120 DISCOUllSES OF FATHER HYACINTHE. 



man is not free, even when lie thinks himself so, for he 

 always acts nnder the fatal pressure of motives. The 

 difference between right and wrong varies with individ- 

 uals as well as with periods and climates; it depends 

 upon the varying points of view at which we stand, and 

 in fact is nothing but an optical illusion ! 



I pause before these pernicious steeps, down which, 

 from the very height of civilization, a nation, at least 

 the upper classes of a nation, may go plunging into a 

 barbarism infinitely deeper and more hopeless tlian that 

 of rude and simple nations. 



0, better far the peasantry, or (as our Democracy 

 in its lofty and insolent language affects to call them), 

 the " ignorant country-folks !" To them I turn in search 

 of that the loss of which nothing can make good — the 

 divine gift of common sense and good morals! 



[From the perils of the higher civilization, Fiither Hyacinthe 

 draws an important and unanticipated conclusion — that religion 

 is even more needful to the rich than to the poor ; to the groat 

 than to the masses. 



Religion, furthermore, is not only the conservative force in 

 human society in its present condition ; still more is it the pro- 

 phecy of its future. Man is a being too full of mysteries to end his 

 career with the achievements of this earthly existence. Civiliza- 

 tion is the expression of an ideal too grand to be realized, com- 

 pletely and absolutely, short of the commonwealth of eternity. 

 This ultimate condition of things is that of which Cicero had a 

 presentiment, Miien lie declared " this universal world one gen- 

 eral conunonwealth of gods and men." Universus hie mimdi.'^ 

 11 lia civitas communis dconun afque homininn.'^' It is that which 

 the prophets have contemplated under the image of the new 

 Jerusalem, city of God, beginning on the earth, but completed 

 only in heaven. "Behold the tabernacle of God witli men, and 

 he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God 

 himself shall be with them, and be their God."f] 



* Dc I.opil.ufi, i., vii. t RcTclaiion, xxi. 8. 



