Public worship is no more an arbitrary institution than society and government, language and arts. All these things have their roots in human nature. Adoration abandoned to itself, would easily degenerate into dreams and ecstasy, or would be dissipated in the rush of affairs and the necessities of every day. The more energetic it is, the more it tends to express itself outwardly in acts that realize it, to take a sensible, precise, and regular form, which, by a proper reaction on the sentiment that produced it, awakens it when it slumbers, sustains it when it languishes, and also protects it against extravagances of every kind to which it might give birth in so many feeble or unbridled imaginations. Philosophy, then, lays the natural foundation of public worship in the internal worship of adoration. Having arrived at that point, it stops, equally careful not to betray its rights and not to go beyond them, to run over, in its whole extent and to its farthest limit, the domain of natural reason, as well as not to usurp a foreign domain. But philosophy does not think of trespassing on the ground of theology; it wishes to remain faithful to itself, and also to follow its true mission, which is to love and favor every thing that tends to elevate man, since it heartily applauds the awakening of religious and Christian sentiment in all noble souls, after the ravages that have been made on every hand, for more than a century, by a false and sad philosophy. What, in fact, would not have been the joy of a Socrates and a Plato if they had found the human race in the arms of Christianity! How happy would Plato--who was so evidently embarrassed between his beautiful doctrines and the religion of his times, who managed so carefully with that religion even when he avoided it, who was forced to take from it the best possible part, in order to aid a favorable interpretation of his doctrine--have been, if he had had to do with a religion which presents to man, as at once its author and its model, the sublime and mild Crucified, of whom he had an extraordinary presentiment, whom he almost described in the person of a just man dying on the cross;[258] a religion which came to announce, or at least to consecrate and expand the idea of the unity of God and that of the unity of the human race; which proclaims the equality of all souls before the divine law, which thereby has prepared and maintains civil equality; which prescribes charity still more than justice, which teaches man that he does not live by bread alone, that he is not wholly contained in his senses and his body, that he has a soul, a free soul, whose value is infinite, above the value of all worlds, that life is a trial, that its true object is not pleasure, fortune, rank, none of those things that do not pertain to our real destiny, and are often more dangerous than useful, but is that alone which is always in our power, in all situations and all