In fact, from top to bottom, all this society lives on sensation; that is the common trait through it all, and it is graded according to the quality of its sensations.... Fundamentally there is only sensation, with here and there unequally subtle nerves. There are no terms less reconcilable one to another than research of sensation and moral obligation. There is nothing more opposed. Therefore he who expects all from his sensations depends absolutely on externals, upon the fortuitous things of life, in all their incoherence; he is no longer a self-centre, he feels himself no longer responsible, his personality is dissolved, evaporated; it does not react, and ambient nature already absorbs him, like some dead thing....
And this is where we are. I recognize then the evil; I see it in its extent. Nevertheless, to paint this lamentable picture once more is not to show our moral ideas. Our moral idea is what we believe touching the life which shall be best; it is not exactly our life.
Ever since the antique Medea of Ovid uttered that cry, many others, one after another, have groaned over the fact that, seeing the best and approving it, they yet follow the worst—alas!
Such a sorrow is to-day profound and universal; there where vice abounds, sorrow superabounds. It is no longer that melancholy born of the insufficiency of external reality, once for all recognized, that felt by Obermann and proud romanticists; but a humble, narrow, ragged rancor, mixed with disdain, with disgust, born of our insufficiency to ourselves, perceived thoroughly. Never, I believe, have we been more generally sad than in these times. And it is that which saves us; I find here our greatness. He alone is lost who feels himself at ease and healthful in evil; consciences without anxiety are the only hopeless ones. Let us hope then, for it cannot be denied that we feel we are very ill. It is apparent that we are in labor with something which shall be our cure. The symptoms of this painful labor are not lacking. The works which are appearing now, pre-eminent in form, but obscure and hesitating in principles, bear signs of the stress in which they were conceived; soon they will seem merely specious. In the poetry, romance, painting, music, of to-day, how many exquisite works are born, not of energy guided by love, but only of a dream of energy, a dream of love, on the shores of inconsolable exile! The truth is, we no longer know what to become; when any one of the antique misfortunes strikes us,—death, abandonment, ruin,—we no longer bear it as our fathers did. We no longer know the dignified, peaceful mournings of old; but under an unexpected stroke, the torment, the complicated rending in the heart, show that it has been secretly undermined. We feel indeed divided within ourselves, and we need to be unified; but the inward unification is possible only for the absolutely debauched or the absolutely good man; there is no via media; half-virtue rends us....
Our spiritual life being in truth miracle and mystery, I do not know how to explain what each one knows so well; I do not know how there is developed within us that sublime state known and described under different names by Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Tauler, the author of the 'Imitation,' Shelley, Emerson, Tolstoy: but I know that such a state, which we all know by experience, merits alone the name of positive morality.... Well then, history shows that what is true of each one of us personally, is true of society.
THE CONVERSION OF THE CHURCH
While a purer spirit is visibly awakening in ailing humanity and turning it again to Christ, the religion of Christ is rejuvenating. His church is no longer motionless. Thus, in the midst of a great confusion, two religious movements which correspond with one another are defining themselves with sufficient clearness.
On the one side, men without any precise faith, and who thought themselves without any faith, have perceived that they carry within themselves that which they sought: an explanation of themselves, say a principle of salvation. At whatever point these thinking men arrive, it is apparent at the present that they are progressing in the way of the Evangel, and following the path of the cross.... On the other side, the Roman Catholic Church, governed by a vigilant Pope, has declared herself. She has spoken of love, at the moment when all were thirsty for love and self-forgetfulness; she intercedes for the suffering masses, at the moment when others were going to do it outside of her, perhaps against her. And more, she is resolutely to-day accenting spirituality, after having so long accented ritual or policy. The new spiritualists and the renewed Christians are thus pushed forward to a meeting with one another by the need of their practical co-operation, and also perhaps by the consciousness of their intimate kinship. They are marching from both sides, with the same rallying cry, Fraternity and sacrifice! Here they are flying from the city of the plain, where a material civilization reigns, and claiming to suffice all; they are emigrating, they know not whither, if it be only towards the heights; there they are descending from their high, narrow, clerical, shut-in fastness.