Never mind the
future, if only you have peace of conscience, if you feel yourself
reconciled, and in harmony with the order of things. Be what you ought
to be; the rest is God's affair. It is for him to know what is best, to
take care of his own glory, to ensure the happiness of what depends on
him, whether by another life or by annihilation. And supposing that
there were no good and holy God, nothing but universal being, the law of
the all, an ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the
key of the enigma, the pole-star of a wandering humanity.
"Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra."
January 26, 1868.--Blessed be childhood, which brings down something of
heaven into the midst of our rough earthliness. These eighty thousand
daily births, of which statistics tell us, represent as it were an
effusion of innocence and freshness, struggling not only against the
death of the race, but against human corruption, and the universal
gangrene of sin. All the good and wholesome feeling which is intertwined
with childhood and the cradle is one of the secrets of the providential
government of the world. Suppress this life-giving dew, and human
society would be scorched and devastated by selfish passion. Supposing
that humanity had been composed of a thousand millions of immortal
beings, whose number could neither increase nor diminish, where should
we be, and what should we be! A thousand times more learned, no doubt,
but a thousand times more evil.
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