exegetical volume of Cellérier9 on this Epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, after having first of all passed more than an hour in the garden with the children. I made them closely examine the flowers, the shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails, in order to practise them in observation, in wonder, in kindness.

How enormously important are these first conversations of childhood! I felt it this morning with a sort of religious terror. Innocence and childhood are sacred. The sower who casts in the seed, the father or mother casting in the fruitful word, are accomplishing a pontifical act and ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and gravity, for they are labouring at the kingdom of God. All seed-sowing is a mysterious thing, whether the seed fall into the earth or into souls. Man is a husbandman ; his whole work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this divine mission the great instrument is speech. We forget too often that language is both a seed-sowing and a revelation. The influence of a word in season, is it not incalculable ? What a mystery is speech! But we are blind to it, because we are

carnal and earthy. We see the stones and the trees by the road, the furniture of our houses, all that is palpable and material. We have no eyes for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which people the air and hover incessantly around each one of us.

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends to transform the universe and humanity into its own image. Thus we have all a cure of souls. Every man is a centre of perpetual radiation like a luminous body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a ship upon the rocks if it does not guide it into port. Every man is a priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is for ever preaching to others; but there are priests of Baal, of Moloch, and of all the false gods. the high importance of example. comes the terrible responsibility which weighs upon us all. An evil example is a spiritual poison: it is the proclamation of a sacrilegious faith, of an impure God. Sin would be only an evil for him who commits it, were it not a crime towards the weak brethren, whom it corrupts. Therefore it has been said: 'It were better for a man

Such is
Thence

not to have been born than to offend one of these little ones.'

6th May 1852. - It is women who, like mountain flowers, mark with most characteristic precision the gradation of social zones. The hierarchy of classes is plainly visible amongst them; it is blurred in the other sex. With women this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; among men we see it broken by the incalculable varieties of human freedom. The reason is that the man, on the whole, makes himself by his own activity, and that the woman is, on the whole, made by her situation; that the one modifies and shapes circumstance by his own energy, while the gentleness of the other is dominated by and reflects circumstance; so that woman, so to speak, inclines to be species, and man to be individual.

Thus which is curious

women are

at once the sex which is most constant and most variable. Most constant from the moral point of view, most variable from the social. A confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy in the second. All degrees of culture and all conditions of society are clearly marked in their outward appear.

ance, their manners, and their tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their instincts, and their desires. The feminine sex represents at the same time natural and historical inequality; it maintains the unity of the species and marks off the categories of society, it brings together and divides, it gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through them, according as it interprets its twofold rôle in the one sense or the other. At bottom, woman's mission is essentially conservative, but she is a conservative without discrimination. On the one side, she maintains God's work in man - all that is lasting, noble, and truly human in the race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. the other, she maintains the results of circumstance all that is passing, local, and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses. She surrounds with the same respectful and tenacious faith the serious and the frivolous, the good and the bad.

if you

On

Well

what then? Isolatecan - the fire from its smoke. It is a divine law that you are tracing, and therefore good. The woman preserves; she is tradition as the man is progress.

And if there is no family

and no humanity without the two sexes, without these two forces there is no history.

14th May 1852 (Lancy). Yesterday I was full of the philosophy of joy, of youth, of the spring which smiles and the roses which intoxicate; I preached the doctrine of strength, and I forgot that, tried and afflicted like the two friends with whom I was walking, I should probably have reasoned and felt as they did.

Our systems, it has been said, are the expression of our character, or the theory of our situation, that is to say, we like to think of what has been given as having been acquired, we take our nature for our own work, and our lot in life for our own conquest- an illusion born of vanity and also of the craving for liberty. We are unwilling to be the product of circumstances, or the mere expansion of an inner germ. And yet we have received everything, and the part which is really ours is small indeed, for it is mostly made up of negation, resistance, faults. We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the manner in which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us, then,