ulgar appearances, a product of the marvellous chisel of
the Greeks? He sets himself, with a zeal full of respect, to free the
noble statue from the impurities which defile it. Every soul of man is
the work of art Divine, and every charitable heart is an artist who
desires to labor at its restoration. Henceforward we can understand that
love of suffering and of poverty, that passion for the galleys and the
hospital, which have at times thrown Christians into extravagances which
our age has no reason to dread. God in the poor man, God in the sick
man, God in the vicious man and the criminal; this, I repeat, is the
grand secret of charity. Charity passes from the heart of men and from
individual practice into social customs and institutions. Charity it is
which, by degrees, takes from law its needless rigors, and from justice
its useless tortures; which substitutes the prison in which it is sought
to reform the guilty for the galley, which completes the corruption of
the criminal; it is charity that opens public asylums for all forms of
suffering; and that will realize, up to the limits of what is possible,
all the hopes of philanthropy. If God ceases to be present to the mind
and conscience of men, justice and love lose their power. Without the
powerful action of justice and of love, society would descend again, by
the ways of corruption, towards the struggles of barbarism. Observe,
study well, all that is going on around us. Does our civilization appear
to you sufficiently solid to give you the idea that it can henceforth
dispense with the foundations on which it has reposed hitherto?

The sentiments of justice and of benevolence which form the double basis
of the progress of society, suppose a more general sentiment which is
their common support--the sentiment of humanity. The idea that man has a
value in himself, that he is, in virtue of his quality as man,
independently of the places which he inhabits and of the position which
he occupies in the world, an object of justice and of love;--this idea
includes in itself all the moral part of civilization. Social progress
is only the recognition, ever more and more explicit, of the value of
one soul, of the rights of one conscience. Now, the idea of humanity has
the closest possible connection with the knowledge of God, considered as
the Father of the human race. Ancient wisdom, superior to the worship of
idols, had gained a glimpse of the fact that the philosopher is a
cit