of the prostrate soul increases through the emotion of the souls that
surround it; in the same degree, active piety, meaning by this the doing
of good works, education and charity, especially the accomplishment of
repulsive tasks, such as attending the sick, the infirm, the incurable,
idiots, maniacs and repentant prostitutes;

* Finally, the strict daily rule which, a sort of rigorous and minute
countersign, enjoining and compelling the repetition of the same acts
at the same hours, renders habit the auxiliary of will, adds mechanical
enthusiasm to a serious determination, and ends in making the task easy.

Hence, communities of men and of women, congregations and convents,
these likewise, the same as the sacraments, the priesthood and the
hierarchy, form a body along with belief and thus constitute the
inseparable organs of faith.

Before 1789, the ignorant or indifferent Catholic, the peasant at his
plow, the artisan at his work-bench, the good wife attending to her
household, were unconscious of this innermost suture. Thanks to the
Revolution, they have acquired the sentiment of it and even the physical
sensation. They had never asked themselves in what respect orthodoxy
differed from schism, nor how positive religion was opposed to natural
religion; it is the civil organization of the clergy which has led
them to distinguish the difference between the unsworn cure and the
interloper, between the right mass and the wrong mass; it is the
prohibition of the mass which has led them to comprehend its importance;
it is the revolutionary government which has transformed them into
theologians and canonists.[3179] Compelled, under the Reign of Terror,
to sing and dance before the goddess Reason, and next, in the temple of
the "Etre Supreme," subjected, under the Directory, to the new-fangled
republican calendar, and to the insipidity of the decade festivals,
they have measured, with their own eyes, the distance which separates
a present, personal, incarnate deity, redeemer and savior, from a deity
without form or substance, or, in any event, absent; a living, revealed,
and time-honored religion, and an abstract, manufactured, improvised
religion; their spontaneous worship, which is an act of faith, and a
worship imposed on them which is only frigid parade; their priest, in
a surplice, sworn to continence, delegated from on high to open out to
them the infinite perspectives of heaven or hell beyond the grave, and
the repub