lised for human happiness! The universal cry of Justice, which rises
louder and louder, in a growing clamour from the once silent multitude,
the people that have so long been duped and preyed upon, is but a cry for
this happiness towards which human beings are tending, the happiness that
embodies the complete satisfaction of man's needs, and the principle of
life loved for its own sake, in the midst of peace and the expansion of
every force and every joy. The time will come when this Kingdom of God
will be set upon the earth; so why not close that other deceptive
paradise, even if the weak-minded must momentarily suffer from the
destruction of their illusions; for it is necessary to operate even with
cruelty on the blind if they are to be extricated from their misery, from
their long and frightful night of ignorance!

All at once a feeling of deep joy came over Pierre. A child's faint cry,
the wakening cry of his son Jean had drawn him from his reverie. And he
had suddenly remembered that he himself was now saved, freed from
falsehood and fright, restored to good and healthy nature. How he
quivered as he recalled that he had once fancied himself lost, blotted
out of life, and that a prodigy of love had extricated him from his
nothingness, still strong and sound, since that dear child of his was
there, sturdy and smiling. Life had brought forth life; and truth had
burst forth, as dazzling as the sun. He had made his third experiment
with Paris, and this had been conclusive; it had been no wretched
miscarriage with increase of darkness and grief, like his other
experiments at Lourdes and Rome. In the first place, the law of labour
had been revealed to him, and he had imposed upon himself a task, as
humble a one as it was, that manual calling which he was learning so late
in life, but which was, nevertheless, a form of labour, and one in which
he would never fail, one too that would lend him the serenity which comes
from the accomplishment of duty, for life itself was but labour: it was
only by effort that the world existed. And then, moreover, he had loved;
and salvation had come to him from woman and from his child. Ah! what a
long and circuitous journey he had made to reach this finish at once so
natural and so simple! How he had suffered, how much error and anger he
had known before doing what all men ought to do! That eager, glowing love
which had contended against his reason, which had bled at sight of the
arrant absu