The whole
hierarchy will rest upon the dollar, and the most brutal, the most
hideous, the most inhuman of inequalities will be the fruit of the
passion for equality. What a result! Plutolatry--the worship of wealth,
the madness of gold--to it will be confided the task of chastising a
false principle and its followers. And plutocracy will be in its turn
executed by equality. It would be a strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon
individualism were ultimately swallowed up in Latin socialism.
It is my prayer that the discovery of an equilibrium between the two
principles may be made in time, before the social war, with all its
terror and ruin, overtakes us. But it is scarcely likely. The masses are
always ignorant and limited, and only advance by a succession of
contrary errors. They reach good only by the exhaustion of evil. They
discover the way out, only after having run their heads against all
other possible issues.
April 15, 1870.--_Crucifixion!_ That is the word we have to meditate
to-day. Is it not Good Friday?
To curse grief is easier than to bless it, but to do so is to fall back
into the point of view of the earthly, the carnal, the natural man. By
what has Christianity subdued the world if not by the apotheosis of
grief, by its marvelous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the
crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet into a symbol
of salvation? What does the apotheosis of the Cross mean, if not the
death of death, the defeat of sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the
raising to the skies of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain? "O
Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?" By long
brooding over this theme--the agony of the just, peace in the midst of
agony, and the heavenly beauty of such peace--humanity came to
understand that a new religion was born--a new mode, that is to say, of
explaining life and of understanding suffering.
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