of the progress of society, suppose a more general sentiment which is
their common support--the sentiment of humanity. The idea that man has a
value in himself, that he is, in virtue of his quality as man,
independently of the places which he inhabits and of the position which
he occupies in the world, an object of justice and of love;--this idea
includes in itself all the moral part of civilization. Social progress
is only the recognition, ever more and more explicit, of the value of
one soul, of the rights of one conscience. Now, the idea of humanity has
the closest possible connection with the knowledge of God, considered as
the Father of the human race. Ancient wisdom, superior to the worship of
idols, had gained a glimpse of the fact that the philosopher is a
citizen of the universe; and that famous line of Terence: "I am a man,
and I reckon nothing human foreign to me," excited, it is said, the
applause of the Roman spectators. But these were mere gleams,
extinguished soon by the general current of thought. It was the pale
dawn of the idea of humanity. Whence came the day?

I will limit the question by defining it. The idea of humanity is the
idea of the worth and consequently of the rights of each individual man.
It is the idea of liberty; not of liberty interpreted by passion and
selfishness as the inauguration of the license which violates right, but
of liberty interpreted by reason and conscience as the limit which the
action of each man encounters in the right of his neighbor. We are not
speaking here of the equality of political rights, which is not always
a guarantee of veritable liberty. We are speaking of a social condition
such that man, in the exercise of his faculties, in the manifestation of
his thoughts, in his efforts for the causes which he loves, so long as
he does not violate the rights of others, does not meet with an
arbitrary power to arrest him. Still farther to limit our subject, we
shall speak of the most important manifestation of that liberty--liberty