sentiment, to see features you love to gaze on convulsed with agony
or pale in death? And yet you must either see the death of your beloved
ones, or they must lay you in the earth; for every life ends with the
tomb, and we do but walk over graves. When the soul has been thus
wounded by anxiety, for this poisoned wound there is one remedy, but
only one: "God reigns!" Nothing happens without the permission of His
goodness. And of all those who are dear to us, we can say: "Father, to
Thy hands I commit them." If we are without this trust, we shall only
escape torment by levity. Without God our mind is sick; our conscience
and our heart are sick also, and in a way more grievous still.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] _Meditation troisieme_, at the end.

[20] Gen. xxviii. 16.

[21] _Demontrer_.

[22] "_On le montre_."

[23] "Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.... Let us hear the conclusion
of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is
the whole duty of man." (Eccles. i. and xii.)

[24] Apology.

[25]

Si mon coeur, fatigue du reve qui l'obsede,
A la realite revient pour s'assouvir,
Au fond des vains plaisirs que j'appelle a mon aide,
Je trouve un tel degout que je me sens mourir.

PART II.

_SOCIETY._

We have just studied what life without God would be for the individual.
Let us now direct our attention to those collections of human beings
which form societies. We shall not speak here of the relations of civil
with ecclesiastical authorities,--a complex question, the solution of
which must vary with times, places, and circumstances. Let us only
remark that the distinction between the temporal and spiritual order of
things is one of the foundations of modern civilization. This
distinction is based upon those great words which, eighteen hundred
years ago, separated the domain of God from the domain of Caesar.
Religion considered as a function of civil life; dogma supported by the
word of a monarch or the vote of a body politic; the formula of that
dogma imposed forcibly by a government on the lips of the
governed--these are _debris_ of paganism which have been struggling for
centuries against the restraints of Christian thought.[26] The
religious convictions of individuals do not belong to the State;
religious sentiments are not amenable to human tribunals; and it would
be hard to say whether it is the spiritual or the temporal order of
things which suffers most from the