uls, their immortal destinies, only for a morsel of more
savory bread upon their table, for a larger portion of earth under
their feet? No! no! enthusiasm soars aloft, it does not fall to earth.
Bear me up to Heaven, if you wish to dazzle my eyes; promise me
immortality, if you would offer to my soul a motive worthy of its
nature, an aim worthy of its efforts, a price worthy of its virtue!
But what do your systems of atheistic society show us in perspective?
What do they promise us in compensation for our griefs? What do they
give us in exchange for our souls? You know,--we will not speak of it.

But, indeed, if these sects survive the month which sees and which
produces them; and, if these questions which they debate, and these
systems which they bring before the astonished People, are destined to
serve as enigmas to posterity; what will the future say of us? It will
only explain the Materialism, Atheism, and brutality of the doctrines
and sects by which we have been disturbed for ten or twelve years, as
the nightmare of a starving People, whose dreams have, for an object,
only a frantic satisfaction of the senses. All these philosophies, or
all these deliriums, are the deliriums or philosophies of the stomach!
"All this epoch," future historians will say, "the French must have
been a nation distressed by a terrible famine, to have forgotten, in
so total an eclipse of the intellectual nature, the great and immortal
ideas which have alone inspired even these, the human race, and
rendered the revolutions of the People worthy of the regard of
posterity, and of the blood of man. The Eighteenth Century must have
been a time when avaricious Nature shut up her bosom, and the earth
brought forth neither fruit nor harvests, that this great intellectual
People, formerly called the French People, should have forgotten their
souls for a morsel of bread, their immortality for an income, and
their God for a dollar! Let us turn away our eyes and weep over that
age."

XVI.

See where we were when the Republic arose: happy was it that the
People had at bottom more of the true sentiment of God than these
masters and heads of sects. For, what would have become of us, if, in
that total eclipse of government, of armed force, and of law, which
followed the 24th of February, the People, masters of all, of the
fortunes and lives of the citizens, of Heaven and earth, had been a
People of Materialists, of Terrorists, and of Atheists?