than meanly to serve a great truth; for in doubt, no less than in faith, are passion and love to be found. Some doubts are as generous and passionate as the very noblest convictions. Be a thought of the loftiest, surest, or of the most profoundly uncertain, the best that it has to offer is still the chance that it gives us of loving some one thing wholly, without reserve. Whether it be to man, or a God; to country, to world or to error, that I truly do yield myself up, the precious ore that shall some day be found buried deep in the ashes of love will have sprung from the love itself, and not from the thing that I loved. The sincerity of an attachment, its simplicity, firmness, and zeal--these leave a track behind them that time can never efface. All passes away and changes; it may be that all is lost, save only the glow of this ardour, fertility, and strength of our heart. 96. "Never did man possess his soul in such peace as he," says Saint-Simon of one of them, who was surrounded on all sides by malice, and scheming, and snares. And further on he speaks of the "wise tranquillity" of another, and this "wise tranquillity" pervades every one of those whom he terms the "little flock." The "little flock," truly, of fidelity to all that was noblest in thought; the "little flock" of friendship, loyalty, self-respect, and inner contentment, that pass along, radiant with peace and simplicity, in the midst of the lies and ambitions, the follies and treacheries, of Versailles. They are not saints, in the vulgar sense of the word. They have not fled to the depths of forest or desert, or sought egotistic shelter in narrow cells. They are sages, who remain within life and the things that are real. It is not their piety that saves them; it is not in God alone that their soul has found strength. To love God, and to serve Him with all one's might, will not suffice to bring peace and strength to the soul of man. It is only by means of the knowledge and thought we have gained and developed by contact with men that we can learn how God should be loved; for, notwithstanding all things, the human soul remains profoundly human still. It may be taught to cherish the invisible, but it will ever find far more actual nourishment in the virtue or feeling that is simply and wholly human, than in the virtue or passion divine. If there come towards us a man whose soul is truly tranquil and calm, we may be certain that human virtues have given him his tranquillity and his calmness. Were we permitted to peer into the secret recesses of hearts that are now no more, we might discover, perhaps, that the fountain of peace whereat Fenelon slaked his thirst every night of his exile lay rather in his loyalty to Madame Guyon in her misfortune, in his love for the slandered, persecuted Dauphin, than in his expectation of eternal reward; rather in the irreproachable human conscience within him, overflowing with fidelity and tenderness, than in the hopes he cherished as a Christian.