of the future, and that the facts of our own time are matter for history
to our posterity? These, I repeat, are but vain subterfuges. If humanity
is always adorable, it is so in the faults of the meanest of men as in
the splendid sins of the magnates of the earth; it is so to-day as it
was thirty centuries ago; the god in growing old does not cease to be
the same.

When the mind is engaged in these pernicious ways, the spring of the
moral life is broken, and the practical consequence is not long in
appearing. The philosophers of success, having become the philosophers
of the _fait accompli_, accept all and endure all; but in another sense
than that in which charity accepts all, that it may transform all by the
power of love. It is the morality of Philinte:


I take men quietly, and as they are:
And what they do I train my soul to bear.[151]


These instructions are not very necessary. There will always be people
enough found ready to applaud victory, and to fall in with the _fait
accompli_. But is it not sad to see men of mind, men of heart too,
perhaps, making themselves the theorists of baseness, and the
philosophers of cowardice?

There is still more to be said. From the glorification of success the
mind passes necessarily, as we have just seen, to the glorification
alike of all that is. It would appear at first sight that the adept in
the doctrine must find himself in a condition of indifference with
regard to what prejudiced men continue to call good and evil. This