admirably appropriated to their object, wherein appears so well the hand of the century and the country which reared them! While architecture thus strays, it is natural that painting should seek above every thing color and brilliancy, that sculpture should apply itself to become Pagan again, that poetry itself, receding for two centuries, should abjure the worship of thought for that of fancy, that it should everywhere go borrowing images from Spain, Italy, and Germany, that it should run after subaltern and foreign qualities which it will not attain, and abandon the grand qualities of the French genius. It will be said that the Christian sentiment which animated Lesueur and the artists of the seventeenth century is wanting to those of ours; it is extinguished, and cannot be rekindled. In the first place, is that very certain? Native faith is dead, but cannot reflective faith take its place? Christianity is exhaustless; it has infinite resources, and admirable flexibility; there are a thousand ways of arriving at it and returning to it, because it has itself a thousand phases that answer to the most different dispositions, to all the wants, to all the mobility of the heart. What it loses on one side, it gains on another; and as it has produced our civilization, it is called to follow it in all its vicissitudes. Either every religion will perish in this world, or Christianity will endure, for it is not in the power of thought to conceive a more perfect religion. Artists of the nineteenth century, do not despair of God and yourselves. A superficial philosophy has thrown you far from Christianity considered in a strict sense; another philosophy can bring you near it again by making you see it with another eye. And then, if the religious sentiment is weakened, are there not other sentiments that can make the heart of man beat, and fecundate genius? Plato has said, that beauty is always old and always new. It is superior to all its forms, it belongs to all countries and all times; it belongs to all beliefs, provided these beliefs be serious and profound, and the need be felt of expressing and spreading them. If, then, we have not arrived at the boundary assigned to the grandeur of France, if we are not beginning to descend into the shade of death, if we still truly live, if there remain to us convictions, of whatever kind they may be, thereby even remains to us, or at least may remain to us, what made the glory of our fathers, what they did not carry with them to the tomb, what had already survived all revolutions, Greece, Rome, the Middle Age, what does not belong to any temporary or ephemeral accident, what subsists and is continually found in the focus of consciousness--I mean moral inspiration, immortal as the soul.