20 DISCOURSES OF FATHER HYACINTHE. 



the commonwealth ; that it received from civil society 

 its constitution, its laws, and its spirit; that conse- 

 quently civil society possesses over the family, over its 

 internal affairs, and over its substantial rights, a power, 

 so to speak, unlimited. 



You see that we are concerned at the very start with 

 a question of origin between the two societies which we 

 are comparing. AMiich of the two comes first ? Histor- 

 ically and logically, in the order of ideas and in the 

 order of facts, which is the root and which the fruit ? 



Against the authority of the pseudo-philosophers of 

 the eighteenth century, and of the pseudo-politicians 

 of the French Revolution, I declare that civil society is 

 relatively of recent date, and that domestic society pre- 

 ceded it, I do not say by years, but by ages. 



I ask the Bible. I have told you before, I am not 

 ashamed of the Bible. Anti-religious prejudice may 

 deny its inspiration ; but it cannot contest its historical 

 authority. I take the Bible, which one of the deepest 

 thinkers of our age has called " the book of humanity," 

 the Bible, which is not the history of a political organi- 

 zation or of a religious sect, but the history of the great 

 race of man ; I open its first book, the book of the be- 

 ginning. Genesis. Nothing, here, of empire or republic, 

 nothing about political society, but from end to end it 

 breathes the pure and fruitful spirit of domestic society! 

 From the marriage-bed of Adam and Eve, to the wan- 

 dering tents of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — everywhere 

 domestic society ! 



But this page of ancient Scripture, how it is dis- 

 l)layed before our eyes, subjected to our very touch, in 

 contemporary facts! Providence is wonderful in its 

 inventions. It has written tlie liistory of our globe 

 and its primeval transformations in i he bowels of the 



