_Duty towards God_,--that is to say, the duty of developing, as much
as possible, my intelligence and my reason, to arrive at the purest
idea and the highest worship of the Supreme Being, by whom and for
whom all is, all exists:--_Religion_.
_Private Duties_,--that is to say, the exact and tender discharge of
all sentiments to which form has been given, either in written or
unwritten laws, which bind me to those, to whom, in the order of
nature, I hold most closely,--the nearest to myself in the human
group--father, mother, brothers, sisters, wife, children, friends,
neighbors:--_the Family_.
_Collective Duties_,--that is to say, devotions, even to the sacrifice
of myself, even to death, to the progress, the well-being, the
preservation, the amelioration of this great human family, of which my
family, and my country, are only parts; and of which I myself am only
a miserable and vanishing fraction, a leaf of a summer, which
vegetates and withers on a branch of the immense trunk of the human
race:--_Society_.
Let us speak to-day only of these last duties,--because, now we are
occupied with politics alone.