h which is in it confers immortality
upon it, and when this voice escapes from a human breast, he who
speaks, sings or weeps, feels indeed that eternity has concluded an
alliance with him. Peeling his fragile testimony confirmed by all that
endures and can not die, he says with Christ: "Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but my words shall not pass away!"

The holy labors entrusted to the voice can never be counted. Because
of the very fact that it lives and that it contains a soul, it is
the great awakener, the incomparable evoker. When, obscure still and
unknown, a thought distracts us and slumbers at the bottom of our
being, a voice is all that is needed to make it emerge into the light.
With maternal tenderness, the voice borrows all the energies of
incubation, to infuse with warmth, to fortify, the nascent germs of
spiritual life. In it lives and breaks forth what, in the evolving
soul, tends feebly and furtively toward the flowering. In short, the
voice, speech, the tongue, condenses in a single focus incalculable
quantities of rays.

Only think of the efforts that human thought must have made to reach
that clearness that enables it to become speech. Every word that you
utter without giving it a thought is a monument toward which centuries
and multitudes of minds have wrought. A world is contained in it. Poor
words! one man decks himself out in them, another wraps himself up in
them, but how few know of the warmth of life and love that has put
them into the world that they may be forever the witnesses of the past
for posterity! No matter, for when they have been made sufficiently to
resound like an inanimate cymbal, there comes an hour when they revive
under the breath of a true and living being, and they depart to spread
life. Then they fulfil their role as educators. To educate is to
explain a being to itself. And this is the benign service that
the voice performs. It tells us what we think better than we can
ourselves. It unbinds the chains of the captive soul and permits it to
take its flight. Happy the child, happy the young man who meets with
a voice to decipher him to himself! This is what Christ did in those
blest hours when He reunited the children of His people, as a bird
reunites its brood under its wings!

What the voice does in detail, it continues to accomplish on the
larger scale. At certain moments societies seem a prey to a sort of
chaos. A number of contrary forces clash and perturb them, as th