part of the frame.

The preface to the first edition contains powerful passages. We extract
some of the best of them from the English translation by Mr Cocks, which
is sufficiently respectable for our present purpose.

"The question is about our family:--that sacred asylum in which we
all desire to seek the repose of the heart, when our endeavours
have proved fruitless, and our illusions are no more. We return
exhausted to the domestic hearth; but do we find there the repose
we sigh for?

"Let us not dissemble, but acknowledge to ourselves how things are:
there is in our family a sad difference of sentiment, and the most
serious of all.

"We may speak to our mothers, wives, and daughters, on any of the
subjects which form the topics of our conversation with indifferent
persons, such as business or the news of the day, but never on
subjects that affect the heart and moral life, such as eternity,
religion, the soul, and God.

"Choose, for instance, the moment when we naturally feel disposed
to meditate with our family in common thought, some quiet evening
at the family-table; venture even there, in your own house, at your
own fireside, to say one word about these things; your mother sadly
shakes her head, your wife contradicts you, your daughter, by her
very silence, shows her disapprobation. They are on one side of the
table, and you on the other--and alone.

"One would think that in the midst of them, and opposite you, was
seated an invisible personage to contradict _whatever you may say_.

"But how can we be astonished at this state of our family? Our
wives and daughters are brought up and governed by _our enemies!_

* * * * *

"_Our enemies_, I repeat it, in a more direct sense, as they are
naturally envious of marriage and family life. This, I know full
well, is rather their misfortune than their fault. An old lifeless
system, of mechanical functions, can want but lifeless partisans.
Nature, however, reclaims her rights: they feel painfully that
family is denied them, and they console themselves _only by
troubling ours_.

* * * * *

"This lifeless spirit, let us call it by its real name, Jesuitism,
formerly neutralized by the different manners of living, of the
orders, corporations, and religious parties, is