Were it not so, why this dejection, this secret disgust, this indifference, this bluntness, this chill which now so often accompany wisdom and sound sense? You say you are discouraged, you do not hope, you do not dare any more to attempt aught that is difficult and great. What then has happened? {39} What has this experience, at the same time so much vaunted and so mournful, taught you? That duty, not interest or passion, is the principle of morality; that God has not ceased to watch over the world; that he resists the proud and punishes the guilty; that order has her natural and inviolable laws, and avenges herself on those who mistake them; that evil, always present, always at our door, in us and about us, needs to be incessantly resisted. Of what do you complain? These are advances, not mistakes; truths reconquered, power recovered, not hopes thrown away. It is true, man was carried away by an ambition beyond his strength and right; it must be brought down, his reason and his will must agree to restore what they attempted to usurp. Instead of setting up and adoring himself as a monarch, man here must acknowledge his primitive imperfection, his definite insufficiency, and yield submission in thought and life on the bosom of liberty. But is it nothing that this liberty is now more firmly established than man has ever known it? Is the general progress of justice and happiness in the world nothing? Is there not therein a fitting reward for the toils and sufferings of our age? Is there not, after so many mistakes, enough to satisfy the most exacting, to refresh the most exhausted? Let us look higher. In return for the sacrifices required from our pride, in compensation for the demonstrated weakness of our nature and the marked bounds of our power, has nothing been given to us? {40} Do we not regain more than we lose? Do we not ascend more than we have been forced to descend? The eighteenth century had inflated us with pride, yet had in reality only lowered us. In making us monarchs of this world, it had at the same time confined and reduced us to it alone. No more immensity, no more eternity for the soul; no longer a bond of kindred between God and man. We came and passed over the earth like all that springs from and returns to it. Our noblest ambition, our purest desires, our most sublime flights, all that there is in us of noble and truly divine, was no more than a delusion and a burden. Not only in respect of our worldly goods and joys, but of ourselves and for ever, we had to exclaim, "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." We have escaped; we are leaving this confined and low condition; we are rising; we are again about to attain our dignity, our hope, our futurity, our soul. We can no more parade ourselves in our pride, but we are no longer plunged into and abandoned in misery; we find again a Master here below, and also "our Father which is in heaven."