e away the idea of God, and the first
consequence will be that you will sacrifice all the conquests of modern
civilization; the next, that you will soon have rendered impossible the
existence of any society whatever. I am going to ask your close
attention to these two points successively.

History does not offer to our view an uninterrupted progress, as certain
optimists suppose; still less does it present the spectacle of an
ever-increasing deterioration, as misanthropes affirm; and lastly, it is
not true, as we hear it said sometimes, that all epochs are alike, as
good one as another. There are times better than those which follow
them; and there are epochs less degraded than those which precede them.
Human societies fall and rise again; their march exhibits windings and
retrograde steps, because that march is under the influence of created
liberty; but when their destinies are regarded at one view, it is
clearly seen that they are advancing to a determined end, because while
man is in restless agitation, God is leading him on. The conquests of
modern civilization are great and sacred realities. What are these
conquests? Let us not stay at the surface of things, but go to the
foundation. Societies fallen into a condition of barbarism have for
their motto the famous saying of a Gallic chief: Woe to the vanquished!
In institutions, as in manners, the triumph of force characterizes
barbarous times. The right of the strongest is the twofold negation of
justice and of love; and what characterizes civilization, issuing from
the barbarous condition, the fragments of which it so long trails after
it, is the establishment of that justice which founds States, and, upon
the basis of justice, the development of the benevolence which renders
communities happy. These are the two essential conditions of social
progress. These conditions are necessary even to the progress of
industry and of material welfare.

Modern civilization,--that, namely, which we so designate, while we
relegate, so to speak, into the past the contemporaneous societies of
the vast East,--modern civilization possesses a power unknown to
antiquity. Justice has a foundation in the conscience, benevolence has
natural roots in the heart; but a moment has been when justice and love
appeared in the world with new brightness, like rays disengaged from
clouds. Modern civilization was then deposited on the earth in a
powerful germ, of which nothing was any more to arres