rse, and to which we cannot give a name
without betraying the truth?... There remained something, Sirs, be very
sure, more generous than self-interest, more elevated than duty, more
powerful than love. Search your own hearts, and if you find it hard to
understand me, if your own endowments are unknown to you, listen to
Bossuet speaking of you:--'When God,' says he, 'made the heart of man,
the first thing He planted there was goodness:' goodness; that is to
say, that virtue which does not consult self-interest, which does not
wait for the commands of duty, which needs not to be solicited by the
attraction of the beautiful, but which stoops towards its object all the
more, as it is poorer, more miserable, more abandoned, more worthy of
contempt! It is true, Sirs, it is true: man possesses that adorable
faculty. It is not genius, nor glory, nor love, which measures the
elevation of his soul,--it is goodness. This it is which gives to the
human countenance its principal and most powerful charm; this it is
which draws us together; this it is which brings into communication the
good and the evil, and which is everywhere, from heaven to earth, the
great mediating principle. See, at the foot of the Alps, yon miserable
_cretin_, which, eyeless, smileless, tearless, is not even conscious of
its own degradation, and which looks like an effort of nature to insult
itself in the dishonor of the greatest of its own productions: but
beware how you imagine that that wretched object has not found the road
to any heart, or that his debasement has deprived him of the love of all
the world. No: he is beloved; he has a mother, he has brothers and
sisters; he has a place at the cottage-hearth; he has the best place and
the most sacred of all, just because of all he may seem to have the
least claim to any. The bosom which nursed him supports him still, and
the superstition of love never speaks of him but as of a blessing sent
of God. Such is man!

"But can I say, Such is man, without saying also, Such is God! From whom
would man derive goodness, if God were not the primordial Ocean of
goodness, and if, when He formed our heart, He had not first of all
poured into it a drop from His own? Yes, God is good; yes, goodness is
the attribute which includes in it all the rest; and it is not without
reason that antiquity engraved on the pediment of its temples that
famous inscription, in which goodness preceded greatness."

Now, to say nothing of the