God did not wish it: the light suddenly failed him who was the light; the guide, stealing away, left his flock in darkness. But my fellow-countryman, though his public career has been interrupted, will always have his private superiority left and his pre-eminence in natural gifts. In the order of time, he ought to survive me; I summon him to my death-bed to agitate our great conquests at those gates through which there is no returning. I should like to see his genius shed upon me the absolution which once his hand had the right to call down upon my head. We were lulled at our birth by the same waves[441]; may my ardent faith and my sincere admiration be permitted to hope that I shall meet my reconciled friend once more on the same shore of eternal things[442]. On the upshot, my investigations lead me to conclude that the old society is giving way beneath itself, that it is impossible for whosoever is not a Christian to understand the future society pursuing its career and satisfying at one time either the purely republican or the moderate monarchical idea. In any hypothesis, you can derive the improvements which you desire only from the Gospel. At the bottom of the actual sectarians, what we find is always the plagiarism, the parody of the Gospel, always the apostolic principle: that principle has entered into us so deeply that we use it as though it belongs to us; we presume it to be natural, even though it be not so to us; it has come to us from our old faith, to take the latter two or three steps in the ascending line above us. Many a man of independent mind occupied with the perfecting of his fellows would never have thought of it if the right of the peoples had not been laid down by the Son of Man. Every act of philanthropy in which we indulge, every system of which we dream in the interests of humanity, is but the Christian idea turned over, changed in name and too often disfigured: it is always the Word made Flesh[443]! [Sidenote: The Christian idea.] Do you say that the Christian idea is only the human idea in progression? I agree; but open the different cosmogonies, and you shall learn that a traditional Christianity preceded revealed Christianity upon earth. If the Messiah "had not come" and if He "had not spoken[444]," as He says of Himself, the idea would not have been disengaged, the truths would have remained confused, such as we see them in the writings of the ancients. However you interpret it, therefore, it is from the Revealer, or from Christ that you hold everything; it is from the Saviour, _Salvator_, from the Comforter, _Paracletus_, that you must always start; it is from Him that you have received the germs of civilization and philosophy.