But you, who do not believe in Providence, and who are consequently neither emasculated nor debilitated, do you know of any other belief that can better teach mankind to bear with life and brave death? You have this year ordered many men to rush to destruction. Would you have dared to recommend our soldiers to go forth to meet death, mocking God? And do you believe that the souls of the Pontifical Zouaves, and of the Breton francs-tireurs, were enervated by their faith in Providence?
But be cautious. In order that your reasoning be consistent, a belief in Providence appertains not to priests alone, but to whoever professes the Christian faith; consequently, if priests are to be banished from the schools because they teach that emasculating dogma, then all Christians must be kept out as well, and henceforward
you must exact from every teacher and every professor not to believe in Providence.
Avow, sir, that seldom have calumnies and absurdities been mixed up together with greater facility than you have done in these words of yours.
Nevertheless, you manage to go on still further, and you attempt to create a division between the higher clergy, whom you traduce, and those whom you call the lower clergy, whom you flatter, by endeavoring to excite them to envy. You labor in vain, sir; and, besides, I do not recognize any lower clergy as such. The rank of the priesthood is the highest to which we can attain; no bishop, not even the Pope himself, has a sacerdotal character different from that of the most humble priest. All ecclesiastical dignities are, in one sense, beneath the title of priest, which leads to the highest offices and dignities of the church. So that, in this regard, it may be said that no institution is so democratic as the church. Sprung from the people as we nearly all of us are, educated together and fed together on the words of him who died for the people, we will suffer ourselves to be neither divided nor deceived.
Our fraternity is of the right sort. Our God is the true God, and you are without any. Be sincere, sir: come out of this mere talk, and answer me plainly and without oratorical precaution, whether, yes or no, the free thought in which you are a believer, and human science, which, according to you, has nothing to equal it, recognize the existence of a personal and living God? Candor leaves you no alternative but to reply. Either dare to declare to your friends that you do believe, or dare to proclaim to our land that you do not believe, in God.
If indeed your sham science denies
God, I pity you, sir; but you must admit that it hardly becomes you to talk about religion, and to endeavor to beguile and divide priests who have consecrated their lives to him. You assert that, if they dared to disclose their convictions, they would own themselves democrats. Do you know what our village priests would tell you if they were to make disclosures to you? They would inform you that in every hamlet is to be found a handful of petty rhetoricians, tavern orators, fellows who lead municipal councils, who drive away the Christian Brothers and Sisters of Charity, and do their best to deprive the curate of the small pittance without which he cannot subsist, who forbid teachers to take children to Mass, refuse to have churches repaired that need it most, recommend mutual-guarantee-association marriages and burials, and know no better way of serving a republic than by hating priests and by persevering in a low and silly infidelity. Now, in every village these very rhetoricians are your friends.
It is with their assistance that you contemplate establishing that education, “national and truly modern,” in which, in order to teach children “their duties as citizens, to excite in them ideas of sacrifice, of devotion to country, to make out of them an unemasculated race,” you will have not only to avoid speaking to them of God and of Providence, but besides to combat and root out of their minds the idea of Providence, and, in fine, to force upon French youth a teaching without religion, and a moral instruction without God.
Well, would you have me tell you what such education will turn out for you? Instead of rearing men, it will give us monsters, and a learned barbarism, armed with abundant means of destruction, barbarism in the