11 G DISCOURSES OF FATHER HYACINTHE. 



mighty works was but a country-girl, but she was not 

 a barbarian; and it is most just and lit that she pre- 

 sides at Paris over the destinies of France and civili- 

 zation. 



Part Secoxd. — The Higher CiviUzation. 



[Father Hyacinthe proposed to show three things : the fact of 

 a higher civiUzation ; the right of such a civilization to exist; the 

 dangers attending it.] 



I. TJte Fad of a Iliglicr Civilization. 



The two laws of the family and of worship are the 

 same at the bottom of society and at the top. Not so 

 with the law of labor. Labor is not wholly for the 

 hands. There comes a day when, entering on the vast 

 fields of mind, it seeks to till them, in their turn, and 

 sow them with the seed of science. Science, at that 

 stage of development at which it is worthy of the name, 

 is not an absolute necessity of human nature. If man 

 knows his own soul and God, love and duty, labor and 

 death, he knows the ansAver to those supreme questions 

 which are put to him by consciousness within and by 

 the world without. But none the less is science the 

 indispensable luxury of great civilizations. It is devel- 

 oped in two principal directions, the contemplative and 

 the active. 



Contemplative science — what is there that it has not 

 included in its scope? It has scrutinized the invisible, 

 weighed the imponderable, decomposed the molecule, 

 in the laboratories of its physics and its chemistry. 

 Queen of tlie inorganic world, it is extending its con- 

 quests, day Ijy day, by means of ])hysiology, into the 

 organic world; and, laying hands upon life itself in the 

 currents of blood which it iiitcrroii-ates and directs at 



