independence of all the accidents of life, and to protest in the name of virtue the immutability which it gave them in the possession of real good. Rome, waxing old, and although mistress of the world no longer mistress of herself, admitted within her walls, amongst the trophies of her ancient customs, that rigorous doctrine, and with it reanimated the remains of her virility. Under emperors wearied of the baseness which they had created, there were certain souls who were not to be corrupted by fortune, and the Roman toga received from their blood, shed by tyranny, a last ray which still covers mankind, so much does a generous doctrine, even when false, bear with it the secret blessing of the God of strength and devotedness.

Stoicism had the indisputable merit, which was the cause of its greatness, of saving morals by uniting the idea of happiness to that of virtue, and at the same time rendering accessible to all the final end of man. For virtue is not, like riches, power, or glory, a privileged or an exceptional thing; it is the reign of order in every soul that wills it, the spontaneous fruit of love, which is the common fund of our nature, and the most lowly hut is an asylum as open to it as the palace of kings. A thought followed by a resolve, a resolve followed by an act: such is virtue. It is produced when we desire it, it increases as

quickly as our desires, and if it costs much to him who has lost it, he has always in himself the ransom which will bring it back again. Stoicism was then a moral and a popular doctrine, and would perhaps have been considered divine if the Gospel had not been at the gates of the world, and uttered to it that great cry which the world has repeated to be forgotten nevermore.

According to stoicism, life is a movement which has liberty for principle, virtue for orbit and term. Now, there lies here an idolatry of man under a magnanimous illusion. Man, whatever he may do, is neither the principle, the orbit, nor the term of his life. He comes from beyond himself, and he seeks above himself the supreme end' of his being, as a stream sprung from the depths of earth flows on to the abyss of ocean. In vain would stoicism confound virtue and happiness; in vain would its followers insult suffering and death, in order to save their doctrine; suffering and death made them great, but it did not make them happy. They suffered as heroes, they died as martyrs; sacred victims, whom philosophy crowned with flowers and the consciousness of glory, but whom reason condemned, by joining, in spite of them, the idea of impassibility and immortality to the idea of beatitude. Why should we lie to ourselves? If falsehood may become sublime, it can

never become true. I do not say that pride corrupted all the virtues of the stoics: the sincere love of good may be allied to false wisdom, and false wisdom may deceive even to exaltation men of great heart. But if Thrasea, Helvidius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, were sages, they were so like those trees which from corrupted earth shoot forth towards heaven venerable trunks and branches.

Where are we, Gentlemen, and what, in fine, is the home of happiness? What, beyond us and with us, is the inexhaustible seat where we shall find the living repose of all our faculties? Ah! do you not perceive it? You think in the infinite, as I said to you just now, you love in the infinite; how, out of the infinite, should you find the repose of your thought and of all your faculties? There is your principle, there also is your centre, there your term. No limited object, however beautiful, is able to appease the inner hunger that consumes you, because as soon as you possess it you have exhausted it. An invincible energy bears you beyond time and space, and happiness flies before you in the unmeasured regions which your intelligence opens to you, and whither your will necessarily follows it. But the infinite is not an abstraction without living reality; it lives, it thinks, it loves, it is free, it has a great name inscribed upon the portal of all life as the proper name of life itself;

it is called GOD. It is in GOD that happiness dwells, because in him fulness is.

He

It is worthy of all wonder that when the ancients, by their poets, represented the sojourn of the blessed in another world, they painted it as a calm shadow of the universe, an unsubstantial image of past things, and Virgil, animating that strange abode of happiness with his own spirit, inflicted upon it the name of kingdom of emptiness—INANIA REGNA. showed there to his contemporaries happy shades regretting the light of day, and endeavouring in noiseless games to feign their by-gone combats. It is because our fathers before Christ had not the idea, so simple for us, that happiness is in God. They believed in divine justice, in the rewards and punishments of another life; they also believed, perhaps, in the disappearance of sensible matter in that other life. which they imagined beyond the tomb; but that God was that life, that the soul, a living and substantial being, was in direct relations with its source, and drew therefrom, in a contemplation of eternal beauty, the reward of its beauty personally acquired by virtue, that was not of their times. The shadow of truth covered them, and they made even of known truth a gloomy and silent shadow. Mahomet coming afterwards, Mahomet initiated to the Gospel, had not even this merit. He clothed supreme happiness

with flesh, and that phantom of his paradise still persecutes the shameful imagination of his followers, the only people who have not known modesty.

Happiness is in God, reason proves it, the Gospel declares it to us, and thereby falls the scandal raised within us by that definition of life: Life is a natural and lawful movement towards happiness; for henceforth it should be: Life is a movement, whose principle, centre, and term is God.

Doubtless, it remains always that happiness is our final end, since God is happiness itself; but it also remains that our last end is in perfection, since God, who is supreme beatitude, is at the same time infinite perfection. Being like him in our nature, we cannot separate in our tendencies that which is in him by the same title and in the same degree. The love of happiness is not the first cause that leads us to love good, and the love of good is not the first cause that leads us to love and seek happiness. They are two movements springing within us from a single source, contemporary in their expansion, equal in their power, and which, aiding one another upon earth, have both, after a time of trial, their immutable satisfaction in God. During that trial, withdrawn from good by corruption or weakness, we may be brought back to it by the fear of losing our final beatitude; but that fear, however