CIVIL SOCIETY AND CHRISTIAXITY. oS 



Sucli is tlie libtTly Miiicli tlicy liavc in iircparuiion 

 for us ! SiK'li is their Ijoastcil democracy 1 And with 

 such a phitiorm as tliis they dare to make their ap})eal 

 to universal suffrage. Ah ! I liave a respect for the bal- 

 lot-box of France, but I liave a higher respect for its 

 liome. Leave its ballot-boxes free, and leave its house- 

 iiolds sovereign ! True national education is tlie free 

 and liarmonious resultant of all the educations of tlie 

 liousehold. True public opinion is the great soul of a 

 people breathing at once û'om every fireside. However 

 mighty, however enlightened the Government of any 

 nation, it has neither the mission nor the right to fasli- 

 ion that nation in its own image and likeness, and to 

 run it in tlie mould which it has wrought. It has sim- 

 ply to receive the nation such as it has grown of itself, 

 such as it has come down to it with each of its genera- 

 tions growing up in the bosom of the family, such as it 

 has been moulded in the minds of fathers, in the hearts 

 of mothers, in the discipline of teachers chosen by fa- 

 ther and mother, private teachers or public, lay or cler- 

 ical — no matter what, so long as they are the choice of 

 the parents, and therefore representatives of the family 

 and of Christianity. 



[3. llie FlgJtt of Bequest. — The supreme act of parental author- 

 ity and providence is not education, but testation. The right of 

 testation, one of the sublimcst rights that can be exercised by a 

 luiman being, is sublimer yet when it is vested in the person of 

 the fatlier. In every man, it is a grand affirmation of the immor- 

 tality of the soul. In the case of the father, it affirms, besides, the 

 principle of the immortality of the family, and, by a sequence too 

 little imderstood, the i:>i'i'iciple of the immortality of the nation. 

 Here, too, civil society is under obligation to regulate the forms 

 and guard the effects of this act ; but it cannot tamper witli the 

 right itself, nor rob the father of the family of the liberty. of tes- 

 tation.] 



