trong and weak,
learned and ignorant, healthy and sick, of all countries, all times, all
ages, and all conditions.

A trial so long, so continuous, and so uniform, should certainly
convince us of our inability to reach the good by our own efforts. But
example teaches us little. No resemblance is ever so perfect that there
is not some slight difference; and hence we expect that our hope will
not be deceived on this occasion as before. And thus, while the present
never satisfies us, experience dupes us, and from misfortune to
misfortune leads us to death, their eternal crown.

What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but
that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to
him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from
all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not
obtain in things present? But these are all inadequate, because the
infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object,
that is to say, only by God Himself.

He only is our true good, and since we have forsaken Him, it is a
strange thing that there is nothing in nature which has not been
serviceable in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the
elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents,
fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since man
has lost the true good, everything can appear equally good to him, even
his own destruction, though so opposed to God, to reason, and to the
whole course of nature.

Some seek good in authority, others in scientific research, others in
pleasure. Others, who are in fact nearer the truth, have considered it
necessary that the universal good, which all men desire, should not
consist in any of the particular things which can only be possessed by
one man, and which, when shared, afflict their possessor more by the
want of the part he has not, than they please him by the possession of
what he has. They have learned that the true good should be such as all
can possess at once, without diminution and without envy, and which no
one can lose against his will. And their reason is that this desire
being natural to man, since it is necessarily in all, and that it is
impossible not to have it, they infer from it ...

426

True nature being lost, everything becomes its own nature; as the true
good being lost, everything becomes its own true good.

427

Man does