If you are only two against a thousand in leading this beautiful, pure life, rejoice that there are at least two of you and do not despair of your course of action. Is it not Renan who has uttered this profound saying: “The great things in any race are usually accomplished by the minority”? Do not rejoice because there are slaves. Let their example be a fearful warning to you; let it fill you with an overmastering desire to free them from servitude. To the apostle Paul is ascribed that disquieting utterance of the conquering soldier: “Oportet hæreses esse.” Yes, undoubtedly, whoever wishes to fight needs an enemy. The dazzling chance of such conquests is not, alas, the thing you will be most likely to miss. But every conquest is vain that does not tend toward peace. One thinks with ecstasy of the joy of a universal communion, from which no one would be left out, in which no one would be the victim. Must there be heretics? Yes! To convince them, but not to vanquish them, and still less to put them to the stake. X ON THE REIGN OF THE HEART “The knowledge of external things does not make up for me, in times of affliction, for my ignorance of the moral world; but my knowledge of the moral world always consoles me for my ignorance of external things.”--_Pascal_. I It has come, the time of affliction! Whatever may be the outcome of this war, it marks a period of profound despair for humanity. However great may be the pride of victory, however generous such a victory may be, under whatever light the distant consequences may be presented to us, we live, none the less, in a blighted age, on an earth that will be devastated for long years, in the midst of a society that is decimated, ruined, crushed by its wounds. Among all our disillusionments, if there is one that remains especially painful to us it is the sort of bankruptcy of which our whole civilization is convicted. Man had never been prouder than at the beginning of the twentieth century of the discoveries he had realized in the domain of what Pascal called “the external sciences.” We must admit that there was some excuse for this intoxication, this error. In its struggle with matter, humanity had experienced a success that was so daring, so disconcerting, and above all so repeated that it lost a just conception of its adversary and forgot that its principal enemy was itself.