no masters to teach them to doubt," says Bonald. I took these noble
words as my guide long ago; they are the written law of the
monarchical writer. And those who would confute me by my own words
will find that they have misinterpreted some ironical phrase, or that
they have turned against me a speech given to one of my actors--a
trick peculiar to calumniators.

As to the intimate purpose, the soul of this work, these are the
principles on which it is based.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and
capabilities; society, far from depraving him, as Rousseau asserts,
improves him, makes him better; but self-interest also develops his
evil tendencies. Christianity, above all, Catholicism, being--as I
have pointed out in the Country Doctor (_le Medecin de Campagne_)--a
complete system for the repression of the depraved tendencies of man,
is the most powerful element of social order.

In reading attentively the presentment of society cast, as it were,
from the life, with all that is good and all that is bad in it, we
learn this lesson--if thought, or if passion, which combines thought
and feeling, is the vital social element, it is also its destructive
element. In this respect social life is like the life of man. Nations
live long only by moderating their vital energy. Teaching, or rather
education, by religious bodies is the grand principle of life for
nations, the only means of diminishing the sum of evil and increasing
the sum of good in all society. Thought, the living principle of good
and ill, can only be trained, quelled, and guided by religion. The
only possible religion is Christianity (see the letter from Paris in
"Louis Lambert," in which the young mystic explains, _a propos_ to