more clamant than ever.

Though it is sad to leave the fatherland, to return to it is sometimes
sadder still; and there is no Frenchman who would not have preferred a
life-long banishment, to seeing France ground beneath the Prussian heel,
and the loss of Metz and Strasburg. This was an invasion of barbarians;
but there is another menace that is not less formidable. I mean the
invasion of our land by darkness, an invasion of the nineteenth century
by the middle ages. After the emperor, the pope; after Berlin, Rome;
after the triumph of the sword, the triumph of night. For the light of
civilisation may be extinguished in either of two ways, by a military or
by a clerical invasion. The former threatens our mother, France; the
latter our child, the future.

A double inviolability is the most precious possession of a civilised
people--the inviolability of territory and the inviolability of
conscience; and as the soldier violates the first, so does the priest
violate the other. Yet the soldier does but obey his orders and the
priest his dogmas, so that there are only two who are ultimately
culpable--Caesar, who slays, and Peter, who lies. There is no religion
which has not as its aim to seize forcibly the human soul, and it is to
attempts of this kind that France is given up to-day.

One may say, indeed, that in our age there are two schools, and that
these two schools sum up in themselves the two opposed currents which
draw civilisation, the one towards the future and the other towards the
past. One of these schools is called Paris and the other Rome. Each of
them has its book; the one has the "Declaration of the Rights of Man,"
the other has the "Syllabus"; and the first of these books says "Yes" to
progress, but the second of them says "No." Yet progress is the footstep