christianity is thus to have put the family upon the altar. It placed
it there, and there it has left it, for fifteen hundred years. My poor
monk, in the middle ages, contemplated it there in vain. He could
never understand the mother as initiation. He exhausted his energies
by taking the sterile side; he pursued the Virgin, and left us Our Lady.

Man of modern times! thou shalt do what he could not. This shall be
thy work. Mayest thou only, in the height of thy abstract genius, not
disdain women and children, who will teach thee life! Instruct them in
science and the world, and they will speak to thee of God.

Let the family-hearth become firm and strong, then the tottering
edifice of religion, political religion, will quietly settle down. Let
it never be forgotten, that humble stone, in which we see only our good
old domestic Lares, is the corner-stone of the Temple, and the
foundation-stone of the City.

ONE WORD TO THE PRIESTS.

I have finished, yet my heart has not. Therefore, one word more.

One word to the priests. I handled them gently, yet they have attacked
me. Well! even now, it is not them that I attack. This book is not
against them.

It attacks their own slavish state, the unnatural position in which
they are kept, and the strange conditions which make them at once
unhappy and dangerous: if it has any effect, it will prepare for them
the period of deliverance, personal and mental freedom.

Let them say and do what they please, they will not prevent me from
being interested in their fate. I impute nothing to them. They are
not free to be just, or to love or to hate, they receive the words they
are to say, their sentiments and thoughts, from higher powers. They
who set them on against me are the same men who are, at this moment,
preparing against them the most cruel inquisition. The more insulated
and miserable they are made, the greater will be the advantage derived
from their restless activity; let them