CIVILIZATION. 119 



riiption to -whifli Fallu-r Ilyacintlic h;is iilrcady aniinfidvcrtc»!, 

 and ■which is growing upon us more and more — the corruption 

 of morals, and the corruption of the reason itself J 



"We liad in France, at tlie beginning of this century, a 

 great school of Transcendental philosophy, which, un- 

 happily incomplete on some points, erroneous on others, 

 is none the less the lasting honor of a country of which 

 it failed to be the salvation. It relegated to the eigh- 

 teenth century those materialist or simply sensualist 

 doctrines the wretched and unwholesome traditions of 

 which it refused to propagate, so that no one would have 

 guessed, at that time, how speedily they w^ould be com- 

 ing back upon us. But victorious over materialism, 

 inheriting, in part at least, the traditions of Plato, it 

 thought itself in a position to dispense with the Chris- 

 tian revelation. It ignored the realities of the moral 

 and religious life, and perverting ideas as others had 

 perverted facts, it left behind it unfaithful, and yet per- 

 haps logical disciples, who returned, by paths which 

 itself had opened for them, to this very skepticism and 

 materialism, the disgrace of Avhich does, at this hour, 

 weigh heavier than ever on the mind of France. A hid- 

 eous intellecttial barbarism, for which, for my part, I 

 blush before Europe, and more yet before the future, 

 and against which I can never protest often enough nor 

 forcibly enough ! It is not only the divine AYord made 

 flesh whose history and doctrine they blaspheme; it is 

 the httman AVord itself that they would smother in those 

 first lights which preside at once over the reason of phi- 

 losophers and the common sense of the people. God is 

 no longer a personal being. Under that conception he 

 served to sup})ly the craving of former ages. To-day he 

 is an idea of the mind, a law of the universe, an abstrac- 

 tion. Free agencvis a hallucination of the consciousness: 



