of sickness; but let God manifest Himself, and our eyes are opened. The
beauty of souls breaks forth to our view beneath the wasting of the
haggard frame, and from under the filth of vice. We love those immortal
creatures fallen and degraded; a sacred desire possesses us to restore
them to their true destination. Has an artist discovered in a mass of
rubbish, under vulgar appearances, a product of the marvellous chisel of
the Greeks? He sets himself, with a zeal full of respect, to free the
noble statue from the impurities which defile it. Every soul of man is
the work of art Divine, and every charitable heart is an artist who
desires to labor at its restoration. Henceforward we can understand that
love of suffering and of poverty, that passion for the galleys and the
hospital, which have at times thrown Christians into extravagances which
our age has no reason to dread. God in the poor man, God in the sick
man, God in the vicious man and the criminal; this, I repeat, is the
grand secret of charity. Charity passes from the heart of men and from
individual practice into social customs and institutions. Charity it is
which, by degrees, takes from law its needless rigors, and from justice
its useless tortures; which substitutes the prison in which it is sought
to reform the guilty for the galley, which completes the corruption of
the criminal; it is charity that opens public asylums for all forms of
suffering; and that will realize, up to the limits of what is possible,
all the hopes of philanthropy. If God ceases to be present to the mind
and conscience of men, justice and love lose their power. Without the
powerful action of justice and of love, society would descend again, by
the ways of corruption, towards the struggles of barbarism. Observe,
study well, all that is going on around us. Does our civilization appear
to you sufficiently solid to give you the idea that it can henceforth
dispense with the foundations on which it has reposed hitherto?

The sentiments of justice and of benevolence which form the double basis