others. We must work out our own perfection and do wrong to no man. There
is no piety where there is not charity; and without being kindly and
beneficent one cannot show sincere religion.

Good disposition, favourable upbringing, association with pious and
virtuous persons may contribute much towards such a propitious condition
for our souls; but most securely are they grounded therein by good
principles. I have already said that insight must be joined to fervour,
that the perfecting of our understanding must accomplish the perfecting of
our will. The practices of virtue, as well as those of vice, may be the
effect of a mere habit, one may acquire a taste for them; but when virtue
is reasonable, when it is related to God, who is the supreme reason of
things, it is founded on knowledge. One cannot love God without knowing his
perfections, and this knowledge contains the principles of true piety. The
purpose of religion should be to imprint these principles upon our souls:
but in some strange way it has happened all too often that men, that
teachers of religion have strayed far from this purpose. Contrary to the
intention of our divine Master, devotion has been reduced to ceremonies and
doctrine has been cumbered with formulae. All too often these ceremonies
have not been well fitted to maintain the exercise of virtue, and the
formulae sometimes have not been lucid. Can one believe it? Some Christians
have imagined that they could be devout without loving their neighbour,[53]
and pious without loving God; or else people have thought that they could
love their neighbour without serving him and could love God without knowing
him. Many centuries have passed without recognition of this defect by the
people at large; and there are still great traces of the reign of darkness.
There are divers persons who speak much of piety, of devotion, of religion,
who are even busied with the teaching of such things, and who yet prove to
be by no means versed in the divine perfections. They ill understand the
goodness and the justice of the Sovereign of the universe; they imagine a