Finally, we believe in the life everlasting. Doubtless it is to be desired that all men should make every effort for the reign of justice on this earth; in this, the Catholics have not been wanting, nor ever will be. But whatever may be the legitimate beauty of these attempts, I think that the perfection of ideal justice will only be found in the future life, and that, to make the definitive balance of the fate of each man, heaven must always enter in the calculation. Here below there are too many inconsolable sorrows, more suffering than social equality can ever suppress. Alas! there will always be the passions that ravage the heart; always ingratitude and abandonment; always sickness and the death of those whom we love best. Paradise of my God! you will re-establish the equilibrium; paradise of my God! if you are, above all, destined for those who have suffered, you will be assuredly opened to workmen. In this hope I live.
And here I am led to recapitulate, not without emotion, all the benefits that Providence has more especially reserved for you. “A heavenly Father, who merits above all the title of workman, and who made the earth; a God, who comes on earth to take up the plane, the saw, and the hammer, and become the prototype of workmen; an infallible church that for eighteen hundred years has bent over workmen, to enlighten, console, and love them; an eternity of happiness, where all present injustice will be superabundantly repaired.”
Workmen, my brethren, what can you ask further? In the place of God, what could you make better? Answer.
II.
What do we wish, however? In other words, what can we promise you?
First of all, there are twenty promises we cannot make you, and it is our duty here to warn you of our non possumus.
We cannot promise you ever to consider armed revolt as a duty or a right. We cling with all the strength of our understanding to the doctrine that even against injustice the protest should be martyrdom, heroically accepted, heroically submitted. Thus did the first Christians; they allowed themselves to be slaughtered like beautiful sheep, covered with generous blood. This sublimely passive resistance will not take from us, as it never did from them, the liberty of speech; they died declaring their belief in God, the supreme Principle, and in the Son of God, the sovereign Expiator. And when fifteen or eighteen millions had been killed, the church triumphed; she then came forth from the catacombs, and to her was given the mission to enlighten the world.
We do not promise you the liberty of doing evil, and it would be false if we even appeared to make such an engagement. At this instant, there are five hundred men in France who pervert, corrupt, putrefy France; among these are four hundred and ninety writers and ten caricaturists; according to our idea, it is deplorable that they can freely exercise their trade, and destroy with impunity so many millions of souls among young girls, young men, and workmen.
We cannot with sincerity promise you absolute equality on this earth. What we can promise you hereafter is that beautiful equality of Christians who are sprung from the same God-Creator, saved by the same God-Redeemer, enlightened by the same God-Illuminator. It is the equality, the profound equality, of baptism and the eucharist; the equality of souls in trials and reward; it is, in fine, equality in heaven. As for the other, we will exhaust ourselves in the effort to obtain it; but we have two obstacles before us, over which we do not hope to triumph—sickness and vice. No equality is possible with these two scourges, and they are ineradicable. We cannot promise you either illegitimate pleasure or even the end of suffering. In taking suffering from man—which is impossible—they would take from him his resemblance to God, and consequently his true greatness and his titles to heaven. The more we suffer, the more we resemble our Father, the more we merit eternal joy. In suffering will be found the Christian principle, which we cannot efface from the Gospel, and which is even the essence of the Christian life. But we promise to suffer with you, and, as the church has done for eighteen hundred years, to alleviate your sorrows, to heal your wounds, to satisfy your material and moral hunger, and to quench your thirst for truth. The fathers of the church invite us only to consider ourselves as “depositaries of riches.” All property is but a deposit in our hands—a deposit which we are strictly obliged to communicate to you, and for which we must render an account to the Master.
We promise you also faith, which gives to the soul a noble attribute and a happy tranquillity. And with faith we can give you what has been well called the intelligence of life—the intelligence thanks to which the workman knows how to accept inequality, because he sees in the horizon the beautiful perspective of eternity. We promise you calmness in certainty, the consolation that every workman can feel in regarding his divine type; and, in giving you this type, you will possess a rare treasure, for which your souls are justly eager.