CIVJLI/ATION. 109 



I. The Law of Love in the Family. 



I luivc spoken before now about love in tlie family — 

 quite too mucli about it, some people say. I am only 

 sorry that I have not said more. To exhibit the indis- 

 soluble union between love and the family is the noblest 

 and most needed task that any earnest man, and espe- 

 cially any priest, can set himself. For my })art, I have 

 never been able to put myself into the position of those 

 theologians, witli neither heart nor genius, who ignore 

 this great sentiment of the human soul, and are afraid, 

 ap])arently, to pollute their lips by uttering its name. 

 I make bold to declare that it is such men as these 

 who have unconsciously prepared the way for the dy- 

 nasty of those conscienceless writers who, separating, 

 after their fiishion, passion from duty, extol love with- 

 out comprehending its true dignity, and inflict upon it 

 that supreme outrage of confounding it with caprice 

 and lust. Except when it fixes its undivided gaze on 

 heaven, and becomes virginity, love cannot blossom, save 

 in the sanctuary of home, with that twofold bloom, so 

 beautiful and yet so serious and lu)ly — inarriage aiid 

 pîirentage. 



However, I have no occasion, just now, to recur to 

 this important subject. I will only observe, that in all 

 prosperous nations public life is subordinate to private 

 life. This is true not only in this sense, that the >State, 

 having îox its mission to protect the rights of the 

 family, holds toward it the relation of means to end, 

 and that the means is necessarily subordinate to the 

 end ; but in this higher sense, that the citizens them- 

 selves concentrate in their homes the noblest of their 

 activities, convinced that, as the best and worthiest 

 service to humanity is attained by serving it in one's 



