ar one person who remains suspended over the abyss, but let
several attempt to pass together,--the frail support gives way, and the
rash adventurers fall together into the gulf. Such is the destiny of
those schools of philosophy in which the notion of God disappears, and
of those civilizations in which the sense of God is extinguished; they
fall into dark regions where the light of goodness shines no longer.

After the mind and conscience, it remains for us to speak of the heart.
Man, an intelligent and free being, has in his reason an instrument of
knowledge, and in his conscience a rule for his will. But man is not
sufficient for himself, and cannot live upon his own resources. If you
inquire what the word heart expresses, in its most general acceptation,
you will find that it always expresses a tendency of the soul to look,
out of itself, in things or persons, for the support and nourishment of
its individual life. Does the question concern the relations of man with
his fellows? The heart is the organ of communication of one soul with
another, for receiving, or for giving, or for giving and receiving at
the same time, in the enjoyment of the blessing of a mutual affection.
The heart is in each of us what those marks are upon the scattered
stones of a building in course of construction which indicate that they
are to be united one to another. The philosopher suffices for himself,
the stoics used to say; the heart is the negation of this haughty maxim.
From the heart proceeds love, that son of abundance and of poverty, to
speak with Plato, that needy one ever on the search for his lost
heritage. Love has wings, said again the wisdom of the Greeks, wings
which essay to carry him ever higher. Let us extricate the thought which
is involved in these graceful figures: Our desires have no limits, and
indefinite desires can be satisfied only by meeting with an infinite
Being who can be an inexhaustible source of happiness, an eternal object
of love. "Our heart is made for love," said Saint Augustine, the great
Christian disciple of Plato: "therefore it is unquiet till it finds
repose in God." From this unrest proceed all our miseries. Men do not
always succeed in contenting themselves with a petty prosaic happiness,
a dull and paltry well-being, and in stifling the while the grand
instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due
object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its
indefini