us bring to everything the spirit of courage. Let us have
confidence in God always, whatever happens. How much I feel, as you do,
that one can adore Him only with one's spirit! And like you I think that
we must avoid all pride which condemns the ways of other people. Let our
love lead us in union towards the universal Providence. Let us, in
constant prayer, give back our destiny into His hands. Let us humbly
admit to Him our human hopes, trying at every moment to link them to
eternal wisdom. It is a task which now seems full of difficulty, but
difficulty is in everything in life.

_Sunday, December 6._

I am happy to see you so determinedly courageous. We have need of
courage, or, rather, we have need of something difficult to obtain,
which is neither patience nor overconfidence, but a certain belief in
the order of things, the power to be able to say of every trial that it
is well.

Our instinct for life makes us try to free ourselves from our
obligations when they are too cruel, too oft-repeated, but, as I am
happy to know, you have been able to see what Spinoza understood by
human liberty. Inaccessible ideal, to which one must cling
nevertheless. . . .

. . . Dear mother, these trials that we must accept are long, but
notwithstanding their unchanging form one cannot call them monotonous,
since they call upon courage which must be perpetually new. Let us unite
together for God to grant us strength and resource in accepting
everything. . . .

You know what I call religion: that which unites in man all his ideas of
the universal and the eternal, those two forms of God. Religion, in the
ordinary sense of the word, is but the binding together of certain moral
and disciplinary formulas with the fine poetic imagery of the great
biblical and Christian philosophies.

Do not let us offend any one. Looked at properly, religious formulas,
however apart they may remain from my own habit of mind, seem to me
praiseworthy and sympathetic in all that they contain of aspiration and
beauty and form.

Dear mother whom I love, let us always hope: trials are legion, but
beauty remains. Let us pray that we may long continue to contemplate
it. . . .

_Monday, December 7._

MY BELOVED MOTHER,--I am writing this in the night . . . by six o'clock
in the morning military life will be in full swing.

My candle is stuck on a bayonet, and every now and then a drop of water
falls on to my nose. My poor companions try to light a r