ntly the affairs of commerce, has been a shadow over
intellectual civilization; for it has forgotten heavenly things, and,
in forgetting them, has contributed to make the People also forget
them.

X.

But that People which forgets God, forgets itself. What right has it
to be a People, if it have not its origin and hope in Him? How can the
men of any nation expect tyrants to remember and respect its destiny,
if they themselves debase this destiny to that of a machine with ten
fingers, destined to weave the greatest possible number of yards of
cloth in seventy years, to people as many hundred acres as possible
with creatures as much to be pitied and as miserable as themselves,
and to serve, from generation to generation, as human manure for the
land, to fertilize the soil of their birth, their life, and their
graves? How can the moral spiritualism of a People long resist such
theories? Where can they find God in this workshop of matter?

XI.

But even this is nothing. The French Revolution came in 1789. It came
to put an end to a double philosophy,--the spiritual philosophy of
Rousseau's school, founded in reason and religion, the material
philosophy of the school of Helvetius, Diderot, and their disciples,
atheistic and cynical. The thought of the first of these philosophies
was religious at bottom. It consisted merely in freeing the luminous
idea of God from the shadows by which ignorance, intolerance, the
inquisition of temporal dynasties and times of barbarism had falsified
it,--in freeing this idea, debased as it was,--obscured, and enchained
to thrones,--so as to restore reason to its liberty, to inquiry, to
the free conscience of every worship and of every soul; to revive it
in the eyes of the People, by leading them to the broad light of day,
the evidence of nature, the dignity and efficacy of free worship.

But, for this, it was necessary to dispossess the Middle Ages of their
temporal power, of their _mort-main_ possessions, of their civil
jurisdictions, of their exclusive privileges, of their legal
intolerance against all other divine thoughts, and all other individual
or national faith, all other forms of adoration and worship than what
were imposed by the exclusive and established religion. To rally the
people to this work, a work legitimate in itself, a work which the
abuses of a crafty priesthood had made necessary, seven times, and
whose accomplishment they had seven times partially a