And if you add to it the
humility which kneels, and the charity which gives, you have the whole
wisdom of the children of God, the immortal joy which is the heritage of
the true Christian. But what a false Christianity is that which slanders
wisdom and seeks to do without it! In such a case I am on the side of
wisdom, which is, as it were, justice done to God, even in this life.
The relegation of life to some distant future, and the separation of the
holy man from the virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious
conception. This error is, in some degree, that of the whole Middle
Age, and belongs, perhaps, to the essence of Catholicism. But the true
Christianity must purge itself from so disastrous a mistake. The eternal
life is not the future life; it is life in harmony with the true order
of things--life in God. We must learn to look upon time as a movement of
eternity, as an undulation in the ocean of being. To live, so as to keep
this consciousness of ours in perpetual relation with the eternal, is to
be wise; to live, so as to personify and embody the eternal, is to be
religious.
The modern leveler, after having done away with conventional
inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and historical injustice, goes
still farther, and rebels against the inequalities of merit, capacity,
and virtue.
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