152 DISCOURSES OF FATHER HYACINTHE. 



but against tliat higher power of sin and error which 

 dwells in the moral atmosphere we breathe, in the 

 heaven of our loftiest thoughts, our purest affections — 

 '' against spiritual wickedness in heavenly places,"* 

 which there transforms itself into an " angel of light.''f 

 Neither have I aught to say concerning that barbarism 

 of the unbelieving nations which surrounds the civiliza- 

 tion of Europe as with a dense atmosphere into which 

 its light has not yet been able to penetrate ; nor of that 

 other barbarism which our society bears within it, in its 

 morals, its sciences, its institutions, and which realizes 

 the ancient maxim, " Opfimi cujusque pcssima co)T2q^- 

 fio" — the worst of all corruptions is the corruption of 

 the most perfect organizaticwi. 



But this planet itself, on which the work of our great 

 race is wrought, would almost seem less to have been 

 made for us than to have been made against us. From 

 its strange infimcy, an incandescent mass or an abyss 

 of liquid fire, a huge firebrand hurtling through space 

 or dashing out its confused waves into the darkness, it 

 has seemed the enemy of life in every form. Then 

 during those six days — God's days, not man's, and there- 

 fore not to be measured — for " a thousand years in his 

 sight are ])ut as yesterday''J: — it has, with convulsive 

 pangs of labor, produced, and again destroyed, huge 

 forms of being, plants or animals, "which never could 

 have subsisted in the same atmosphere with ourselves. 

 Finally, after all these cataclysms, when that strip of 

 earth habitable for man had emerged — I say nothing 

 of the vast deserts which dispute our occupancy of it, 

 nor of the frozen regions Avhicli consume it at the poles, 

 nur of the heats that blaze along its tropical shores — 

 I find it so scanty in its leiigtli, in its breadth — I was 



• Epliesian-', vi. 1*i. t •_' Corintliiaiis, xi. 11. * Pnalni xc. 4. 



